Pizza is the Ninja Turtles’ favorite food. That makes Pizzaface, a grotesque pizza-making villain introduced in 1990, a particularly nasty joke at their expense. Sometimes dinner really does fight back.
Pizzaface did not originate in the classic cartoon. He was created for the action-figure line, with early concept art already showing the chef’s bulky, unsettling appearance.
His original backstory comes from the toy’s packaging, and it is wonderfully bizarre. Shredder’s deranged cook wants to become the ultimate pizza chef, so he climbs into a retromutagen oven to bake evil into himself. The Turtles interrupt the process and pull him out before he is finished.
The half-baked result blames them for spoiling his plan. Armed with flying pizzas and a pizza-box shield, this Foot Clan member wants revenge—and would happily turn the Turtles into toppings.
An early prototype takes the gross-out concept further: a tiny second head hides beneath the chef’s hat, emerging from the larger head. That feature did not make it into the standard retail figure. It is easy to see why the prototype remains such a memorable oddity.
The design exaggerates the familiar cartoon pizza chef, complete with a tall hat and pointed mustache. A meat cleaver, rock-hard pizzas, and a pizza-cutter leg make the kitchen tools part of the threat.
The character is also associated with the proposed name “Pizza the Hutt,” recalling the Jabba the Hutt parody in Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs. The familiar retail name, however, is Pizzaface.
A cartoon-style image showing Pizzaface feeding Leonardo a mutagen-laced pizza circulates online. It is fan art, rather than evidence of a lost appearance in the 1987 television series.
He does make a brief appearance in the TMNT newspaper comic strip, giving the original toy character a small life beyond the blister card.
The 2012 animated series introduces its own version in season two’s “Pizza Face.”
This incarnation begins as Antonio, a pizza chef who finds a canister of mutagen and tastes it to see whether it might work as an ingredient. It turns him into a giant mass of living pizza dough capable of creating smaller, animated pizzas.
A television commercial brings a wave of orders to Antonio’s shop. But the pizzas turn the people who eat them into obedient zombies under Pizzaface’s control.
Michelangelo is the first to discover the scheme. With April, Splinter, and his brothers affected, he has to face Pizzaface himself. His appetite becomes an unexpectedly useful weapon. The ending suggests that it may have been a dream, then brings Pizzaface back for one last moment of uncertainty. A later cameo in “Meet Mondo Gecko” keeps the character from being entirely confined to that adventure.
This is one of my favorite season-two episodes. Like so much of the 2012 series, it mixes TMNT references with recognizable horror and pop-culture jokes.
Its central idea recalls Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 film in which alien pods replace people with emotionless duplicates. Here, suspicious pizza becomes the delivery system for a similarly unsettling takeover.
Early in the episode, the movie theater visited by April and Irma displays fictional horror posters, including Zombies 4. They fit the episode’s affection for zombie-movie imagery and titles such as Dawn of the Dead.
Graffiti reading “Triceratons are here” adds a TMNT-specific warning, foreshadowing the aliens’ importance later in the series.
Michelangelo’s escape from inside the pizza monster belongs to the show’s long list of visual jokes about Alien and creatures bursting out of bodies.
Mikey also briefly sings “Ninja Rap,” Vanilla Ice’s song from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.
His interrogation of a talking pizza turns the familiar tough-guy questioning scene into a food joke, with increasingly unpleasant consequences for the uncooperative slice.
Another favorite is the pizza delivery through a sewer grate. It is a clear callback to the delivery scene in the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
For collectors, the original 1990 Playmates figure remains the central piece of Pizzaface history. The 2012 version also appears in miniature form with the Pizza Thrower, a modern take on the classic pizza-launching vehicle, rather than as the same kind of full-sized figure.
Custom figure maker Punker Mike created an especially impressive Pizzaface, with detailed paintwork and accessories worthy of a premium collector release. It is the sort of custom that makes you wish a toy company would give the character that much attention.
There is also a Pizzaface miniature for HeroClix, the collectible tactical game. On the video-game side, the 2012 incarnation is playable in the mobile title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Legends.