Media love April Fool’s jokes — heard any good ones?

Animal Planet got me with one today, announcing it would air a two-hour documentary about the poisonous cobra that briefly escaped from the Bronx Zoo:

With never-before-seen footage, the cobra’s home movies, photography and an exclusive interview with confessionals, the candid special will offer the real story behind the cobra’s escape and solo adventures through New York City. The special also will highlight the cobra’s meteoric rise to fame and her interactions with the city’s elite including Mayor Bloomberg. During her brief time away from her enclosure, the cobra has exchanged tweets with several Hollywood A-listers, including Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Favreau and Steve Martin.

“We’re looking for raw, untapped talent,” says Marjorie Kaplan, president of Animal Planet and Science Networks. “We have a triple threat on our hands. @BronxZoosCobra is relatable, audacious and venomous, and you don’t turn your back on a snake like that!”

Hiss-terical!

Todd Spangler showed me one from Roku about their nifty new “branded” remotes, replete with logos, like those four-wheeled rolling ads that circle NASCAR tracks. See visual below.

Todd points out the Roku remote is about the size of a pack of Extra gum, enhancing the joke.

This week’s B&C jumped the gun a little with its March 28 cover, filled with coverlines touting bogus “exclusives” such as Jeff Zucker going to CBS as chief operating officer. Check out the visual here.

Send me more and I’ll add them in.

Nice to see Comcast take its host city obligations so seriously, providing a huge news story heading into the Cable Show in Chicago by blowing away the competition and securing four more Olympic Games for NBCUniversal.

At the convention, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is already scheduled to make some news on Thursday (the last day) with a “next-generation video demo” that observers believe will be Xcalibur, the code name for a new service blending TV programming and social media with a new and improved look and feel.

In industry terms, that’s even bigger than Oprah, who’s also speaking Thursday.

Along with all the sessions and the booth celebrities and the parties inside and outside Wrigley Field, the convention will host some significant events honoring notable people.

Turn to this year’s entrants into the Cable TV Pioneers. That event is a dinner Monday night at the Palmer House hotel.

Tuesday night sees the induction of six worthies into the Cable Hall of Fame, 7-9 p.m. at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

NAMIC honors Next-Generation Leaders and Luminaries (and a Friend) at its annual awards breakfast Thursday morning, 7-8:45 a.m., at McCormick Place.

Profiles of the Vanguard Award winners will be feted at a luncheon Thursday, 12-2 p.m., at the Grand Ballroom at McCormick Place.

Also, WICT hosts its Signature Luncheon Tuesday, 12:15-2 p.m., at McCormick Place.

And McCormick is the Place to be Wednesday morning for Multichannel News’s newsy Multicultural TV breakfast, 7-9 a.m., featuring among others Comcast’s David Jensen.

Be sure to read MCN’s show daily Tuesday through Thursday. Nearly all of our staff will be in Chicago, gathering all the on-site news for those tidy print publications, and creating content for various electronic newsletters you won’t want to miss, either.

To help set the stage for cable’s centerpiece convention, contributor George Winslow has compiled two pages of vital facts and figures about multichannel-TV and broadband delivery.

And we hear the green-screen demo that co-chairs Jerry Kent and David Zaslav have planned for the welcome ceremony will start things off on the right foot. See you in The Park!

Click here for more coverage of Cable Show 2011.

Capt. Kirk was on deck at the aircraft carrier Intrepid Saturday night.

After working the room at a VIP reception with his wife, Elizabeth, there was William Shatner, in the spotlight, on a walkway above the carrier (now a floating museum in New York City).

“Wow! What a magical moment,” he said to a couple hundred fans who’d gathered on a warm night on the flight deck for a free outdoor screening of The Captains, the new documentary airing on Epix. “We’re aboard an aircraft carrier. Maybe this was the size of the Enterprise, and maybe you’re the crew. And we’re having a little entertainment aboard the Enterprise. And we’re gonna beat the Klingons soon! But it’s better than that — the reality is better. The skyline of New York. This great warship that’s docked in memory of all those sailors who fought in World War II and other wars. And we’re here to see a film that I loved making. It was a happening.”

Epix, the upstart premium movie channel, backed Shatner in making the documentary about the actors who have played captains in the various Star Trek iterations after Shatner created the original role, James T. Kirk, in Star Trek. As Shatner noted, even though the original series was canceled in 1969 after just three seasons, it’s become “the most durable and profitable franchise in the history of entertainment.” Viacom and Paramount Pictures, a co-owner of Epix, has enjoyed those profits. (Epix’s other owners are Lionsgate and MGM).

