April Fools 'Fess-Up 2013 Edition!

Yes the rumors are true!  They were absent for a few years but 2013 saw the return of the April Fools pranks to The Knight Shift.  The story about CBS producing a pilot for a modern-era reboot of The Andy Griffith Show was my own humble entry in this year's festivities.  It seems to have been moderately successful 'cuz a few friends were taken in by it (one of whom had some rather colorful remarks about it) and a few hours after I posted it some news site in France had picked it up!  It's in some weird font though: apparently something like Iranian or Pakistani, so I don't know if they thought it was real or they were saying "look at what this American idiot is doing!"

As always, I gotta note what the "clincher" was.  Every time I do a prank like this, I try to give some indication that it's just a gag.  Also as a way of putting my "signature" upon the work.  In this year's case there were two of them.  The first is the TMZ reporter: "Istvan Teleky" was the name of the eighteenth-century European count whose spirit supposedly haunted those tarot cards in the "Three Wishes for Opie" episode of The Andy Griffith Show (one of my favorites, incidentally).  The second was the child actor who would be playing Opie in the Mayberry reboot: "Ralf Paydosilo" is an anagram for "April Fools Day".  Right clever, aye?

The joke went through a few iterations before I posted it.  Originally it was going to be Charlie Sheen as Ernest T. Bass, but he's been doing too much other stuff lately, and he would have been way too obvious a choice to play Ernest T. anyway...

Special thanks to girlfriend Kristen who helped me brainstorm some ideas for this year's prank :-)

Categories: april fools, the andy griffith show