BBC Flying Penguins April Fool - BBC iPlayer
April Fools’ Day 2008 was pretty good I thought, Google made me laugh with Virgle and G’day and so did the BBC with this Flying Penguin April Fool commercial for iPlayer. The 90 second April Fool showed a newly discovered variety of Penguin that flies from the South Pole in Winter to live it up in the Amazon.
The first I heard of this was on The Telegraph website who got in on the joke and you know, for a split second I almost half caught myself maybe believing it despite knowing full well today is April Fools’ Day.
The Flying Penguins April Fool is the latest in a long line of BBC April Fools’ dating back to the 1950s and showed CGI penguins taking off in the Antarctic, flying over the tropics and eventually landing in thick Amazonian undergrowth.
The Flying Penguin April Fool featured ex-Python Terry Jones and was created by blending library footage and footage shot on green-screen with CGI and was created entirely in-house at the BBC.
Spaghetti Trees
In 1957 the BBC current affairs programme Panorama aired a 3min spoof report on how the Swiss were cultivating Spaghetti Trees as a April Fools’ Day joke. Hundreds of gullible viewers rang the BBC on April 2nd asking how to cultivate their own Spaghetti Trees and were told
“…place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”
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April 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I saw it on one of my feeds early yesterday morning. It was pretty obvious that it was a fool, but it was made so well it was quite compelling - you had to watch it all even if you thought it was for jokes.
As a promotional tool for their iPlayer, it’s a brilliant piece of marketing; it will continue to attract links and traffic for years to come - every April!
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Well I’m getting loads of hits out of it already, so the BBC must be rubbing their flippers together!
I’m showing up for all sorts of searches for penguins, flying penguins, bbc penguins, penguins hoax, bbc april fool, flying penguin fools….the list goes on.
Always nice to get some hits, even if they are for other people’s penguins.