April Fools 2001 - Britney Spears & The Adventures of Billy Bob

Britney Website

Adv of Billy Bob

I don't remember what possessed me to do it. Maybe it was something I saw, or something that was suggested to me at some point. But I got the wild hair to play a joke on everyone by transforming SP.com into something absolutely rediculous to see what the reaction would be. Since I figured I would only have one shot at this, I decided to make it a good one by developing two rediculous websites.

Don't hate on me - everybody was obsessed with Britney Spears around the turn of the century. She was still America's pop princess and was several years away from going ape-biscuits and becoming a horrible role-model. I decided to take the existing design that SP.com had and simply swap out some images and transform it into "VegaNova's Britney Spears Website". But the title was misleading, as the website was stupid as hell and basically was the worst Britney website someone could dream up. Most of it was slapped together from my old "Character Asylum" webpages (a collection of imagined / warped characters and personalities).

The second gag was also hastily put together and was a reworking of another old website of mine The Adventures of Chuck E. Cheese, but with Billy Bob filling the role. This was my own little nod to the former site. It contained some new material since not everything could be relevantly transferred directly over. It was about a tenth the size of the old "CEC" version, but still had some fun stuff in it.

The reaction by the fans was amazing. I got e-mails in pairs - the first one was usually confused and frantic, the second was sent shortly afterwards with a "haha, oh I see". I can remember getting messages from people praising the Britney website that were along the lines of "I really like the Britney site, but I loved the ShowBiz one... is it coming back?!?".

These sites made some comebacks throughout the years - because stupidity is timeless - but they haven't been seen in at least 3 years. So on that note, here's links to the working versions (some links may not work properly so be forewarned): VegaNova's Britney Spears Website and The Adventures of Billy Bob.