Top 5 April Fools’ Day pranks

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Top 5 April Fools’ Day pranks
April 1, 2011 | Andie Hutner Senior Cadenza Editor
The best thing about April Fools’ Day isn’t the pranks that people pull; It’s the fact that people believe them. Here are five of the best pranks from the last 20 years.

5. In 1995, Euro Disney was having some financial trouble and told the world that it would be moving Vladimir Lenin’s body to its Disneyland Paris theme park. The kicker? Russians campaigned to fill Lenin’s mausoleum with Tsar Nicholas II’s body.

4. Burger King declared in 1998 that it would be making a new product—the Left-Handed Whopper. It would be exactly the same, but with condiments rotated 180 degrees for easy access. Righties were offended and tried to order a Right-Handed burger. Oops.

3. On NPR in 1992, “Richard Nixon” announced that he would be making another run for the presidency, claiming he never did anything wrong. Viewers were shocked and appalled, and many called in to share their outrage on-air. They should have waited until the second half of the program, when the program host announced that he was a lying crook—Nixon would not be running again.

2. In 1998, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that the Walt Disney Company had bought the university. It was reported that the campus would be moving to Orlando to open new programs like the Donald Duck Department of Linguistics. This announcement even showed up on the university’s website. At a school like MIT, you should expect that students would be able to break into the server, so of course this was just a prank.

1. Taco Bell publicized the knowledge that they bought the Liberty Bell on April 1, 1998. They would be renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Sounds yummy. Too bad it was a hoax.
 

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Sid Finch was another good one

1985: Sports Illustrated published a story about a new rookie pitcher who planned to play for the Mets. His name was Sidd Finch, and he could reportedly throw a baseball at 168 mph with pinpoint accuracy. This was 65 mph faster than the previous record. Surprisingly, Sidd Finch had never even played the game before. Instead, he had mastered the "art of the pitch" in a Tibetan monastery under the guidance of the "great poet-saint Lama Milaraspa." Mets fans celebrated their teams' amazing luck at having found such a gifted player, and Sports Illustrated was flooded with requests for more information. In reality this legendary player only existed in the imagination of the author of the article, George Plimpton.
 

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I remember that article Rob when it first came out.
 
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If you can find the 04/01/93 edition of the DRF, read the front cover; a whopper of a story about an indoor horse track in Las Vegas that generated numerous letters to the editor regarding how they would be able to pull it off.
 

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How about the one where BBC (I think it was BBC anyway) aired the documentary about picking spaghetti off the spaghetti tree? It was back in the 50s or so and most people in the USA didn't really know about it. Let me try and find the video.
 

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