Jon Hamm Storms Off Mad Men Set
Contractual disputes have led to a shock resignation, throwing the April 7 season return into serious doubt.
Hello! Here’s a history of some of our favourite April Fools pranks.
–
1878: Food Machine!
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, which meant apparently he could do anything. On April 1 the next year, when The Daily Graphic in New York announced he had found a way to turn soil into cereal and water into wine, newspapers around America ran with it.
1919: Poo Piazza!
Infamous Irish prankster Horace de Vere Cole – whose group of friends (including Virgina Woolf) once dressed in Turbans and blackface, disguised themselves as an Abyssinian royal family, and convinced the captain of the HMS Dreadnaught to take them all to Ethiopia – was on vacation in Venice when he got up late one night, snuck off to the mainland, transported a load of manure across the water and distributed it through the Piazza San Marco, as if a procession of horses had marched by for no reason. He was on his honeymoon at the time. His wife divorced him soon after.
1934: Lung Power!
This is a photo of a man breathing into a box on his chest, activating rotors that created a powerful suction effect, which lift him aloft. The skis are for landing.
After being picked up from the April Fool’s day edition of a paper in Germany by a photo agency who couldn’t speak German, the photo was printed in The New York Times, The Daily Mirror, Chicago Herald & Examiner and The New York Daily News – the largest circulating paper in the States.
1957: The Great Spaghetti Harvest!
British flagship news programme Panorama ran a three-minute segment boasting of an “exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop” in southern Switzerland, thanks to both a mild winter and the disappearance of the spaghetti weevil that had been terrorising cultivators at the time. “Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length,” the reporter said, “but this is the result of many years of patient endeaver by plant breeders, who’ve succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.”
Soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC began receiving so many calls they had to release a statement explaining the joke.
1962: Instant Colour!
In 1962, the only television channel in Sweden was in black and white. The station announced that their “technical expert” had found a way to turn your TV into colour: Kjell Stensson gave a very technical explanation of the prismatic nature of light, and the phenomenon of “double slit interference”, before stating that a fine-meshed screen in front of a TV would cause the light to bend in such a way…
If you wanted to try it at home, he said, you could place a nylon stocking over the screen, sit the correct distance from the screen, and rock your head slowly and carefully from side to side. Meaning the whole population looked like a bunch of idiots until the broadcast ended.
1974: Porky’s Prank!
An apparently delightful 50-year-old Alaskan man called Porky dropped a hundred old tires into the long-dormant volcano, Mount Edgecumbe, and then lit them on fire. This is what it looked like from the neighbouring town of Sitka:
Terrified of a surprise volcano, the Coast Guard got involved – but when the commander looked into the crater, he saw a 50-foot-high spray-painted message proclaiming him an April fool.
1975: The Musendrophilus!
David Attenborough reported on BBC Radio 3 about a group of islands in the Pacific, in which he’d discovered a type of tree mouse which could sing, but only at night time. (Yes, there were field recordings). The musendrophilus was also prized by the locals for its webbed feet, which could be used as reeds for musical instruments.
1984: The Tasmanian Mock Walrus!
Meet the Tasmanian Mock Walrus, a revolting-looking creature that The Orlando Sentinel reported was being adopted as a pet by resourceful Floridians.
He is four inches long, looks like a walrus, purrs like a cat, acts like a hamster, and likes to eat cockroaches.
1995: The Hotheaded Naked Ice Borer!
The April issue of Discover Magazine reported a newly discovered Antarctic species: the hotheaded naked ice borer.
The bony plates on the animal’s head can become burning hot, which helps the animal bore through ice at high speeds.
1995: Lenin’s Corpse Does Disney!
The Irish Times reported that the Walt Disney Company was in negotiations with the Russian government to purchase Lenin’s embalmed body, move it into Euro Disney, and give it the “full Disney treatment”: strobe lights, surround sound, and a merch desk with T-shirts.
1997: The Great Comic Strip Switcheroonie!
46 comic strip artists conspired to ruin breakfasts all over the world, with character cameos, guest artists and all kinds of cross-polination.
