As soon as websites started competing for EXCLUSIVES to determine how much pizza Pizza Rat actually ate and publications wrote highbrow thinkpieces about it and people hauled out cheap imitations like Milkshake Squirrel, you knew that Pizza Rat was an Official Thing of 2015. All Official Things of a given year wind up with Halloween costumes, and we don’t begrudge America’s cash-in costuming industry for grabbing at dollars. Still, a line has to be drawn somewhere, and we’re drawing it here, today. This Sexy Pizza Rat costume is all sorts of wrong, and it just needs to go.
The issue isn’t, as you might think, the lazy sexualization of an otherwise sexless phenomenon. For all we know, people want to fuck the rat, and that’s fine, provided Pizza Rat consented of course. The issue here is that aesthetically, the costume gets everything about what made Pizza Rat great all wrong — and it still costs $90.
What made Pizza Rat sexy wasn’t giant honking boobs or a miniskirt. It was a willingness to struggle against the odds, to try the impossible even in the face of certain failure, and accepting that ultimate failure with grace. |
For starters, it was VERY CLEARLY a regular slice that Pizza Rat was carrying down the stairs of the L train. We can’t let the historical record be confused and distorted literally two weeks after this happened. Accuracy counts, and just like there’s a difference between a hamburger and a cheeseburger, there’s a difference in taste, grease production and price between a slice and a pepperoni slice.
Of course, to the cynical manufacturers of this costume, it seems the pizza doesn’t even matter. Instead of coming with a comically oversized slice of pizza for the costumed woman to carry around and struggle with all night, two small slices of pizza are sewn onto her hips, as if it was easy for Pizza Rat to get his slice down the stairs. Pizza Rat appealed to us for two reasons: Because we all love pizza, and because we could project our struggle to survive this stupid crazy city onto the disease-ridden rodent struggling to bring a pizza back to its rat home. To just slap a couple pieces of pizza onto the costume negates the very essence of what made Pizza Rat such an enthralling figure. What made Pizza Rat sexy wasn’t giant honking boobs or a miniskirt. It was a willingness to struggle against the odds, to try the impossible even in the face of certain failure, and accepting that failure, which was the ultimate result, with grace.
We’ll give credit to the people at Yandy for making the costume in America as opposed to a place where manufacturing comes fast and cheap, but beyond that, we can’t support this costume at all. Make the costume a look a little dirtier, quit describing a “mouse tail” and “mouse ears” in the copy (it’s a damn rat) and at the very least change the costume so that the pizza isn’t sewn into it.