Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which George Lucas tangles with Hector Boiardi in an interleaved portmanteau:
(1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Orthographically, we’ve got Chef Boyardee (a brand of canned ravioli) confronting R2-D2 (a film robot), which don’t join easily to get Chef BoyR2D2. But it’s all in the pronunciation. In transcription, marked off in syllables, with the shared parts underlined:
bòj.ár.tu.dí.tu = bòj.ar.dí + ár.tu.dí.tu
If the film robot had been named RD2 / ar.dí.tu / and the title of the cartoon had been (Chef) BoyRD2 / bòj.ar.dí.tu /, then it would have been a textbook portmanteau. But R2-D2 has a / tu / in between the / ar / and the / di / of Boyardee. So the shared syllables are interleaved — still a portmanteau, just a more complex type.
The contributing elements in #1.
(2) Chef Boyardee (Formerly Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and also Boyardee Foods) is a brand of canned pasta products sold internationally by ConAgra Foods. The company was founded by Italian immigrant Ettore “Hector” Boiardi to Cleveland Ohio U.S.A. in 1928. (link)
(3) R2-D2, the fictional robot character in the Star Wars franchise created by George Lucas.
Wayno’s title for #1: “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, an indirect allusion to:
Marvin the Paranoid Android … a fictional character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series [in which The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the second book] by Douglas Adams. Marvin is the ship’s robot aboard the starship Heart of Gold. (Wikipedia link)