As ever, there were dozens upon dozens of April Fools sites up this year. Many of them involved new looks for established sites, or new products or services. While we would never mess with our audience this way, we sampled several others — no way to get them all, of course — but one I really enjoyed is the TeeVeePedia, done by the people at TeeVee.org.
TeeVee.org has done this kind of thing more than once: a couple of years ago, they created an all-reality version of ABC, a prescient joke considering the Fox Reality Channel, and back in 1999, on the heels of WB and UPN, they gave us SONY TV.
But this year, they’ve topped themselves. The TeeVeePedia is brilliant. Here’s part of an entry discussing one of the major divisions of Fox:
Anguish
Perhaps the most nefarious department in the sinister Fox empire, Anguish specializes in nuturing brilliant, wonderful television shows. It shepherds these shows through the long and difficult process of development, keeping their quirky spirit intact. It then brings these shows to air just long enough to develop a small but devoted audience, then mercilessly cancels them. The resulting outcry of rage and despair from the show’s viewers is then harvested by specially trained druids, and mystically transferred to Rupert Murdoch, further increasing his dark powers.
Perfect. Of course, as in Wikipedia itself, some entries are better than others, but the Wikipedia format means that this could be one of those satire sites that could have a long life way beyond just being an April Fools-centric parody site.