A brief history of Pizza Hut's revolutionary 90s X-Men promo

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Originally published at: A brief history of Pizza Hut's revolutionary 90s X-Men promo | Boing Boing

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Pepe’s.

Just sayin.

I never went to pizza hut ever but was a serious x-men fan. Maybe that would have drawn me in…

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I don’t think I had that kit, but I do have a couple of the VHS’s of the cartoon they gave away!

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It was discovering that there were more Transformers stories in Marvel’s comics that dragged me in. It took a cartoon/toy empire crossing over to inspire me to first dabble in the medium. But again, that was rare at the time.

Marvel had published comics to sell toys multiple times before Transformers. U.S. 1, ROM Spaceknight, and Team America all started before that. None of those were as successful as the Star Wars comics were, but they did happen. Also, they got to keep the rights to the things they came up with. My favorite consequence of this was when Flash Thompson became a space knight despite having no idea what that even meant. He got to have rad space adventures and learn about his klyntar buddy.

It wasn’t just me, either. Every time this promotion comes up on my podcast, a different comic creator will reach out about their fond memories of this campaign.

About 24 minutes into this interview with the writers of X-Men '92, Chris Sims brought up the Pizza Hut comics and the influence they had on him. They also talk about the fun they had working with Scott Koblish on that series.

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ROM the Spaceknight is such a fascinating case because of how they tried to integrate him into the Marvel Universe…without owning the rights. Like, Rogue’s entire hero turn in X-Men is basically relegated to ROM tie-in issues that no one can legally read!

Meanwhile, Marvel does still own the rights to the Direwraiths (who now have no back story when they first show up in X-Men), and the Spaceknights in general (who they keep trying to make happen).

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And here’s an X-Plain the X-Men episode covering when the X-Men showed up in ROM. The guest host also gave a description of something from one of Marvel’s Godzilla comics, when he was on the run from S.H.I.E.L.D.

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