The Old-School Pizza Hut Menu Item That Was Too Big To Handle

Pizza Hut is an iconic restaurant that doesn't shy away from innovation. From debuting crusts stuffed with hot dogs and cheeseburgers to meat pies and hash browns, the global brand has created a slew of unusual pizzas. While some of these creative ideas have stood the test of time (the stuffed crust, anyone?), others were a one-hit wonder that bloomed for a single season. Enter the Bigfoot pizza, a whopping two-foot-long pie that was delivered in a paper bag.

The Bigfoot might be one Pizza Hut menu item from the 1990s you probably forgot about. Launched over 30 years ago, this super-sized rectangular pie was described as "two square feet of pizza, 21 slices on a tasty new crust, $10.99 for up to three toppings," in a 1993 TV advert promoting the colossal menu item. In the clip, the pizza was placed beside two medium Little Caesars pizzas to display its size and "legendary value" versus competitor pizza chains, which had launched similar mega pies.

Cut twice lengthwise and six times widthwise, the pizza was simply too big to fit inside a regular cardboard pizza box, so it was slid snugly inside a paper bag featuring a hairy green mascot in a green tank top. The huge size of the Bigfoot pizza made it perfect for serving a crowd, and its gimmicky name made it a popular choice among customers who wanted to make the most of the high-value deal.

Pizza Hut heavily invested in promoting the Bigfoot pizza in order to compete with Little Caesars' Big! Big! Cheese (2 pizzas sliced into 24 pieces) and Domino's Dominator (a rectangular pie cut into 30 squares). It even forked out for a giant blimp to sail across New York City advertising the Bigfoot Pizza, which unfortunately ended up crashing on the roof of a Manhattan building. However, pizza fans seem to have remembered only the good parts of this pie's limited life. For instance, on a Reddit thread discussing people's memories of the item, one commenter wrote, "Oh man... so many memories of getting these, and watching Saturday Night TV. Probably something on Nickelodeon, or maybe the X-Files, etc. I'll never know if it really tastes as good as I remember, and maybe I don't want to know." Another said, "I remember the Bigfoot. We would get one at our birthday parties. Either that, or Little Caesars Pizza when they used to give you two pizzas for the price of one. Good times!"

A poster on a different Reddit thread claimed that while the pizza was popular, it was discontinued because it had to be made in large pans and used up a lot of pizza dough, which made it unprofitable. Having said that, Pizza Hut boosted $5.7 billion in annual sales that same year, suggesting the brand had made an impact with its super-sized promotional idea.