About

Selleck Waterfall Sandwich^[1] is a single topic blog featuring images of American actor Tom Selleck photoshopped into waterfall scenes with a sandwich. The site became well-known for its absurd combination of seemingly unrelated items and its obviously photoshopped composition.

Origin

The Tumblr blog was created by Los Angeles-based copywriter Greg Szmurlo^[2] on January 13th, 2010. The first batch of eight artworks were posted without explanation, aside from the description of the type of sandwich displayed in each image. Szmurlo later told ABC News^[15] that the blog was inspired by a dream he had where Tom Selleck was eating a sandwich in a meadow. His mustache spoke to Szmurlo in Portugese, asking him to make this dream a reality.

Spread

The first mention of the blog outside of Tumblr appeared on internet culture blog Ünnecessary Ümlaut^[3] on January 29th, 2010. That day, the blog also appeared on Urlesque^[4] and Buzzfeed.^[5] The following day, a link to the blog was shared on the Something Awful Forums,^[6] where it resulted in a series of photoshopped contributions based on the formulaic theme.

Over the course of the following week in February 2010, the blog was featured on Entertainment Weekly^[7], Mental Floss^[8], the Something Awful front page^[9], Neatorama^[10], GQ^[11], Geekologie^[12], A.V. Club^[13], BoingBoing^[14] and ABC News.^[15] A Facebook page^[16] was created for the site on February 8th, 2010, although it has only received 771 likes as of June 2012.

Though the blog has not been updated since May 2011, Selleck was shown images of the blog during his appearance on Conan on June 1st, 2012. He pointed out his favorite of the images, one with his face and a Mexican torta sandwich faded into the background, which Conan O’Brien had blown up for him to hang up in his home.

Notable Examples

Derivative Blogs

On February 3rd, 2010, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich's first spin-off blog Pereira Waffle Pyramid^[17][18] was launched, featuring similar collages of G4's Attack of the Show host Kevin Pereira, waffles and Egyptian pyramids. The blog was shown during the following day's episode Attack of the Show.^[19] Later that month, another derivative site Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza^[20] (below center) was created, showcasing the Golden Girls actress with mountain scenery and a variety of pizzas. In 2011, two additional blogs based on the same formula were launched on Tumblr with Tony Danza Space Pretzel^[21] (shown below, left) in March and Ryan Gosling Disneyland Cats^[22] (shown below, right) in October that year.

Search Interest

External References