Ellio’s Pizza – Hip to be Square (or Rectangle)
If you visited my house when I was growing up, to play a game and asked for a snack, I would offer you Ellio’s Pizza. Ellio’s Pizza was not the greatest pizza, it also wasn’t the cheapest.
It occupied that middle ground. It was moderately priced mediocre pizza and I loved it.
Now, I did not just eat the pizza out of the box. I developed an entire process around cooking my Ellio’s Pizza. It involved cooking the pizza in the oven or toaster oven until the bottom crust was just starting to get crisp. Then I would take it out, douse it with extra cheese and put if back in the oven on broil.
You are probably thinking I did that until the cheese was nice and melty. You are very wrong. No, I would cook that cheese to a dark brown crisp. It terrified all who beheld it and gave me a monopoly on whatever pizza I made.
My friends quickly learned my method and insisted on cooking their own. Which was just fine by me.
Over the years, I moved away from Ellio’s Pizza. Last time I visited my sister, she surprised me with a box and I attempted to recreate my childhood mouth treat.
Sadly, it just wasn’t the same. In the intervening years, I have become pizza-spoiled. No longer can I feel comfortable with that pizza middle-ground. Still, I have great memories of eating Ellio’s Pizza and whenever I see an ad or box of the stuff in the store, it takes me back to happy times.
I don’t recall a lot of commercials for Ellio’s Pizza from the eighties. But in the late Eighties and into the Nineties they started advertising heavily. These commercials had two things wrong with them.
One, they made Ellio’s look a lot cheesier than they actually were. Two, they played on this idea that the slices were square. They even used the saying, “Hip to be Square,” in their advertising. That just ain’t true, this is rectangular pizza!
I guess “Hip to be Rectangle” isn’t as catchy.
Oh well, the kid they have in this particular ad is pretty great.