"Sandcastles in the Sand" is a song written by Craig Thomas and Carter Bays for the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother.

The music video was shot at Zuma Beach, California, featuring Tiffany, Alan Thicke, and James Van Der Beek as her love interest.

It had sold 1,000 digital downloads in the United States as of August 2008, and the music video attracted more than 70,000 views online after 3 days of release.

Cobie Smulders played Robin Scherbatsky, a devoted broadcast journalist who moves from Canada for a job in New York, in the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother.

[2] That episode featured the song "Let's Go to the Mall", which had sold 4,000 digital downloads in the United States as of August 2008,[3] while its music video received more than 300,000 viewers on MySpace and the CBS official website within the 10 days of its TV premiere.

[5] During the production of "Slap Bet", creators and executive producers Craig Thomas and Carter Bays had deliberated over the idea of bringing back Robin's musical past in a later season.

[9][10] Titled "Sandcastles in the Sand", it was one of the three original songs written by Thomas and Bays for season 3, along with "Ted Mosby is a Jerk" and "You Just Got Slapped".

[5] In the episode, character Robin Scherbatsky reveals that "Sandcastles in the Sand" was a less-successful artistic follow-up to her minor hit "Let's Go To The Mall", with both songs released by Dominant Records on an album called Make It Sparkle.

[23] The creators labeled it a "slow, mournful breakup song"; Smulders, on the other hand, called it a "pretty funny" and "a love ballad about teen heartbreak".

[24] She recalls "the greatest week and a half" of her life with her love interest: he taught her how to french kiss and they were "gonna travel the globe / From Alberta to Ontario".

[32] According to TV Squad, the show began to enlist more guest stars after the ratings success of "Ten Sessions", in which Britney Spears appeared in a cameo role.

[19] It was filmed at Zuma Beach, on the coast of Malibu, California,[22][36] a week and a half after its parent episode was shot at the 20th Century Fox soundstage.

[37] Bays wanted the video to show Sparkles' origin story and what she was going through, from the "one time she loved so fully and gave herself over to her heart and got burned real bad by it.

"[8] The video begins with Sparkles, wearing a long white dress, walking along the beach while singing about her summer love.

[38] Sparkles' girlfriends appear in schoolgirl uniforms as a form of Greek chorus, lip-synching to the lyrics and jumping ropes.

[25] An animation shows a van going across a map from Alberta to Ontario; later, handwritten text reads, "It was the greatest week and a half of my life...R+S 4EVA.

[7] He wears a sweater vest over a button-down shirt, which Eric Goldman of IGN compared to Thicke's appearance in his 1985–1992 sitcom Growing Pains.

[45] Ryan Keefer of DVD Talk thought that the video "totally exploits Robin's Canadian heritage" and is "one of the funniest things" from the show.