Dagwood Sandwich



You know, those ludicrously tall sandwiches that a Big Eater makes. Often in Western Animation a common gag will be for a character to distend his jaw like a snake and swallow it whole, only for it to expand and leave his neck in the shape of the towering sandwich. Another possibility is for a character to take two or more already made sandwiches and 'shuffle' them together like a deck of cards, creating this.

As the page image demonstrates, these often have an olive and toothpick in the top, ostensibly to hold the massive stack together. In animation (Garfield notably) the sandwich will be consumed in one gulp without removing said toothpick. Don't try THAT at home.

Related to Satiating Sandwich. Also known as Sandwich Tower.

Naturally, Wikipedia has a page about them.

Anime and Manga

 * Episode 13 of Steam Detectives has Narutaki order one. He has to squish it down to the size of a normal sandwich and eat it in one bite when he sees.
 * Food Porn series Toriko has the Toriko Burger. It's so tall that Toriko has to dislocate his jaw just to take a bite.

Comic Books

 * Fantastic Four: Benjamin J. Grimm loves these.

Film

 * Mentioned by name in sci-fi children's book adaptation Zathura. The visiting astronaut immediately ransacks the main characters' fridge upon being rescued, and although the sandwich he makes isn't ludicrously huge, it's still pretty sizable.

Literature

 * In Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road, Oscar mentions how he creates a "Dagwood" and offers a bite to a pretty girl at a party.
 * Heinlein also has characters enjoying "Dagwood" sandwiches in The Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
 * In the Honor Harrington short story Miss Midshipwoman Harrington, Honor makes one of these while on a break. Unfortunately, an alert forces her to report to the bridge before she can eat it.

Live-Action TV
"Dean: I'm gonna need a bigger mouth. Sam (on entering): You're gonna need a bigger mouth."
 * Dean made one for comedy in an episode of Supernatural they were switching between "shows" and ended up in a sitcom.


 * Lizzie McGuire. Gordon made one of these out of boredom. He gave up trying to eat it as soon as he realized his jaws couldn't stretch like that.
 * Parodying the recent trend of restaurant sandwiches that replace the bread with full meals in and of themselves, The Colbert Report had a grilled cheese sandwich where the bread was replaced with grilled cheese sandwiches, ad infinitum, to create what he called "The Mobious Melt": an infinity symbol made of grilled cheese sandwiches.
 * On That Mitchell and Webb Look, one of the "party planners" sketches about how fictional characters would behave if you really had them over had the couple complaining about Shaggy and Scooby Doo ("He treats that dog like it's a person! It's creepy!") and included pulling a leftover giant sandwich out of the fridge and saying it's cruel to feed this kind of thing to a dog.
 * On Man v. Food, though Adam has encountered a few of these, he's only had one as a challenge once (Des Moines, Iowa's Adam Emmenecker Sandwich Challenge).

Newspaper Comics

 * Dagwood Bumstead of Blondie is the Trope Namer. The term has entered the English language, as per the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
 * Garfield occasionally has these. One strip features a ridiculously tall sandwich falling on Jon.
 * In one episode of Garfield and Friends, Garfield gets carried away making a sandwich like this. He ends up putting Jon's shoes, the telephone, and even Odie into the sandwich.
 * In an April Fools' strip when the creators of Blondie and Garfield switched places, Dagwood made one of these sandwiches and said that "Making sandwiches is an art and I am an artist". Then Garfield showed up and ate it while claiming to be "a patron of the arts".
 * Peter from FoxTrot, being a Big Eater, has made several such sandwiches. One is dubbed "The Leaning Tower of Peter". Peter once spent an entire Sunday strip making another one.
 * And then there's his "literally everything bagel", which actually has other sandwiches in it.
 * There's a Zits comic out there where Jeremy unhinges his jaw to eat one of these.

Video Games

 * A food item (called "Dire Sandwich") in Dungeons of Dredmor.
 * This is subverted in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Large sandwiches are used as Power-Up Food, and the player can have the trainer make their own. However, if you enter Creative Mode and try to add too many ingredients, you'll usually just end up with a mess.

Web Comics

 * Being a Big Eater, Monica of Wapsi Square has been known to eat these.
 * Scandinavia and The World: Denmark's smørrebrød

Web Original

 * The Amazing Atheist and his Slaughterhouse, which consists of a KFC Double Down wedged between a Wendy's Baconator.
 * EPICMEALTIME has made a few in the past.

Western Animation

 * Scooby-Doo and Shaggy both enjoy these. Not to be confused with the other trope "Scooby Stack".
 * In newer cartoons, however, these sandwiches never contain meat, since voice actor Casey Kasem (who does Shaggy) became a vegetarian recently and insisted that all his characters eat vegetarian, too. Interestingly, Kasem's favorite kind of sandwich is apparently eggplant.
 * Tom of Tom and Jerry also eats them on occasion.
 * Sealab 2021 had a good example of this, with Stormy miraculously making one underwater after fixing a submarine in near-freezing temperatures.
 * Happened to be Mickey Mouse's favorite in Mickey Mouse Works episode, "Mickey Tries to Cook."
 * Donald's Country Cousin ate this (and a lot more) when he visited Don in his first short movie.
 * In the Merrie Melodies cartoon "Hollywood Canine Canteen," there is a "Dogwood" sandwich made of bones interleaved with slices of bread.
 * Perry and Heinz Doofenshmirtz accidentally creates one on Phineas and Ferb during a deli meat food fight in "Mommy Can You Hear Me?".
 * An entire episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes featured Jimmy making one of these and then refusing to allow it to be eaten, since it was art.
 * Mr. Bogus dines on one of these in the episode "Bad Luck Bogus". However, in a rare example of the trope, Bogus actually eats the sandwich one layer at a time with a fork instead of the usual practice of devouring the entire sandwich in one bite. Considering that the contents of the entire sandwich itself are all bigger than Bogus, that's a pretty understandable matter entirely.
 * This is lampshaded in the DC Super Hero Girls episode "#AwesomeAuntAntiope"; after Diana lets Antiope order for them at the bar and grill, Zee's hamburger is so huge, she's at a loss on how to simply bite into it.

Real Life

 * In-N-Out Burger in the American Southwest allows hamburgers and cheeseburgers to be ordered this way. A cheeseburger with two slices of cheese and three hamburger patties is a '2x3'. Three slices of cheese and three patties becomes a '3x3', etc. Some people ordered a 100x100 mega-burger, and the restaurant actually made it. After the incident was posted about online, there arose concerns that the meat of such a large burger wasn't being cooked thoroughly. As a result, the burgers now have a limit of no bigger than 4x4. (Though you can still order 25 of them at once.)
 * Just look at the picture! From The Other Wiki.
 * Wendy's has a few items like this on their "secret menu", meaning only available by request. They include the Home Run Burger (four patties with cheese) the Quadruple Baconator (four patties, cheese, and bacon), and the T-Rex Burger (nine patties, nine slices of cheese, tomato, lettuce, onions, and pickles). It's doubtful most Wendy's will sell the last one anymore, however, as someone mentioned it on the web, it went viral, and the company now discourages their stores from selling it. Bummer.