Hell, if you were a carpenter, making bespoke wooden chairs, and you accidentally got a bit of oregano from the sandwich you were eating on your lunch break onto one of said chairs, the next day your place would be called "Big Tony's Original Meatball Chair." There would be a cartoon Italian man in an apron taking a huge bite out of a wooden chair on the sign, even though your family is from Denmark and your name is Rick. You're Big Tony now. You do Italian carpentry.Â
So, with that logic embedded in American culture, it was only natural that Pizza Hut went down that road when creating their very first mascot, Pizza Hut Pete.
Pizza Hut
As you can see, Pizza Hut Pete is pretty damn unremarkable. He's what happens when you drop bricks on the fingers of an amusement park caricature artist who's never traveled outside of Ohio and ask him to draw an Italian man. Pizza Hut Pete is pure, unabashed laziness. So much so that you have to respect it. He's an afterthought. He's an "Oh, shit!" moment for the Pizza Hut team, realizing they're about to launch their big national pizza chain without a mascot. He's some illustrator's Friday at 4:30, about to sneak out the door, when the boss catches him with one last assignment.
Even Pete himself looks like he knows he's not supposed to be there. Like he won't be around for too long. He's got the energy of a disinterested dad at his kid's elementary school play; just getting him to show up was a damn miracle, and he's not really sure what the hell to do from there. It does go to show that Pizza Hut probably could have used a mascot that stuck on. Because what the hell is Pizza Hut even these days? It feels like one of those things that exist, quite ubiquitously even, but you have absolutely no proof of it. You haven't been in or seen one since the early 90s, but you see commercials and have heard rumblings about one a few towns over. Maybe if they had gone with Pizza Hut Pat, a perverted, pizza-gobbling Aardvark in a denim jacket who can only get hard from pizza, they would have actually been on to something.