The end of an era: YouTube pulls Rickroll video
We are gathered hear today to say good-bye to an old friend. He was there for us in the hard times, as well as the good times. He was never gonna give you up. He was never gonna let you down. And, most importantly, he was never gonna run around, and desert you.
After 30 million views, the original copy of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video has been removed from YouTube for a terms of use violation.
It all started in May 2007 when those lovable scamps over at the image board known as 4chan started pulling a prank on one another by sharing a link to something they found cool, but once someone followed it, they would find themselves confronted by Rick Astley’s hit video from 1987. As with most pranks on 4chan, it eventually spread out to the Web as a whole. The act became known as “being Rickrolled.”
In April 2008, YouTube itself got in on the joke, and on April Fool’s Day, all the Featured Videos on the front page of the site linked to the Rickroll. By May 2008, the prank had truly gone viral, and you basically couldn’t trust a link to anything any more. The joke got so widespread that at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Nov. 2008, Mr. Astley popped out of the float for the children’s cartoon Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, and lip-synched the song. As the float drove away, one of the characters shouted, “I like Rickrolling!”
It is amazing that it took this long for the original video to be pulled, and there are sure to be more copies placed on YouTube in various forms in the very near future, but, for now, the original is gone. What the possible reasoning could be for pulling it after this long is a mystery. Yes, it was an unauthorized copy, but how much attention had it brought to this mostly forgotten singer of the 1980′s?
So long original Rickroll, we hardly knew ye.
UPDATE: It’s coming back! Apparently it was a mistake, and YouTube will be restoring it. Phew … what would we have done without Rickroll?
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