Fridge / Pizza Tower

Fridge Brilliance

• The rather slapstick transformations Peppino and the Noise undergoes throughout the tower, as well as more comedic level gimmicks like the gifts with extending boxing gloves or rockets with nerd glasses on them start to make a little more sense upon the reveal of Pizzahead being the mastermind behind the tower.
• Each of the Secret Treasures are thematically related to the level they appear in:
  • John Gutter: A stick of butter, like the similarly-shaped Pillar John.
  • Pizzascape: The names of the background music playing are "Hot Spaghetti" and "Cold Spaghetti", so it's a plate of spaghetti.
  • Ancient Cheese: Peanut Butter, a food with a long shelf life, complementing the level's Ancient Grome theme.
    • This makes sense from a meta perspective, too: The peanut butter was the first treasure designed for the game, so of course it'd be found in an ancient ruin.
  • Bloodsauce Dungeon: A (cooled down) bowl of tomato sauce found throughout the dungeon.
  • Oregano Desert: A can of beans, which cowboys stereotypically eat out of.
  • Wasteyard: Ice cream which resembles a ghost.
  • Fun Farm: An ear of corn grown on the farm.
  • Fastfood Saloon: A donut might seem like an odd choice, until you realize that it's a staple of breakfast on the go. It could also be interpreted as a food that's had a hole shot through it, since the level is an old western saloon.
  • Crust Cove: Orange juice resembling the umbrella drinks one might drink on the beach.
  • Gnome Forest: A pie, like the one the grandma gnomes gives out when her Gnome Pizza gets delivered to her.
  • Deep-Dish Nine: A sandwich with an olive on it, since the level is full of olive aliens.
  • GOLF: A burger, due to the Burger Golfers and Primo Burg's golf rank.
  • The Pig City: Reflecting the Chinatown area, an Onigiri with jelly coming out of it.
  • Oh Shit!: A nugget on a stick resembling the, er, substance featured throughout the level.
  • Peppibot Factory: Hot dogs are known for being ultra-processed icons of factory-made food.
  • Refrigerator-Refrigerador-Freezerator: An ice cream sandwich, like what you probably keep in your freezer.
  • Pizzascare: A wall chicken.
  • Don't Make a Sound: A slice of pizza. It might seem strange that it takes this long into the game for a pizza slice to appear as a treasure; however, it was saved for the level based on an abandoned pizzeria.
  • WAR: A box that says "food," which is implied to be a military ration.
• Peppino's double-thumbs up during the "You Suck!" ending could be seen as a sarcastic gesture, but considering that you have to try to earn the ending, it could also be seen as genuine.
• The Noise is based on The Noid, a Domino's mascot whose main motive was to ruin delivered pizzas. Not only does this explain why the Noise hates pizza, but also adds another layer to his rivalry with Peppino. The chef's business is shown to be doing poorly, and having some costumed lunatic ruin what pizzas Peppino manages to sell would definitely cause him to be annoyed with the Noise, at minimum.
• The truth about Pillar John may seem to be purely Word of God from the developer's Discord (John was actually a regular guy, but Pizzahead split up his consciousness among the Pillars to act as a dimensional doorstopper to all of the game's levels), but there's actually evidence of this in WAR if you look closely at the background when you break into the lab. Peppino isn't the only one being cloned...
  • On top of the above, the game sets this idea up from the very beginning: The very first level of the game, post-tutorial, is John Gutter, a bleak area full of oddly-shaped, dead, or otherwise defective versions of Pillar John, indicating that the cloning process doesn't always work perfectly and this level is the one where the rejects get thrown out. Makes for a nice bookend when the start of the final level has you knock out the decrepit original John.
• By the time of the final boss fight, Peppino has every right to go berserk and deliver a can of whoopass on all of the returning bosses as is, but also, consider how the last three boss fights turned out: the Noise almost turns him into Swiss cheese with a minigun before being dragged away by Noisette, Fake Peppino turns into a giant monster that he can only run away from, and now Pizzahead just No Sold all of his attacks and brought all the bosses up to the arena. Peppino isn't just mad, he's rushing them down in a desperate attempt to counter their trump cards before they can take him down.
