In The LEGO Batman Movie, Robin plays 'Never Gonna Give You Up' while cycling through music to use for the film's climactic battle, which Batman simply groans at.The video 'Hilarious Muppet Bloopers' takes video from The Muppet Show (particularly a segment from episode 96 where Beaker sings 'Feelings') and dubs 'Never Gonna Give You Up' over it, essentially turning Beaker into Rick Astley.Ĭommenter: The resemblance of Beaker to Rick Astley is astonishing!.More recently, the Nebraska State Legislature invoked one to break up a filibuster. More interestingly, the Oregon State Legislature managed to do something similar without anybody noticing. House of Representatives launched its YouTube channel, Speaker Nancy Pelosi invoked the Rickroll. It's possible to do a Rickroll in Scribblenauts.The White House Communications Department, in response to complaints on Twitter that a press conference on fiscal policy was too boring, tweeted a link that turned out to be a Rickroll.Cartoon Network is the all-time offline champion of Rickrolling, culminating in a successful conspiracy with Rick Astley himself to spontaneously perform the song at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.note In fact, what caused him to walk off his set was a video by Sting, which is probably much more poetic, but less meme-tastic.Īnd where can we see it outside its natural habitat? Despite the popularity of this video, the first Rickroll victim was not Bill O'Reilly. Looking at the production dates, it's not impossible to believe she was the first person to have been sidelined by a performance of 'Never Gonna Give You Up'.

Apparently, they rushed through the production of her song 'I Should Be So Lucky' because Astley was supposed to use the studio to record later that day. She and Astley were both members of the Stock Aitken Waterman hit factory back in The '80s. The first victim of the Rickroll is commonly believed to be Kylie Minogue - but in a very meta sense. Whatever the case may be, there's almost certainly an 'in-joke' element to it, as there is with many Internet memes part of the point is to make you ask, 'of all things, why that?' One factor is probably the lyrics of the song itself, with Rick professing how he will never tell a lie in one line. One possible candidate is Nick Lowe's song 'All Men Are Liars', which mocks Astley and at one point transitions into the chorus of 'Never Gonna Give You Up' another is Mystery Science Theater 3000, which included the song in its riff on Attack of the Eye Creatures because a character resembled Astley. It may be a reference to an earlier joke involving the song. That being said, no one's certain exactly how it transitioned to the Rick Astley video specifically. The duck would be in the post you linked to, and its entire point was to remind you that you got pwned. Duckrolling was actually part of a particularly elaborate trolling method where the point of the link was to send you to a post in another thread - such a redirect forced your browser to load the entire thread, which was super annoying, and there wasn't any easy way to distinguish such links from links to other posts within the thread (which were much easier on your browser). It's actually a variant of the duckroll, which consisted of links to a picture of a duck on wheels ◊. Like a lot of memes, it started on 4chan. It also means that Rick Astley himself was very much aware of the meme at first, he was quite baffled by it and started to get really annoyed that it's all anyone ever wanted to ask him about, but he eventually grew to accept and embrace it. Newspaper articles were even written about the phenomenon, to the point where discussions of the song on its own merits as a song were very rare. People were trying this in Real Life, trying to foist the video (or even a live performance of the song) on large public gatherings.

It grew to be more than just an Internet meme, though it was one of the few memes to break out of the Internet and into general popular culture. That said, several have found ways to avoiding it - they either simply checked the copyright info on the YouTube link to see if it featured the song (or 'content from Rick Astley Official Channel'), or memorized the YouTube link for it. How did it become so popular? It's simple, it's mostly harmless, and the song itself is pretty catchy. It's a classic Bait-and-Switch, where you're linked to a web page that purports to be something relevant to whatever you're reading, only to click on it and find yourself watching the music video of British singer Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up'. The Rickroll is one of the most famous yet polarizing memes on the Internet.

Never going to give you up lyrics