![]() ![]() ![]() This brings us to why Astley never really tried to capitalize on Rick Rolling directly, as so many former stars would have. Have you seen the one with President Barack Obama? Someone has cut up his speeches and put them together so that he sings “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It’s totally amazing. I always liken it to when people look through their photo albums or home videos from 20 years ago and think, Gosh, did I really wear that? The difference is, thankfully on the one hand and perhaps a bit scarily on the other, mine are out there for the public to see whenever they want. I suppose at first I was a little embarrassed by it. It’s like, “We’re choosing that video because it’s a full-on Eighties, cheesy video.” There’s no getting away from it now and I’ve got to own it because if I don’t, it’s like being petty. If someone had messed around with it and cut it all up and made me look stupid – I mean I look pretty stupid anyway in that video – if it was nasty, then I’d be probably a bit pissed off, but it’s not. To begin with, Astley states he thinks the whole thing is rather amusing and, to quote the man himself, After all, this once again thrust him in the spotlight he so rapidly exited in his late 20s when he got sick of the life of a popstar and decided he’d rather devote himself to other things, most notably raising his new daughter, Emilie, rather than being absent from her life for large stretches of time while on the road. Which brings us to what the notoriously reclusive Astley thinks of his most popular song being, to put it bluntly, the punchline to a bad joke. Not getting why his friends were emailing him links purported to be to other things, but taking him to his hit song’s music video, he would later reveal in an interview that his teenage daughter let him in on the prank that was sweeping the internet. In any event, when linking Astley’s hit song became the new en vogue prank, the term Rickrolling, borrowing from Astley’s first name and the aforementioned duckrolling meme, was coined to describe it.Īrguably the apex of the Rickolling phenomenon came on April 1st of 2008 when YouTube automatically redirected every person who clicked on a video on the site’s main page to the music video for the song, which we guess is a lot better than directing them to an alternate version of this joke going around at the time involving a couple of ladies and a cup…Īs to Astley, he first learned about Rickrolling via friends of his Rickrolling him. It’s also worthy of note that the uploading of this video predates an authorized upload by some two years. Google caches and a bit of trolling through the Wayback Machine reveals that this video, along with being the first known video created expressly to Rickroll internet denizens, is one of the earliest known examples of that music video being uploaded to YouTube. Some time in May of 2007 an unknown user on 4chan’s /v/ video game board posted a link purported to be for the trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV, but in reality took people to a freebooted upload of the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. ![]() It soon became a common prank on the site to to trick fellow users into clicking links that led to the image of the duck, resulting in the coining of the term “duckrolled” to describe the act of being duped in this way. As the joke evolved, some time in late 2006 one anonymous user Photoshopped and linked to an image of a duck with wheels- a literal interpretation of the word duckroll. The prank was a big hit with 4chan users who were particularly amused that the word eggroll would automatically be stylised as duckroll whenever it was typed. Not long before Rickrolling became the internet’s go-to prank, moot decided to make it so that anytime a user wrote the word “egg” on the site, it would autocorrect to “duck”. Duckrolling got its start indirectly thanks to the founder of the occasionally infamous internet message board 4chan, Christopher Poole- better known online by his moniker “moot”. So how did the curious meme of Rickrolling get its start?įor that, it’s necessary to start with its much lesser known predecessor- duckrolling. To begin with, for anyone who’s somehow managed to avoid the more than a decade old phenomenon of Rickrolling, in a nutshell this involves tricking someone into clicking on a link that takes them to the video for the relentlessly upbeat and infinitely cheesy 1980s anthem, usually by suggesting it’s a link to something else which is a particularly compelling click. asks: Is it true that Rick Astley only made like $10 from Rickrolling? ![]()
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