• The use of "The Death I Deservioli" as a motif during the final stretch of Unexpectancy is one of the easiest to miss choices but one of the simplest. The Boss Rush is a Lap 2 run of each fight, but now Peppino isn't concerned with trying to fight them so much as he is getting them out of his way so he can finish the level.
• The pose Peppino makes during P-Ranks is hard to make out, as his back is turned to the camera. But a close examination of his arms reveals that he's performing what is known as an "Italian salute", a rather profane gesture. And note that the top of the Tower appears in the background, which means that Peppino is facing it. In essence, Peppino is telling the Tower to bite him, and with the performance required for a P-rank, he deserves to gloat.
• Peppino getting arrested by a cop who disguised his car as a taxi and put in a jail cell in "Pig City" may look like it comes out of nowhere at first, but if the player pays close enough attention to the loading screen for the stage, a "Wanted!" Poster for Peppino can be seen. Most likely, the cop saw said poster and inferred from it that Peppino is a wanted criminal, hence the arrest.
• Regardless of whether or not Peppino is an actual war veteran, there's still one other trauma of Peppino's that WAR can tap into — the Pizza Time timer. Whenever Pizza Time starts, hell tends to follow as any pace the player (and subsequently Peppino) has taken beforehand is forced to take a backseat just to ensure Peppino can make it out of the level before Pizzaface catches him. With up to 18 levels where the hellish timer rings its bell, Peppino's bound to develop some form of fight-or-flight response to it, and WAR has its timer going right from the moment Peppino grabs the shotgun and vehemently ticks down to his doom no matter what — not even stopping in the Secrets where Peppino could get a brief break from the hellish timer — painting the image of Pizzaface turning the timer into a beast all of its own when combined with the War Is Hell imagery of the level. One could also say that the War Is Hell imagery was deliberately invoked to make Peppino shit his pants as hard as he can to keep him from clearing the level, as being dropped into a warzone is likely to break any man's mind at first sight.
• Pizza Time being one of Peppino's Leitmotifs makes sense. It's a song that starts calm and simple, and even when the main melody first starts it's relatively subdued. However, the song keeps ramping up, like someone getting angrier and angrier, and it's clear that Peppino is quite the angry guy. However in the last minute it cuts out, and returns at an insane speed, which helps with the panic of trying to find the exit, and that's the other half of Peppino.
  • The Death That I Deservioli is far more confident than Pizza Time, since Peppino already proves he can make it to the end. Now he's showing off and making it to the end again, for no reason other than to increase his score and ranking.
  • The Noise’s escape theme, Distasteful Anchovi also befits his personality. The former starts off with the familiar "Hello there!" from Pizza Time heavily distorted and repeated before segueing into a confident yet openly chaotic remix of The Noise’s Leitmotif, accompanied instead by "Let’s Go” and "Aw Yeah" call outs, as The Noise claims Peppino’s spot as protagonist as his own, with the iconic "Y’all ready to get funky?" swapped with "Bring the Noise!". After all, you’ve already done this at least once before, now you’re in your element, just like the chaotic gremlin that is The Noise.
  • As for World Wide Noise, The Noise decides to go back for Lap 2, but unlike Peppino being determined to give the tower that tormented him so more trouble (and a higher score), The Noise’s reasons are purely for his own ego and the higher score, and the song is more outwardly chaotic with a repeated "Aw yeah" phase throughout. And yet, halfway through the song takes on a more serious tone before eventually collapsing at the end. This change lines up with Pizzaface spawning in to kick you out of the level, and it represents The Noise getting in over his head and being forced to run not only for his score, but his very life.
• Every time a boss fight enters the second phase, the background changes to match the boss' personality. The only exception is during the final battle, where the background changes twice: the first time is when Pizzahead gets out of the Pizzaface mech and fights you on foot... And the second time is when Peppino enters his "phase two".
  • The background of the arena changes back to normal once the boss is defeated. This doesn't happen with the Noise and Fake Peppino because technically you never knock them out: the Noise is dragged away by Noisette, and you have to run away from Fake Peppino. It does however happen for the Doise because they get killed off screen.
