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27 Mar 2019
April Fool’s Day is probably the only day of the year where you can’t be sure of any news you read or hear about, and for good reason, as a lot of brands and corporations tend to use the day to spread funny (but fake) marketing campaigns for products, news and services that don’t exist. We’ve selected a few of our favourite April Fool’s pranks of all time, from the BBC to Richard Branson, let us know which one’s your favourite in the comments.
Sir Patrick Moore, a leading British astronomer, made an exciting announcement whilst appearing on a BBC Radio 2 interview on April 1st 1976; Pluto would soon be passing directly behind Jupiter, which would counteract Earth’s gravity for a few short moments. He instructed listeners that, due to this, at precisely 9.47am, they could jump into the air and feel a momentary floating sensation before landing safely to the ground. At the predicted time, thousands of people listening to the programme called in claiming they had indeed floated for a moment, with one disgruntled caller even demanding compensation after he floated so high that he hit his head on the ceiling. Whether these claims were psychosomatic or just plain lies, Sir Patrick Moore was simply pulling a prank on the British public; the planetary alignment and subsequent gravity adjustment were all an April Fool’s concoction.
In 1998, fast food giant Burger King took out a full page ad in USA Today to proudly announce the launch of their first ever Whopper burger, made specifically for lefties all across America. The burger would keep all of the same much-loved ingredients, with the game-changing adjustment of rotating everything by 180°, so as to ‘redistribute the weight of the sandwich so that the bulk of the condiments will skew to the left, reducing the amount of lettuce and other toppings from spilling out the right side of the burger.’ Whilst this ingenious adaptation seems to be an obvious prank, Burger King had to issue an official release the following day to confirm the prank, as thousands of customers had flooded restaurants, attempting to order the left-handed burger.
Anyone who spent a decent amount of the time on the internet in the early 2000s will surely remember the art of ‘Rickrolling,’ which consists of enticing someone to click on a YouTube video link (usually for a supposed new movie trailer) that in fact just leads to the music video to Rick Astley’s classic 1980s hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’ A simple lampoon, but for about a year the threat of being Rickrolled was very real. YouTube, aware of this ongoing prank, decided to utilize it in their own April 1st hijinks, and relinked all (yes, ALL) of their ‘featured videos’ on the homepage to the Rick Astley video for the whole day in 2008.
For just 24 hours on the 1st April 2009, travel booking website Expedia were offering an out of this world deal on their website. Customers could book a luxury holiday to none other than the red planet, Mars, and as an added bonus Expedia had dropped all booking fees, resulting in a massive saving of $3 trillion and making the trip an affordable $99. The dedicated Mars holiday pages outlined the different travel options (choose between retro, classic or nouveau spaceship designs), and gave a handy list of things to do as well as a map of the planet itself. Of course, this is all just an elaborate marketing prank, and we’ve still got a bit of a wait until Mars holidays are a thing, but it’s nice to dream.
Continuing with the intergalactic theme, Richard Branson announced in 2011 that he had ‘bought the former planet Pluto for an undisclosed sum,’ and furthermore intended to work towards Pluto being reinstated as a planet (Pluto was demoted to dwarf-planet in 2006 due to its relatively small mass). In order to achieve planetary status, Branson was in the process of building a deep space vehicle to collect asteroids and space debris and drag them into Pluto’s gravitational field, thereby bulking it up to the required mass. Again, you’d think it would be obvious that this was a hoax, however some people completely bought into the story, congratulating the entrepreneur on his goal of creating the ‘first ever part human-created planet.’
