Will It Blend? — Cartoon of caped figure holding cat over a blender asking Will it blend

Will It Blend?

2006viral videoclassic

Published October 7, 2026

Will It Blend? is a viral video series launched by Utah blender maker Blendtec in October 2006, where founder Tom Dickson calmly pulverizes iPhones, marbles, golf balls, and other improbable objects inside a kitchen blender. The deadpan infomercial format turned a small commercial appliance company into one of the defining branded YouTube success stories of the mid-2000s.

advertising memes youtube viral late 2000s memes catchphrase memes participatory video memes

Overview

Each Will It Blend? episode follows the same tight script. Tom Dickson, wearing a lab coat and safety goggles, walks on screen next to a Blendtec Total Blender, holds up the sacrificial object, and asks the title question in a flat Midwestern voice. He drops the item in, hits a numbered preset, and the camera holds on the jar while the blade turns a phone, a rake handle, or a stack of CDs into a puff of smoke and powder1. The payoff is the lid coming off and Dickson declaring, 'Yes, it blends!' as he waves away the dust2.

The hook was never the catchphrase alone, it was the pairing of an industrial-grade blender ($400 and up at the time) with the kind of destruction test usually filed under late-night prank video3. The first episode in 2006 ground 50 glass marbles into dust on the lowest speed setting, which told viewers everything they needed to know about the premise without any voice-over1. Later episodes raised the stakes with brand-new consumer electronics, which is what pulled in tech blogs and daytime TV bookers3.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube
Creator
Tom Dickson
Date
2006

Blendtec, a commercial blender manufacturer based in Orem, Utah, uploaded the first Will It Blend? video to its YouTube channel on October 30, 20062. The clip, titled around the question 'Will it blend? That is the question,' showed Dickson feeding 50 marbles into a Total Blender and running them on the slowest speed until nothing was left but a cloud of glass dust1. By 2014 that single upload had passed 6.4 million views2.

Dickson was Blendtec's founder, not a hired actor, and the series was built in-house as a low-budget marketing experiment after a staffer noticed Dickson routinely destroying 2x2 pine blocks to stress-test blades on the shop floor2. The YouTube account the videos went up on is still the brand's main channel4.

How It Spread

The series started slow but picked up through 2007 as Dickson took the bit to broadcast TV. He guest-starred on NBC's The Tonight Show that March, which pushed the videos past the YouTube tech-blog crowd and into mainstream press2. Esquire ran an interview with Dickson about the campaign on May 3, 2007, treating it as a case study in low-budget web stunts rather than a product ad5.

The commercial payoff landed by late September. Mashable reported on September 27, 2007 that Blendtec's retail sales had grown roughly five-fold on the back of the campaign, with the iPhone episode singled out as the most-watched clip of the batch3. That piece pointed at a brand-new iPhone being shredded 'to smithereens' as the moment that gave Blendtec its real recognition boost, and noted the company was also making ad revenue through the Revver video platform3.

The channel kept shipping episodes through the late 2000s and into the 2010s, including the destruction of camcorders, Chuck Norris action figures, Barbie dolls, iPads, and glow sticks2. By March 2014 the Blendtec channel listed more than 130 videos, 294 million cumulative views, and over 690,000 subscribers, with the brand's Facebook page past 52,000 likes and its Twitter account past 23,000 followers67. The question 'will it blend?' leaked out of the channel entirely and became shorthand on Urban Dictionary for asking whether an idea is actually viable, with the entry crediting Dickson and Blendtec directly8.

Timeline

2006-10-30

Blendtec uploads the first Will It Blend? video, in which Tom Dickson blends 50 glass marbles on the lowest speed[1].

2007-03

Dickson appears on NBC's The Tonight Show, pushing the series beyond YouTube and tech blogs[2].

2007-05-03

Esquire publishes an interview with Dickson about the campaign[5].

2007-09-27

Mashable reports Blendtec's retail sales have grown roughly five-fold, citing the iPhone blend episode as the most memorable[3].

2014-03

The Blendtec YouTube channel passes 294 million cumulative views and 690,000 subscribers across more than 130 episodes[2].

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