• The second part of the Final Boss theme, "Unexpectancy", contains samples from the song "After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It", a song about a selfish person who wants everything, only to quickly lose interest once they actually get it. Quite fitting for Pizzahead, who owns a giant tower with everything he could ever want in it, yet still tries to blow up Peppino's pizzeria out of petty spite from his own failed restaurant.
  • One of the song's lyrics is, "If I gave you the moon, you'd grow tired of it soon." And sure enough, the moon gains Pizzahead's face for the duration of this phase.
• Peppino's motivation to destroy the Pizza Tower may not just be due to the immediate threat of his pizzeria's destruction. The entire tower seems to be some sort of kitschy, pizza-themed tourist trap, complete with a vacation resort! Having such a massive place set in the same general area as Peppino Pizza (they're within eyesight of each other), it's pretty likely the Pizza Tower has been drawing attention away from it, steadily stealing Peppino's customers, which would explain why it's in the process of going bankrupt.
• The Pizza Tower collapsing after the final battle may seem like it's just for the sake of drama and a cool backdrop, but Peppino spends the whole game knocking out Pillar Johns in every stage; those are the metaphysical and physical supports keeping the whole Tower structurally sound-ish. Without them, the tower just becomes a hollow tube kept together by its bricks and walls. Piledriving Pizzahead into the roof from the clouds and knocking out the original Pillar John gives it a big enough jolt to fall to pieces.
• Why does Cold Spaghetti, the second song from Pizzascape of all things, show up in Unexpectancy Part III? Wait, what happens in that level again? Oh yeah, Peppino discovers the knight ability, which can make him... become uncontrollable and plow through his enemies like butter. Dun dun DUNDUN dun, dun dun, dun dun DUNDUN dun, dun, dun...
  • One of Pizzahead's attacks in the previous phase involves ripping off a chunk of a level...specifically, the part of the level containing the knife in the stone, which can only be found on Pizzascape.
  • don't preheat your oven's because of you do the song won't play's leitmotif, of all things, also plays in Unexpectancy during the final phase. Of note, it only plays when you're fighting Pizzahead the second time. Pizzahead is, while not sane, collected and keeping much cooler than Peppino, even to a fault. Plus, Refrigerator Refrigerator Freezerator features Pizzaface in its title card, which no other title card up to this point has done.
• Why can't Peppino use the doorways between hubs in the Crumbling Tower of Pizza?
  • You have to use stairs instead of elevators when evacuating a building!
  • Gerome also controls the elevators. In order for him to get the others down via elevator, he'd probably have to stay behind.
• Pizzaface/Pizzahead has 8 pieces of health. What's the most common number of pieces a pizza is cut into?
• Why doesn't the Vigilante hand the Noise a gun for a fair showdown? At first, you think it's because of his bombs...
  • But Noise already has his own gun, which he uses to preemptively defeat the Cheeseslime in the quick draw event.
  • Also, the Noise is a known cheat. The Vigilante probably knows it wouldn't be 'evening the odds' like with Peppino, or a complete lark since the Noise playthrough is an in-universe fiction, so of course the Noise would puff himself up by saying he didn't need a gun, only to then beat the Vigilante in a quickdraw with his own, naturally bigger, gun.
• The reveal at the end of The Noise's play through, where the whole campaign is a movie about the events of Pizza Tower with himself as the main character, explains quite a few oddities during it:
  • Him being able to wield the sword in Pizzascape, which appears to work under Only the Chosen May Wield rules? He just wrote in the script that it worked on him.
  • His counterpart of playable Gustavo and Brick being another one of him? Stunt doubles are used in movies for a reason!
  • Him yelling at Fake Peppino and scaring him off? Could just be The Noise yelling at Fake Peppino for going off-script and running too fast.
  • Him literally dying in Don't Make a Sound and then another of him jumping back down? The corpse is actually a prop, and you're still playing as the same Noise!
• Compared to Peppino, The Noise moves a lot faster in most transformations that usually slow you down in some way. Unlike Peppino, who goes through all of these transformations against his will, The Noise is entirely cheerful when he ends up stuffed in a barrel or covered entirely in cheese. He still has his wits about him to be able to control his movements compared to Peppino's helpless flailing.