The Intrepid screening was like a mini Comic-Con. At that San Diego convention, Epix and Shatner had put on a screening on July 22 that drew more than 2,000 fans. Fans came to the Intrepid in costume Saturday, some showing them off to win a prize. (The intrepid winner wore a lit-up model of the original Enterprise as a hat.)

Epix EVP Doug Lee introduced Shatner, saying, “Epix really wants to make a thank you to Bill.”

Besides backing the doc — and Shatner said he hopes to work with Epix on more projects — Epix already has thanked Shatner by promoting the heck out of the film.

Not as a favor to Shatner, mind you, but as the centerpiece of a brand awareness and subscriber acquisition campaign the network calls “Shatnerpalooza.”

Nora Ryan, the network’s chief of staff, said it’s all about tapping into the Star Trek fan base online, getting fans to try the Web version of the movie channel for a two-week trial and then sign as many as possible up as paying subscribers. TV-Everywhere style, the online portion of the multiplatform Epix channel is only available to authenticated subscribers of the linear network.

“Star Trek fans are an amazing fan base, so passionate, and Bill Shatner is emblematic of that and taps that vein in a way, to tell you the truth, took many of us by surprise,” Epix chief of staff Nora Ryan said ahead of the screening. “Shatner embodies everything that the Trekkies are so excited about in terms of the franchise.”

Other elements of the campaign include “The Long Khan,” a stitched-together version of fans’ recreating Kirk’s famous anguished cry in the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. (See them at thelongkhan.com.) Epix has been showing hilarious shorts of Shatner in action in other roles, hammy and serious alike, dubbed “Now That’s Sh-Acting!” It aired all six Star Trek movies this past weekend.

Shatner and Avery Brooks (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Capt. Benjamin Sisko) appeared at a Comic-Con panel in San Diego on July 22 that drew 2,200 people, with an unknown number turned away. Epix also premiered the documentary on July 22 and produced an hour-long online Q&A with fans that day that drew 20,000 participants.

EpixHD.com Webcast the Q&A live from the Cox Communications San Diego production facilities with Cox’s help, and Epix affiliate Cox will have that video plus footage of the Comic-Con panel and other material to offer subscribers on video on demand. Cox California SVP and general manager David Bialis is a big Trek fan, Ryan said. About half of the fans who participated in the Q&A signed up for a free two-week trial and are marketing prospects later, she said.

Along the way, through screenings and other fan interactions, the channel has offered fans a two-week free trial of the network online, and affiliates will use that database to do direct marketing of the channel. EpixHD.com tripled its Web traffic the weekend after July 22, the channel said.

Overall, Ryan said, the message was targeted to 10 million people on fan sites and social media. “You tap the online passionate audience, they come to you online, and it’s a very organic way to expand the TV Everywhere proposition because it’s fishing where the fish are,” Ryan said.

The doc is a fun watch, with some signature goofy Shatner moments, including ad libbing a tune with jazz pianist Brooks at Brooks’s home in Princeton, N.J., and getting Kate Mulgrew (Capt. Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager) to volunteer that she snookered her dad into helping her begin an acting career in New York by paying her tuition to NYU.

Pictured below, at Epix Live With William Shatner at Comic-Con in San Diego on July 22, left to right: Sharon Taylor-Huppert, social media specialist, Cox Communications; Andy Hunter, chief marketing officer, Epix; Ceanne Guerra, media and public relations manager, Cox; William Shatner; Nora Ryan, chief of staff, Epix; Dave Bialus, SVP and GM, Cox Communications California; Aaron Wilson (back), media marketing specialist, Cox; Zack Fields (front), competitive & retention specialist, Cox; Ryan Witt, account manager, Epix; Mike Ruggiero, VP, programming planning & strategy, Epix. Photo by: Jonathan Leibson/Wire Image.

Some 700 people were at lunch today at WICT’s Leadership Conference, a potent start to the return of Cable Diversity Week in New York.

“Thank you for coming out en masse,” Women in Cable Telecommunications CEO Maria Brennan said at the New York Hilton noontime event, before Ruby Gettinger, star of Style Network’s Ruby, charmed said masses with a little bit of her personal story. Watching TV helped save her life, Gettinger said. A program about obese women inspired her to action that has led to her losing more than 400 pounds, from a weight of 716 pounds. She urged the network presidents in the audience to keep inspiring people to save their own lives.

