About

Devastated Elmo refers to a popular photograph of a person in a distraught-looking Elmo costume observing a Times Square tourist taking a picture with a person in a costume of Woody from Toy Story. The picture, particularly the expression on the Elmo's face, has become the inspiration for numerous photoshop battles on Reddit.

Origin

On July 26th, 2014, Redditor Brian_Buckley^[1] posted a picture (shown below) of a person in a Elmo costume appearing to "catch" a person dressed as Woody taking a picture with a tourist in New York City's Times Square. They posted the picture in the /r/photoshopbattles subreddit, garnering more than 1,800 points (96% upvoted) and 130 comments.

Spread

Around the same time as the photoshopbattle, July 2017, two blogs also published the same photograph of Elmo. The blog Shock My Mind and the Spanish-langauge blog Lomacia also uploaded the same picture as the one in that started the photoshopbattle.^[2][3]

Several days later, on July 29th, the website We Know Memes^[5] posted a tenso variation of the meme with the caption "I thought we had something special."

Nearly four years later, on May 17th, 2017, Redditor KingMactastic posted "Horrorfied Elmo" to /r/photoshopbattles under the name "Devastated Elmo."^[6] Within 24 hours, the post received more than 63,500 points (90% upvoted) and 700 comments. Some of the most popular response can be seen below. Several sites covered the photoshop battle, including Complex,^[7] Teen Vogue,^[8] and more.

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References