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14 pizzas (and pizza-flavored snacks) you will never eat again
Did you cook pizzas in your toaster?
Image: dork-larue / Tumblr
Forget apple pie and hot dogs. Pizza is America's favorite food. If there is any doubt, you only have to look back at the plethora of pizzas and pizza-flavored foods sold in supermarkets and fast food joints over the decades. Our nation never tires of reinventing the pizza.
We love to look back at the bygone food of our youth. So, let's turn back the clock, turn up the oven and get to drooling over some past pizzas.
Fair warning: You will craze some pizza after reading this.
1. Roman's Frozen Pizza
A centurion tosses boxes of frozen pizzas from his chariot like a delivery boy. This was the advertising campaign for Roman, "the non-stingy frozen pizza for big American appetites." Perhaps you saw this in 1969 while watching The Brady Bunch. Roman kept reiterating that it was not stingy.
Image: YouTube
2. Pizza Pick-Up Stix
Pizza in a stick! Brilliant! Bird's Eye sold these tubes in the 1970s.
Image: Pinterest
3. Totino's Pizza Slices
Totino's still survives largely in Pizza Roll form, but we forget that the brand was a pioneer. Rose Totino was Pillsbury’s first female corporate V.P. and worked directly with the company's food scientists to craft the country’s first nationally distributed frozen pizza. Her “Crisp Crust” technology was patented in 1979. Three decades later, Rose Totino was inducted into the Minnesota Inventor’s Hall of Fame. Anyway… we miss her "My Classic Pizza" and rectangular pizza slices.
Image: General Mills
4. Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Frozen Pizza
The king of the D.I.Y. boxed pizza kit, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee got into the frozen game. There was not a lot of cheese on these suckers, was there?
Image: saltycotton / Flickr
5. Red Owl Pizza
Here's another brand from the 1960s, the decade that saw frozen pizzas explode as a quick-dinner phenomenon.
Image: Jeff Lonto / Flickr
6. Pizza Hut Electronic Baking Oven Pizza
Pizza Hut got into the Easy-Bake Oven market in the 1970s with this plastic, plug-in cooker. The little things were more like tomato tarts. Of course, a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine could provide the perfect desert.
Image: History's Dumpster
7. CELENTANO FROZEN PIZZA
If you were a fan of food with corners, this rectangular pizza was for you. Even the sausage was shaped into little squares.
Image: YouTube
8. McPizza
After a brief run with pizza in the 1980s and 1990s, McDonalds abandoned the cheesy menu item because it took too long to make. However, a McDonald's in Pomeroy, West Virginia, is still serving it, if you are desperate.
Image: BBR
9. ShowBiz Pizza
The mechanical bears of ShowBiz once owned the whole animatronic party-pizza parlour scene — until Chuck E. Cheese came along and killed the competition. But we'll never forget Billy Bob the bear and that jingle, "Where a kid can be a kid!"
Image: dork-larue / Tumblr
10. Nabisco Poppins
Not to be confused with Mary Poppins, this Nabisco innovation took instant pizza to new levels of laziness. Good luck cleaning the cheese dripping off the heating coils!
Image: Mental Floss
11. Buitoni Instant Pizza
Buitoni had the sense to make their toaster pizza more of a Hot Pocket. The rounds developed quite a devoted following. There is even a Facebook page petitioning to bring these pizza pockets back to market.
12. Kellogg's Presto Pizza
Have you ever wondered, "Why don't they make pizza Pop Tarts?" Well, they did.
Image: Dan Goodsell / Flickr / Serious Eats
13. Pizza Spins
Pizza flavored pizza shapes. Of course, you could pretend they were steering wheels or wagon wheels. Odd that the pizza on the box didn't seem to be covered with any cheese. Here are 11 more 1970s snacks you will never eat again.
Image: Flickriver
14. Pizzarias
The Keebler elves are known for their cookies, but at one point in the early 1990s, they made some really tasty pizza-flavored chips. Who remembers these?
Image: Reddit
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6 Comments
They could always bring most of them back...they look pretty great...especially the Spins. :33
Does anyone remember either of those products?
The Pizzarias chips were actually pretty good. Totino's survives in more than just pizza roll form; they still make rectangular crisp crust Totino's Party Pizzas. Relatively cheap though a bit stingy on the cheese, just add a quick sprinkle of parmesan and a dollop of extra mozzarella, and they're good to go.
