Can You Guess Which 2 Presidential Candidates Inspired Pizza Hut Commercials in the '90s? The 2016 election is shaping up to be pretty cheesy.
By Kate Taylor
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have something in common other than the desire to be the president of the United States: a shared past as Pizza Hut's inspiration.
In the 1990s, Pizza Hut poked fun at both candidates long before they ran for president, with one commercial featuring a character inspired by Clinton and another starring Trump and his ex-wife Ivana.
The 1995 Pizza Hut commercial opens with Trump and Ivana, who divorced three years earlier, debating what they are about to do in innuendo-filled dialogue. Ultimately, they decide, "it feels so right" – to eat pizza crust first. That's right, it's an ad is for Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza.
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Four years later, Hillary Clinton inspired another Pizza Hut ad that she certainly did not agree to star in. In 1999, Pizza Hut ran a commercial starring a Clinton look-alike lecturing the camera on the chain's Big New Yorker, the "quintessential New York Pizza." At the end of the ad, the doppelganger declares she wants to be New York's next senator – a move that the then First Lady was widely rumored to be considering.
The joke in the commercial is on Clinton, who was trying to up her New Yorker credibility while planning to run for senator despite never living or working in the state. However, the Clinton campaign wasn't laughing, noting that Clinton's Republican opponent, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was on the board of Pizza Hut's parent company. Earlier in the year, Giuliani helped unveil the New York pizza campaign, leading to critics calling the commercial an illegal campaign contribution.
In 2015, neither Trump nor Clinton is bringing up their Pizza Hut roots. However, one candidate is. Earlier this week, Rand Paul responded a Trump's tweet calling him a "spoiled brat," saying, "If we're talking about who's a spoiled brat or not, my two kids all work minimum-wage jobs. Do you think the Trump kids have been working at the local Pizza Hut?"
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