April Fools, Poptropicans!
Yesterday, on April Fools Day, the PHB announced PopFeedz, a new site promising pure Poptropica entertainment, named as the PHB’s “cooler cousin” for abandoning the PHB’s typical posting style in favor of fun web trends like clickbait titles and the most random personality quizzes, gifs, listicles, cute animal pics, more. Well, as many of you guessed, it was just an April Fools prank: we’re not actually planning to turn the PHB into another Buzzfeed.
Many of you caught onto our joke, although we did manage to fool some of you. 😜 Either way, we hope you enjoyed exploring the PopFeedz site we put together! If you missed it, or want to relive it, the site will remain available at popfeedz.wordpress.com – so enjoy!
The PHB team worked hard to put everything together, combining ideas and being inspired by each other. Lucky Joker even put up a new quiz about PopGum after we had announced the site! A sketch from Brave Tomato made its way into the post about Skinny Moon – which, if you haven’t figured out yet, is just our imagination, and not a real interview. 😉
As the team was coming up with ideas for what to do for this year’s prank, we kept thinking we wanted to do something about Poptropica Worlds, which was tricky since we still don’t know much about it. However, Slippery Raptor had the idea of turning the PHB into a “PHB 2.0,” just as Worlds is a New Poptropica – and from there, it took off!
The name PopFeedz is, of course, inspired by Buzzfeed, a popular entertainment website with all sorts of fun time-wasters. The content of PopFeedz is similarly inspired, particularly with quizzes, memes, and an overall style of clickbait titles and concise text. Of course, everything is adapted to Poptropica, such as Spotted Dragon’s “You Will NOT Believe What’s In These Behind-the-Scenes Sketches…” playing on our own concerns about what might happen with Poptropica Worlds, but with a humorous intent. And as a reference to the shiny Worlds art we’ve been seeing, we even threw in a little parody of the hit song “Shiny” from the recent Disney film Moana in our announcement post.
Pets of Poptropica is inspired by some of Skinny Moon’s latest social media posts, not only about her pup Toby, but also her call to post pictures of pets on social media with the hashtag #PetsOfPoptropica. A few of us had pets (both past and present), so we started a pets series on PopFeedz! Here’s a look at my betta fish, Biscotti, staring at my Poptropican on the computer screen:
Because these articles were enjoyed so much, we hope to re-publish a few of them here on the PHB over the next few weeks, so they can be enjoyed by even more readers, who might have missed them on PopFeedz. However, some of them will remain exclusive to PopFeedz since they are more suitable there, so be sure to check them out.
On April 1, PopFeedz received over 1,600 visits to the site, and we heard from many of you about how much you liked it! We even received this complimentary message from the one and only Skinny Moon:
As always, the team here at the PHB is grateful for your continued support and readership, and we’d like to think PopFeedz was one fun way to celebrate that fact. The Poptropica Help Blog is here to stay, so stay popping, Poptropicans! 😜✌️
– slantedfish 🐠 –
