Le Franco Phoney

Check out these two photos of pizza boxes. The one with the beach scene in the background was handed over to me with a pizza almost a year ago. I posted the picture on my blog because I thought it was all a bit phallic. Click here to see the original post. I don’t think that my objection to the pizza box brought about the change, so I guess the artist, who probably gets paid to produce a ‘new’ pizza box illustration annually, decided to be a bit lazy and update the background only.

As much as the beach scene was all wrong, I’m not sure that grapevines are much better. It looks like they’re waiting for their pizzas, or that they’re ready to attack, and now I have this image in my head as if from some C-grade movie from the fifties, when things always seemed to attack humans. Is the grinning pizza man about to die? And is the wood-fired oven in the background teaming up with the grapevines? Are they both being controlled by the villa on the hill in the distance? I’m now really looking forward to next year’s illustration. Will it be a Venetian gondola? The pope? Or a trulli hut? I’m hoping for an Italian ski resort.

After some rather dodgy pizza boxes, including this one from Geoff, and this one from me, I bring you the perfect pizza box.

It has everything you want in a pizza box: the idea that your pizza has been made in a wood-fired oven; an aroma that the pizza maker himself is loving; written confirmation, if there was any doubt, that you have a pizza inside this box; and a tasty-looking pizza to get you in the pizza mood while you’re driving back from the pizza shop or paying the deliverer. There are no toothless urchins and no young girls with cleavage in bikinis. This picture has a cartoon feel about it, so if you’re imagining the cartoon man salivating over your pizza, that’s okay too: cartoon saliva isn’t real.

Even better, the size of this pizza box was almost double the size of the last few pizza boxes I’ve had. Its size dictates that the pizza inside is a serious pizza, and not some poor attempt and covering some dough in some canned tomato sauce and hoping it won’t taste too bad.

My rating of this pizza box is a ten out of ten! Have you had a better or worse pizza box experience? Feel free to send me a photo of your loved or hated pizza box and I’ll post it up.

Following on from my remarks on my local pizza box, I received this photo of a Swiss pizza box by Geoff in Switzerland. He wrote:

This is the box they use for pizza round our way. Not as bad as the man with the stick and the young girl, but do I really want to take a pizza from a toothless, homeless urchin? Still, I guess it is Naples, which probably means my wallet is being nicked as I take delivery of the pizza…

So, it looks like France is not solely responsible for weird pizza boxes. I particularly like the guys sitting down behind the urchin’s pizza, almost as if they’re holding it up in a two-dimensional world. And is that a seal that the men on the right are pulling from the water? Or a dead body? At least the pizza is the classic Margherita. They got something right.

Goeff actually found the photo of his local pizza box elsewhere on the web. It turns out that Mike from Zurich put it in a photo album and wrote:

I bought a pizza at my local döner joint because their pizzas come in boxes that have this lovely picture on them. It’s lovely kitsch art.

The ‘artwork’ has also made it onto Photo of the Day on a pizza blog, where it’s described as ’slightly creepy’. My interest in pizza boxes is now starting to match French roundabouts and I’m worrying that perhaps I need to get out more. Speaking of which, lots of photos and information about road tripping through central France will be available just as soon as I can get my hands on the photos.

I bought a pizza the other night and the box looked like this:

So, what’s wrong with this picture? Actually, what’s right about it!

1. I’m in a ski resort: where is the seaside and the boat?
2. The girl in the background, still young enough to need a floaty, seems to have cleavage.
3. The girl is also looking a bit ‘up for it’ despite her interest in sand castle building (bucket in hand) and floaty dependency.
4. The pizza man is grinning just a little too happily: I’m guessing he’s just seen the ‘up for it’ girl.
5. Is his pizza stick not just a bit phallic? Especially the way it’s pointing through a gaping hole and towards the girl?

Maybe it is actually a wholesome illustration that some Italian created to truly reflect the happiness of the pizza-maker charged with making my pizza, or to reflect how imaginative a pizza can be or something. Actually, it probably is: a friend showed me a drawing that a little boy did at her work. It had KKK written on it, a man in a white pointy hat, and a green man with wings who was crying. It turns out that the five year-old is not actually up on the Klu Klux Klan: his name is Karl but he can only write the K so far, and my friend had painted his friend’s face green.