This year's 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade has been Rickrolled (Rickroll'd)! And it happened in the most unlikely of floats containing a collection of weird, discarded characters from one of television's most loved ~~orphanages~~ cartoons.

As the float of "Foster and his Imaginary Friends" made its mandatory pit stop in front of the cameras, the muppets started singing and dancing (more like swaying) to the beat of their song "You're My Best Fried". However, a voice over announced that there would be a surprise performance. What could be that surprise number? Another muppet singing a song? A cartoon character from
another show joining in perhaps? A few seconds into their muppet musical number and the surprise was revealed. The music abruptly stopped and out came Rick Astley singing his most famous hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up"! The 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has just been Rickrolled.

Why is it called Rickrolling? Well, I will let our old pal Wikipedia give you the answer, plus a brief history of the practice:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.

The practice is said to have begun as a variant of an earlier prank from the imageboard 4chan known as duckrolling, in which a link to somewhere (such as a specific picture or news item) would instead lead to a thread or site containing an edited picture of a duck with wheels. The user at that point, is said to have been "duckrolled". The first instance of Rickroll occurred in March 2007 on the site's video game board, where a link to the Rick Astley video was claimed to be a mirror of the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV (which was unavailable due to heavy traffic). The joke was confined to 4chan for a very brief period.

By May 2008, the practice had spread beyond 4chan and become an Internet phenomenon, eventually amassing some coverage in the mainstream media. An April 2008 poll by SurveyUSA estimated that at least 18 million American adults have been Rickrolled.

2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Rickroll Video
Rick Astley's surprise performance at this year's parade

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