The day began with a strong presentation by personal-finance TV star Suze Orman who gave personalized advice to people who attended her Q&A session (sadly I arrived too late to benefit). After that was a very interesting discussion about preparing for the “What ifs” in life, led by Comcast SVP of talent Grace Killelea. Her talented panelists included Time Warner Cable EVP Carol Hevey, who talked about taking on the challenge of first consolidating operations in TWC’s North and South Carolina systems, and then being told by company COO Landel Hobbs last September that she’d done such a good job, the company had decided to consolidate further, into two divisions, East and West, and that she would oversee the East. Just when things had settled down in the Carolinas, she said, “I am right back to where I was three years ago, having to do the same thing, much broader geography, much more complex, much more dynamic.” The East integration has merged the Maine and upstate New York operations with the Carolinas, and New York City will be integrated into it later this year, she said.

On the same panel, Nancy Dubuc, the president and GM of Lifetime Networks and History, talked about the challenges of combining the “old guard” of History with the “new guard” of Lifetime. She had overseen History before AETN absorbed Lifetime and she was picked in April to oversee them both. She compared it, usefully, with life at home with her 7-year-old and 4-year-old, each of whom might want to be read a night-time story first.

As I said, a strong start. And, unless WICT was being extremely conservative with me last week when the forecast was a turnout of around 500 people, the lunch turnout was simply amazing.

Diversity Week rolls on with WICT’s conference wrapping tomorrow, the NAMIC annual conference, the Walter Kaitz Foundation annual fundraising dinner Wednesday night and the ACC Forum 2010. For more about these great groups and the week’s events, please see this week’s Multichannel News.

The Hub’s day one bottom line: it’s an upgrade but eighth out of nine kids’ networks.

In persons age 2 and older, for the total day, The Hub averaged 135,000 viewers, which was a 650% improvement over Discovery Kids on Oct. 3, the network said. Discovery Communications teamed with Hasbro to create The Hub because Discovery considered Discovery Kids an underperforming asset.

The Hub’s best-performing show was new original series Family Game Night (7-8 p.m.), which averaged 267,000 total viewers. The Hub said the show — a live-action series in which families of four square off in Hasbro board games such as Cranium and Connect-4 (reviewed here) — outperformed Disney XD, NickToons and TeenNick among kids ages 2-11 and 6-11 in that time slot.

The Hub’s next-best show was a Garfield movie at 12-2 p.m. (225,000 viewers) and an episode of classic Jim Henson series Fraggle Rock (194,000), Nielsen figures show. Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bit Adventures, a new animated series based on the fruit-scented dolls, had 179,000. The numbers fall off from there.

Overall, The Hub trailed rival kids networks Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, Nick at Nite, Disney XD, Nicktoons and Nick Jr., according to Nielsen figures supplied by other media organizations. The Hub did outpace TeenNick (the former The N), which targets an older kids’ audience than Hub’s coveted 6-12 set.

Nick and Disney, the kids’ category leaders, averaged close to 2.2 million viewers in the total-day P2+ category on Sunday. Cartoon Network, at No. 4 behind Nick at Nite, averaged more than 1.2 million viewers.

Among kids’ networks that led The Hub, the closest in total-day P2+ viewing Sunday was Disney XD, with an average 230,000 to The Hub’s 135,000.

The Hub also ranked eighth in kids 2-11 and 6-11 in total day.

In a twist that supports its branding, The Hub released “co-viewing” statistics, saying it was the top network among children-targeted cable networks in the kids 2-11 and adults 18-49 categories. It said “36% of kids 2-11 watched with an adult 18-49, out-performing all children-targeted networks, including Nickelodeon (20%), Disney Channel (18%) and Cartoon Network (18%). In addition, 57% of A18-49 watched The Hub with a child aged 2-11, significantly beating all kid cablers, including Nickelodeon (35%), Disney Channel (40%) and Cartoon Network (28%).”

Comparable Nielsen figures for other kids’ networks were not immediately available. One other programmer said the raw numbers should be available more widely tomorrow.

In addition to Hasbro’s resources, which will translate to new originals based on characters such as Transformers and G. I Joe, The Hub starts out with a big subscriber base of 60 million homes.