Rick Astley Does a Live Rickroll During Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

We’re In Your Thanksgiving Parade, Rolling Your Rick

As David Crosby said Everybody’s been burned. And okay, maybe not everybody has been Rickrolled, but earlier this year SurveyUSA estimated that 18 Million people in the US have had the video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop gem Never Gonna Give You Up foisted upon them by a surreptitious href.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with this phenomenon, I won’t bother explaining. But instead, suggest you check out the trailer for “Wench Patrol” the awesome Jennifer Aniston / Paris Hilton heist flick directed by Quentin Tarantino shot entirely in IMAX. Go ahead take a look. We’ll be waiting.

Got it?

But until Thanksgiving Day 2008 (the American one not the Canadian one) few if any people had been Rickrolled live by the real Rick Astley (who hereby joins the ranks of The Real Roxanne and The Real Slim Shady as individuals whose reality must be explicitly asserted). Astley, who has said of this fad “it’s a bit spooky innit?”, popped up on the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends‘ float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and chortled those immortal words A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of, amongst others, for the assembled masses (up to a quarter million live plus however many on the TV & youtubes).

Online predecessors of such bait-and-switchery include Goatse.cx (which we of the mirthful squid have chronicled in its many forms) and napster bombing which was invented by squid-pal Evolution Control Committee as a way to broadly distribute their audio offerings thinly disguised as more mainstream songs. Offline predecessors include surprise parties and walking in on co-workers making out at the company Christmas party.