VIDEO: Happy Birthday To Rick Astley – Carla Rea Shares A Throwback Video
Happy Birthday to Rick Astley!
I will always feel that I have a special bond Rick Astley after doing a really fun interview with him several years back 92017). So I’m never gonna give him up, never gonna let him down on this, his 57th birthday.
I bought a Casio Keyboard in the late 8o’s, and every time I turned it on I was rick-rolled, because it played a really cheesy version of his song. “Together Forever.” I would, of course, torment my then roommates with it every chance I got, because it was just so damn catchy!
Where did Rick-rolling actually come from?
Rick-rolling seems to have started in 2007 on the image board 4chan. The first-ever rick-roll involved a link promising to be a trailer for the game “Grand Theft Auto IV,” that instead took excited gamers to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video. (Cue the laughter!)
The Rick part of Rick-rolling comes from Astley’s first name (of course), but where does the roll part come from? Turns out that also started on 4chan, according to Know Your Meme.
In the mid-2000s, the *then*director of the site, decided to prank users by changing all instances of the word egg to duck. This, of course, changed the word eggroll to duckroll, which created such an amusing mental image that someone photoshopped wheels onto a picture of a duck. Suddenly 4chan users were posting bait-and-switch links that led people to a wheeled-duck image. This took on the name duckrolling. Since 2007, rickrolling has taken on a life of its own.
In 2008, Astley contributed to a live-action rickroll during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when he emerged from inside a Cartoon Network float to sing his famous song. By 2011, rickrolling had become so mainstream that the White House’s official Twitter handle sent users to the video of “Never Gonna Give You Up” after a user complained that the correspondence briefing from that day wasn’t as entertaining as the one from the day before.
Enjoy my interview with Rick Astley! Oh, and definitely rickroll someone today, for old time sake!