Ideally, it goes something like this: it’s dinner time and you decide to skip the bla-ness of cooking your own food and eat out. You remember there’s a brick oven pizzeria just minutes from home. You choose something classic and classy – a Margherita or a white pie with garlic. You pop open a bottle of cheap wine and, voila, inexpensive perfection.

But then there are those times when you’re trying to leave the house for a long weekend. You’ve overslept and haven’t even begun to pack. You’re throwing a bunch of stuff into your toiletry bag and hollering at the cats to stop chewing on the suitcases and thinking,  “We cannot be any more late than we are right now…”

…until Mr. Max tells you that a wild animal has somehow gotten into the attic and died, and you’re looking at three hours of unplanned DIY decontamination before you can even think about leaving.

For times like these, there’s Original Pizza of Boston.

Why? 1) It is food and 2) It’s right on the highway.

Mr. Max thought it tasted like the pizza you get at Chuck E. Cheese. I’ve never been to Chuck E. Cheese, but it did remind me of pizza I had once at a roller rink. Because it was late afternoon and we hadn’t eaten anything all day, it was automatically delicious…in a gross, rubbery sort of way.

The box is what you would expect from highway fast food: thin, disposable, and single use.

Visual Assessment: Red and white = classic pizza. Red, blue, and white = Dominos. Red, green, and white = Sbarro. This pizza was basically a Sbarro knockoff, so the packaging was accurate, if a little derivative.

Italian Stereotype: There’s no generic product claim (Hot, Fresh!), but the Italian stereotype’s got enough character to make up for it. He’s fat, he’s got a chef’s hat, and he’s throwing a pizza pie (with sauce, no less) into the air.

Wait, what’s that?

Is that a little…QUESTION MARK hidden in the sauce pattern?

Wherever you are, subversive graphic designer,,,you rock.