The Noid Is Back and Now He's a Marxist Hero!
In an incident absolutely begging to be turned into a true crime miniseries, documentary, Netflix mini-series or prestige drama, in 1989 a mentally ill man named Kenneth Lamar Noid became convinced that the name of the popular Domino’s mascot The Noid was a personal attack against him.
In a fit of delusion, Noid took a powerful handgun to a Domino’s in Chamblee, Georgia (where I live, weirdly enough) and took two employees hostage for five hours and demanded 100,000 dollars and a spotless white limousine as a getaway vehicle.
Noid was a tormented man plagued by powerful delusions rather than a criminal mastermind so he eventually got hungry and had his hostages make him a pizza. While Noid had the world’s saddest, most tragic one-man pizza party his hostages escaped.
Noid’s bleak, bizarre story had an appropriately brutal conclusion. Following the unfortunate incident at Domino’s, Noid spent time in a mental hospital before committing suicide in 1995.
Not long after the real Noid got paranoid about his fictional namesake Domino’s retired The Noid. They claimed that the decision was not related to the hostage situation involving Noid and that the 1980s advertising icon had simply run its course.
That may have been true, but it’s impossible to deny the bad vibes and weird juju Noid’s delusion brought to Domino’s as a brand and The Noid as a character.
The Noid was unusually popular for an advertising character but his popularity transcended advertising. He broke out of the commercial ghetto to inspire his own video game in 1990’s Yo! Noid. There were plans for a Saturday morning animated vehicle entitled The Noids until someone suggested that maybe giving a character created to sell sub-par pizzas his own television program didn’t blur the line separating entertainment from advertising so much as it erased it entirely.
That did not, however, keep The Noid from making an appearance in Michael Jackson’s vanity project Moonwalker in a sequence animated by Oscar and Emmy winner Will Vinton, the claymation pioneer who gave the world another enduring advertising icon that transcended the world of commercials in the California Raisins.
Domino’s might have quietly retired The Noid but he continued to live on as a popular pop culture references in shows like The Simpsons, 30 Rock and Family Guy. It will not surprise y’all to learn that I have a long, intense history with the Noid as well.
How could I not be? I was a child of the 1980s who was obsessed with advertising and kitsch. Who doesn’t love Claymation? It’s pure artisanship, pretty much the most time and labor-intensive way of doing anything. 95 percent of The Noid’s appeal was rooted in the magic of Claymation as an art form.
I’m so obsessed with The Noid that I wrote a gleefully profane, intensely sexual origin story for him and his dark life for this website that was later included in Tales From the Crust, a collection of pizza-themed horror stories.
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So when I discovered that Domino’s was bringing The Noid back to promote their new driverless cars, I felt more than a little like Kenneth Lamar Noid. Was Domino’s bringing back The Noid solely for me? I appear to be more invested in him than anyone else.
In his original incarnation, The Noid was a villain, a lunatic obsessed with destroying pizzas for no discernible reason who succeeded about as often as Charlie Brown successfully kicked the football Lucy was holding for him.
The Noid is ostensibly still a villain intent on sabotaging Domino’s flawless delivery system but the context now is radically different. The Noid is now a sworn enemy of driverless cars designed to rob flesh and blood human beings of jobs.
So in a very real way he’s no longer a bad guy but rather a Marxist hero out to strike a blow against corporate America and its obsession with saving money by removing humans and their need for “money” and “benefits” and “consideration.”
The Noid’s costume isn’t the only thing that’s red about him now: his politics are pretty damn Socialist and righteous as well.
I now WANT The Noid to fuck up Domino’s and its evil scheme to fuck over workers. He’s no longer a weird, nihilistic figure but rather a class warrior sticking it to the man one fucked-up pizza at a time.
Considering how essential claymation was to The Noid’s success initially it seems perverse to bring him back in a charmless CGI iteration. But The Noid’s re-emergence is destined to appeal to both contemporary kids and Gen-Xers like myself with a massive burst of nostalgia.
Welcome to the Struggle, The Noid. Let’s burn down the haunted house that is late-stage capitalism and dance merrily in its righteous flames! After the Revolution, you can destroy as many pizzas as you’d like as well as the dying embers of the rotting corpse of the free market.
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