Pizza Delivery - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Pizza delivery has been featured as a major element in several media in popular culture. There are several works of fiction where the main character delivers pizzas, including Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), and Neal Stephenson's postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992), which posits a future in which pizza delivery is organised by the Mafia as one of the US's two major industries. Several feature films also use pizza delivery prominently, including the 1984 comedy Delivery Boys and the Spike Lee 1989 film Do the Right Thing. In the 2000 comedy film Dude, Where's My Car?, the marijuana-smoking protagonists are pizza deliverymen. In the case of other films, use of pizza delivery has been regarded by critics as "overly integrated product placement".

Since the 1970s, pizza delivery has been a recurring plot vehicle in pornographic films, where it is used to introduce men (or women) for random sexual encounters. Titles in this genre include Pizza Girls, We Deliver (1978); The Pizza Boy: He Delivers (1986); California Pizza Girls (1992); Hawaiian Pizza Punani (1993), Pizza Sluts (1995); Big Sausage Pizza (2003); Big Sausage Pizza 2 (2004); Fresh Hot Pizza Boy (2004); DD Pizza Girls (2004), and Pepperoni Tits (2006). In an episode of American Dad!, Roger tries to write porn, but all involve pizza delivery boys (which the producer proclaims is dated).

Pizza delivery has also been the subject of non-pornographic films, even to the point of being the subject of such feature length films as Drivers Wanted and Fat Pizza: The Movie, as well as Pizza: The Movie. Pizza delivery has served as major plot element of such films as Loverboy. The 2011 American comedy film 30 Minutes or Less is concerned about the kidnapping of a pizza-delivery driver and his subsequent coercive involvement in a bank robbery. The title is derived from a once-popular pizza delivery slogan.

In television, the Australian comedy series Pizza centres on Pauly and his co-workers who deliver pizzas for a Sydney-based pizzeria called Fat Pizza. On the show Futurama, the character Philip J. Fry was a pizza delivery boy in the 20th century before he was cryogenically frozen and woke up in the 30th century.

At Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota, the entrance to the underground missile launch control center is sealed by a blast-proof door emblazoned with a painted spoof of Domino's Pizza's red, white, and blue pizza delivery box. The box is labeled "Minuteman II", and hand-lettered text on the door reads "World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less, or your next one is free", spoofing a former Domino's Pizza slogan.

In the United Kingdom, pizza delivery was very uncommon until the early 1990s. This led Douglas Adams, who had spent considerable time in the USA, to include a section in the novel The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul where the American character Kate Schecter bemoans "Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple principle?"