Tornado Selfie
About
Tornado Selfie refers to a frame from a viral video of a man looking into a camera as a tornado in the Australian outback approaches him. Part of a marketing campaign for the 2014 Australian film Into the Storm, the video went viral, with many believing it to be real and inspired a series of image edits and image macro memes featuring the selfie.
Origin
The original video was created by the video producer The Woolshed Company (now known as RIOT Content) as viral promotion for the then-upcoming 2014 film Into the Storm.[1] On August 19th, 2014, YouTuber Terry Tufferson posted the video under the title "Crazy Guy Runs Into Outback Tornado To Take Selfie." As of April 2020, the video has received more than 18 million views.
Spread
Various news and media outlets covered the video upon its viral success, questioning its validity. These outlets include Gizmodo,[3] USA Today,[4] MTV[5] and more.
Later that year, on October 18th, 2014, Redditor [6] montmuz shared the selfie image on the /r/funny subreddit. The post received more than 2,200 points (84% upvoted) and 165 comments in less than six years (shown below).
On May 24, 2016, user "desacabose" published a screenshot of the video captioned "Australian man attempts to walk to the store" on the website funnyjunk.com, as part of a collection titled "Australia based repost comp" [9]. On Jun 7th, 2016, the image was reposted on the Facebook[3] page "Robust Gourmet Memes". The post received more than 590 reactions and 165 shares in less than four years (shown below, left).
On October 11th, the video was re-uploaded to Youtube by user "sean" under the title "Australian man attempts to walk to the store."[7] Most subsequent parodies feature captions with the format "X attempts to walk to Y" (examples below, center and right).
Here It Comes
The image has also appeared in a series of object labeling memes featuring the phrase "Here It Comes." On February 17th, 2019, Tumblr [8] user dankmemeuniveristy shared the image with the caption "People Born in the 90s" and the tornado labeled "30s." The post received more than 186,000 notes in less than two years (shown below).
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] Campaign Brief – Roadshow Films’ outback selfie for ‘Into The Storm’ film garners over 3 million views; final phase of campaign revealed in Sydney / Posted on 2014-09-02
[2] Facebook – Ｒｏｂｕｓｔ Ｇｏｕｒｍｅｔ Ｍｅｍｅｓ / Posted on 2016-06-07
[3] Gizmodo – The Australian Outback Tornado Selfie: Real Or Fake?
[4] USA Today – Is it real? Australian takes a selfie with a dust devil
[5] MTV – THE MOST DANGEROUS SELFIE OF ALL TIME WILL MAKE YOUR JAW DROP
[7] YouTube – Australian man attempts to walk to the store / 2016-10-11
[8] Tumblr – dankmemesuniveristy
[9] Funnyjunk – Australia based repost comp
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