I decided that this year I didn’t want to do some kind of cheesy post that sounds enticing, invite people to click on the extended entry only to taunt, “April Fools!” Where’s the fun in that? An April Fool’s prank has to be grand. Anyone can just offer a quick enticement, get the other person to ask, “Really!” and then sneer in their face.

So this year…

I wrote up the following post: Slate of DC Comics movies announced at Friday convention

It took six hours, including the researching of links, designing the “April Fools” graphic, finding out HTML codes I needed and thinking the whole thing up. I was up until 5AM finishing it so that it was ready to go April 1st.

To make it seem as believable as possible, I did two things:
1) I mixed in as much real news as possible, talking about current DC movies, Cartoon Network’s failure to renew JLU and Teen Titans, mentioning a Batman team-up movie that had been talked about in the past (abandoned, I’m guessing), even linking to the Brainiac movie.
1-A) One of my fake news items, the Legion cartoon, turned out to be true! There is going to be a Legion cartoon, though probably not as I described it. I threw in a link to the IMDb entry for that, which just made it more convincing.
2) I kept the movies believable. If I said there was going to be a live action Justice League of America movie with a long dream cast in every role, you’d know it was bogus. But an Aquaman animated series, buiilding off some old rumors? Believable. A Jonah Hex movie could happen. You could see the Wachowskis getting a Green Lantern option. Even the Firestorm movie could happen, especially given the marketing factors I mentioned (Spider-Man-like origin and all). Heck, by the time I was done writing up the Firestorm pitch, I regretted that it wasn’t happening!

Next…if I put “April Fool’s” anywhere in the post, the suspicious user might just scroll down looking for it before they read, which meant the post had to look legit from top to bottom. Instead, what I did was make fake links to other sites where supposedly people might learn more about the fake movies, and then made that a link to the “April Fool’s” graphic. I even found a mouseover code so that when you hover on the link, the status bar gives a fake Newsarama URL and the popup tooltip gives the fake page title.

Unfortunately, I may have overthought this.

So far, only one person has IM’d me with “You bastard!”, and the rest are all replying with quibbles about the movies. I thought for sure people would want to read what Newsarama and Comics Continuum had to say about the movies. Halfway through Saturday, I revised it to promise that if you clicked on the link you might see an actress whose costume was entirely body paint. I’m still getting feedback complaining about DC’s new movies.

As proud as I am about it, I think this year’s prank was a failure. Sorry about that. Better luck next year, I guess.

Now, for anyone confused, here’s the tally:
“Captain America” movie in 2009: True
“Hulk vs. Wolverine”: false (but not a bad idea!)
Wonder Woman movie: true
Legion cartoon: my facts are false, but turns out this is actually true!
Aquaman cartoon: false
Superman/Brainiac cartoon? true, obviously
Batman team-up movie: unknown status of a real project (probably abandoned)
Jonah Hex movie: false
GL movie: false
Hawkman movie: false
Firestorm movie: false, but now I really like my idea.