Thirty Minutes or It's Free: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* A pizza place commercial, aired on a Toronto radio station in the 1980s, satirized this with a reporter giving a play-by-play of a fictitious restaurant's thirty-second delivery, with predictably disastrous results. ("Oh no, there's tomato sauce all over the road! Someone get a serviette!") The commercial's concluding slogan: "No gimmicks. Just great pizza."

* An ad for Western Union shown in Australia had a student order a pizza and then realize he didn't have the cash to pay for it. He phones his father overseas for his allowance, who wires it to him. A split screen shows the pizza being prepared and delivered while the student goes to collect his cash. He gets back to his apartment just before the pizza delivery guy gets there, just before the thirty-minute deadline. After the original version became well-known, it was changed so that at the end the pizza is ruined in the box because of all the weaving through traffic the delivery guy did. The student was not happy with his pizza.

 

* The second segment of the [[Ecchi]] anime ''Tales of Titillation'' by U-Jin makes use of this trope for outright parody. A trio of sisters persecute the deliverymen of "Pizza Tokyo" with acts of ''blatant exhibitionism'' to delay them past the thirty minutes mark. The funniest part is when the clueless (and virgin) rookie is sent to do the delivery, and all his co-workers act as if they were in a war movie and watching him go into a suicide mission, with "Taps" playing in the background as he drives off.

 

* ''[[Archie Comics]]'':

** Jughead encounters this problem when he has to deliver a pizza to a house atop a rocky cliff on an island.

* In a ''[[Ren and Stimpy]]'' comic, the two have only thirty ''seconds'' to deliver a pizza with absurdly many toppings.

 

* ''[[Spider-Man (film)|Spider-Man]] 2'': Peter Parker lost a job as a delivery boy due to arriving late having to give the food to the customer for free. His responsibilities as Spider-Man kept getting in the way. Though watching Spider-Man swinging through the skyscrapers of New York with pizza boxes was pretty badass.

{{quote|"Hey! He just stole that guy's pizzas!"}}

* ''Dirty Work'': In the beginning, [[Norm MacDonald|Norm MacDonald's]] character was fired from pizza delivery after failing to deliver a pizza within thirty minutes because a car accident blocked his route. The [[Jerkass]] customer informed him for being two minutes late. This makes it the fourteenth time the character was fired in the past three months.

 

* At one point in [[The Eighties]], when mobile telephones were available but still a relative novelty, the joke was that they were mostly useful for "ordering food, then outrunning it until it's free."

 

* ''[[Far Fetched Fiction]]''

** In the novel ''Waiting for Godalming'' by Robert Rankin, Lazlo points out that if they make this offer they are going to find you rather than give you a free pizza. He experimented with this fact by hiding in his house, leading the pizza deliverers to abseil down to his window.

* ''[[Snow Crash]]'' begins with a [[Mundane Made Awesome|suspenseful, high-speed version from the pizza guy's point of view]]. The pizza company is run by [[The Mafia]], and their guarantee is that if the pizza is late, the customer (who is in a different country due to the way the US developed in the wake of the federal governments' collapse) will get it for free, ''and'' Uncle Enzo himself will drop whatever he's doing to come and apologize immediately, in person. The book never says what, exactly, would happen to the delivery boy, but given that Uncle Enzo is the head of the east coast Mafia and that he would have had to interrupt whatever he was doing to apologize to some schlub in the middle of nowhere, no-one really wants to find out. The Uncle Enzo guarantee only covers the time the pizza arrives in. Not the shape. Since part of the "apology" includes, among other things, a vacation in Italy it's implied that a lot of people just order pizzas as a form of gambling.

 

* In an episode of ''[[Better with You]]'', Debra Jo Rupp and Kurt Fuller's characters [[Kick the Dog|deliberately make the delivery]] [[Jerkass|guy wait outside their door]] for 12 minutes, just so they don't have to pay.

* An episode of ''[[Due South]]'' utilized this, when Ray called a place far away on purpose in the hopes that the delivery boy would be late and the pizza would be free.

* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' season 8 episode "Gemini", General O'Neill mentions that Thor will deliver in thirty minutes or it's free—except it's not a pizza here, but an Asgard satellite of Replicator disruption.

 

* One stand-up comic had a routine about a city he visited which straddled a time zone. Right across the street was a pizza joint.

{{quote|"The second you order it, it's already late!"}}

{{quote|Domino's Pizza trucks passing each other on the highway. Let ''them'' get stuck in traffic - ''all'' our pizza will be free!}}

 

* In ''[[Ninja Burger]]'', the rule is "Delivery in thirty minutes or we commit [[Seppuku]]." Based on Greenwich Mean Time for locations in geosynchronous orbit. And there's one city they don't deliver to ({{spoiler|Detroit. Anything but Detroit.}}). Aside from that—yes, the extreme case. Lost hikers, hostages, recluses or dictators who don't want to have to turn off their security, submarine crews... thirty minutes, pretty much guaranteed.

** They even mention that [[Stock Unsolved Mysteries|Jimmy Hoffa]] is one of their best customers. And yes, they do deliver to the Bermuda Triangle.

 

* Ordering a mid-battle delivery in ''[[Disgaea]] 2'' warrants the response, "If it's not there in thirty minutes or less, just wait longer!"

* One of the [[Easter Egg|fake hint messages]] in ''[[Nethack]]'' is a plug for a nonexistent pizza delivery shop, promising it "in thirty turns, or it's free!"

* The video game of ''Spider-Man 2'' uses Peter's pizza-delivery job, as seen in the film, above, as a [[Timed Mission]].

 

* In ''Absurd Notions'', the characters call out for pizza when there's 5 feet of snow on the ground. The result:

{{quote|'''Warren:''' But you do have some kind of delivery guarantee, don't you?

** In a later strip, he's revealed to have a "dead in thirty minutes or you go free" guarantee.

 

* ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'':

** An episode has Garfield at war with a pizza delivery service which kept ''almost'' arriving on time, but each delivery-person fell prey to elaborate traps Garfield had set to weasel his way out of paying.

* [[Teen Titans Go! (animation)|''Teen Titans Go!'']] episode "Hey Pizza!" has Cyborg and Beast Boy trying desperately to nab a free pizza this way, only for the delivery guy to frustrate their efforts in increasingly inexplicable ways.

 

* The [[Trope Namer]] is a Domino's Pizza ad campaign wherein if customers didn't get their pizza at their door in thirty minutes, the pizza was free. Unfortunately, it [[Gone Horribly Wrong|went horribly wrong]], with Domino's drivers running red lights, exceeding speed limits and causing car crashes in an attempt to beat the [[Exact Time to Failure|thirty minute time limit]]. Domino's was eventually sued and forced to stop using the promotion.

** Domino's brought it back in the late-00's with an ad campaign stressing realistic and silly things one can do in the thirty minutes while waiting for pizza. Of course, the small print indicates that the thirty minutes is not a guarantee due to the inherent danger.