More than a few of us have at some point opened up our laptops and clicked on an email link to watch some interesting video on the Net, only to find that we had been “Rickrolled”.
If you haven’t, Rickrolling is a famous internet prank that originated back in 2007 on the 4chan forum and by 2008 had become a global phenomenon.
The joke involved tricking someone into clicking on a link that appeared to be something else but which took the viewer to a page where instead of what the viewer was expecting, they were presented with a YouTube video of 80’s song ‘Never Gonna Give you Up’ which thrust unsuspecting 80’s singer Rick Astley back into the limelight.
Well now the days of Rickrolling are all but over as YouTube has removed the original Rickrolling video due to “terms of use violation”. The video incidentally had amassed tens of millions of hits in its time.
Ok it took them a while to do it as we’ve been getting Rickrolled for three years so why now?
The truth is, no one seems to know. It’s not as if YouTube had an issue with it, they redirected every single video on their front page to the Rickrolling video as an April fool’s joke on 1st April 2008.
It’s not as if Rick Astley seemed too bothered either, even if he was a little embarrassed at first.
“It’s perhaps ironic that the Internet phenomenon of Rickrolling should bring my video for ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ to a new generation” said Astley in a piece in the Times last April.
“I used to think some young kid had stumbled across my video and thought it would be funny to send it to his mates, and it just kind of caught on. I suppose at first I was a little embarrassed by it” he said.
Still, it did earn him Best Act Ever at the 2008 MTV Europe Awards in 2008 as voted by Internet users. They loved him.
No, someone must have complained about it and got copyright lawyers involved but at the moment we don’t know who or why. Seems a bit belated to me!
Anyway, you can still watch Rick Astley’s never going to give you up, if you want to that is, as there are still versions of it out there. It’s just that with YouTube removing the original Rickrolling video, you’re not as likely to come across it by ‘accident’.
It was such an Internet phenomenon it was worthy of a mention but time to move on now!