• Compared to Peppino's "You are fast as hell!" ending for speedrunning the game but having a low percentage, the Noise's "Slow down, nerd!" ending has him look equal parts confused and furious. Compared to the impressed-yet-exhausted Peppino, Noise is actively trying to create a blockbuster, and just burning through the levels as fast as possible would make for a very short movie without as much excitement as high speed Lap 2s and full completion.
• Each campaign's signature character fights am equal rival to himself and an offshoot of himself. Peppino's is straightforward in hindsight, as he fights the Noise and Fake Peppino. But the Doise is the only offshoot of the Noise that appears in the latter's campaign, and the Noise's fourth boss is Fake Peppino casted as Peppino in the boss title screen.

Fridge Horror

• In "Don't Make a Sound", during the second section, a poster of the various characters inhabiting the pizzeria (sans the pineapple monster) can be seen, and one of them happens to be a human chef. But during the romp through this accursed place, the player never encounters a chef; the only thing that comes close is a butcher with a sausage for a head... a sausage that happens to be leaking a red substance not to dissimilar to blood... oh dear...
  • What's more is that we don't see that sausage-headed butcher in that same poster. Instead, the chef is holding...three sausages in his hand...
• Among the laboratory background in the final stretch of "WAR" is a monitor that reads "20071 COMBOX", with similar antennae to the HUD TV in the top right. While at first it might come off as some sort of training and conditioning for the Peppino clones, including the one in a vat in the same background, one might also consider that the combo meter typically goes up when an enemy is killed, and this level is a warzone, so maybe it's counting casualties, and there have been over 20,000 in whatever war is going on in this level.
  • Also note, the combo meter can reset if you spend too long without killing an enemy. Assuming there have been any periods of time in which nobody has died, and the average casualties per "combo" reach 20,000...
• After initiating Pizza Time in "The Pig City", the background of the city is shown to go up in flames. Whilst at first this may seem like a one-shot nightmare of an Easter Egg for those who do pay attention, given how it's the only level that does it, plans scrapped from the final game show that other levels would get a similar treatment during Pizza Time too, such as "Oregano Desert" and "Oh Shit!". And given how in "The Crumbling Tower of Pizza", knocking out the original Pillar John sets the collapse of the entire tower itself, this paints the horrifying possibility that wrecking each Pillar John in every level doesn't just set off a timer that'll draw Pizzaface's ire, but it actively causes every single one of those levels to collapse. Geez...
• We don't get to see what Pizzaface does to Peppino when the former catches the latter during Pizza Time.
• The very first level, John Gutter is literally made up of dead and decaying John blocks with a grey, lifeless city in the background. And background for world 5 is a giant John in a tower-themed suit of armor just sitting bound by cheese webs ready to die. It’s likely John and Gerome were not the only ones of their kind before Pizzaface got his greasy hands on them…
• McPig eventually retconned Peppino's military background by saying that he "probably imagined it." This actually implies that, rather than war-caused PTSD, Peppino suffers from a debilitating delusional disorder or paranoid schizophrenia so severe that he can convince himself that he's a Shell-Shocked Veteran, right down to having PTSD triggers even though he's never served in the military, putting his Mood-Swinger and Nervous Wreck tendencies in a new light. Even worse, his condition is similar to many real life cases, where patients can believe all sorts of nonsensical things: the basis for Ford v. Wainwright involved a death row inmate who'd grown to believe that he was Pope Jon Paul III, thwarted a Ku Klux Klan plot to bury dead inmates in the walls, and that he was free to go whenever he wanted because he theorized that anyone who executed him would, in turn, be executed.
• Wasteyard and Tricky Treat are littered with corpses that you can surf on. It makes sense with the former, as it's set in a graveyard. But Tricky Treat, an Eldritch Location populated only by pumpkins has them too, implying that more humans have entered it before Peppino, only to get killed by the Ghost Pumpkin there. Suddenly, a goofy non-scary halloween-themed bonus level becomes a lot more sinister.
• Judging by him cheating the quick-draw duel against the Vigilante without being given a gun for ranged attack, and holding the early taxi drivers at gunpoint in the Pig City, the Noise might be concealed-carrying a revolver throughout the game's canon, with nobody outside his circle knowing it.

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