Licorice Pizza was a record store chain around Southern California known for its wide selection, low prices and free licorice at the counter.
Licorice Pizza, you ask? That was a slang phrase for record albums, which are black and pizza-shaped. The silly name, and everything else, went away in 1987 after the chain was sold. Yet the store is experiencing a strange afterlife.
There was 2021’s “Licorice Pizza,” the Paul Thomas Anderson movie about growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s. The store was never seen in the movie. Apparently the title was enough to evoke the era.
Related: A San Fernando Valley icon (PT Anderson) taps another (Dennis McCarthy) for latest cinematic love letter to area
The same year, a Licorice Pizza store opened in Studio City on Ventura Boulevard. Owned by an admirer who bought the rights and uses the original logo, the store sells new and used LPs and merchandise with its logo.
And now, Licorice Pizza artifacts are on permanent display in, gasp, a museum.
Housed at Van Nuys Airport, the wryly named Valley Relics Museum is a collection of donated items reflecting the Valley’s past, by turns solemn or wacky. The showstopper is a vast room of neon signs from old businesses — Ben Frank’s, Pioneer Chicken, the Palomino Club — and two of western tailor Nudie Cohn’s custom automobiles.
TV tie-in lunch boxes, pinball machines, radio station bumper stickers, McDonald’s toys and memorabilia from second-banana actors Johnny Crawford and Jack Oakie all rest cheek-to-jowl in a kind of cultural cacophony.
“It’s a pop culture museum of Southern California,” docent Taylor Avarista told me. “Every gimmicky item works here. We’re not the Ronald Reagan Museum. We’re not the Getty.”
That’s true. Unlike at the Getty, I parked about 20 feet from the Valley Relics Museum’s entrance. No tram necessary.
Now, I have no experience with Licorice Pizza, having arrived in Southern California a few years after the…
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