Posted on 04/01/2025 10:55:13 AM PDT by Leaning Right
For the most part, TV audiences today couldn’t be convinced that spaghetti grows on trees. But in 1957, plenty of viewers were eating it up.
Described as “the most successful April Fools’ Day prank of all time” by one Swiss outlet, the so-called “spaghetti-tree hoax” of 1957 was an attempt by the producers of a BBC news program to convince viewers that spaghetti — a food not widely eaten in the U.K. at the time — was harvested from spaghetti trees in Italy and Switzerland.
“The last two weeks in March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer,” the narrator of the segment, which aired on the BBC program “Panorama,” told viewers.
(Excerpt) Read more at fox8.com ...
Shows the dire depravation of post war Britain.
A April Fool’s Joke.
A local radio personality said that Mount Trashmore ,( yes that is the name, a former landfill turned park ), had exploded.
Local authorities were not amused.
I much preferred the flying penguins.
Whaddya mean it’s not true? I saw it on tv ages ago.
The Spaghetti “Harvest” - San Giorgio Spaghetti ad (1978)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ZtGoXkI58
Al Dente…. I remember him… Italian kid, South Philly…. 😁
I started to just shake my head, but then I remembered all the times I’ve seen a thread title here on a story by the “Bee” and bought it at first.
Best joke of all time.
Pitched barefoot and threw a 150 mph fastball.
Single-footedly! I found a great piece about it:
Some kids did a similar thing with a cinder cone near Amboy, CA back in the 1940s. Many of the townspeople fled.
I knew some people who were thinking about burning a bunch of tires in the crater of Mt. Tabor in SE Portland on April 1, 1980, but they didn’t do it.
I can see where that one was a real mistake.
On April 1, 1982, I tuned in to KRLA (the old rock station at 1110 kilocycles, not today’s talk station at 870) and was astounded to learn that it was no longer 1982 but 1963. The program featured news and weather reports, advertisements, and hit songs from April 1, 1963. I was at first taken aback before I realized that it was April 1.
George Plimpton was a giveaway, but the Mets kept the joke up for a couple weeks for those not familiar with Plimpton.
And then there was the acrostic of:
“He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga...”
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