Retro TV Ads: Avoid The Noid

Retro2

If you are a child of the eighties, you probably found it impossible to avoid the noid.  Some advertising characters catch on because they are cute and lovable.  Not the noid though.  The noid was a relatively annoying little guy with a single mission in life: to make your pizza cold.  In order to avoid the noid, you were supposed to order pizza from Domino’s.

This was the 80s though and somehow annoying things were widely embraced (see also Joe Piscopo, Jellies, and Aquanet).  In fact, the noid became a pop culture icon.  There were t-shirts, figurines, and video games.  The noid was a follow up to the most successful and disastrous promotions in pizza history.

Domino’s built their brand on a 30 minute delivery guarantee.  If you pizza did not arrive in 30 minutes, it was free.  In the mid-eighties, they reduced it to a three dollar discount.  While three dollars might not seem like much, it was enough for some drivers to sell their sanity apparently.  Domino’s started facing a rash of lawsuits from families of people who were killed as their delivery drivers carelessly tried to make their 30 minute guarantee.  Apparently, the noid was not really what you needed to avoid after someone called Domino’s.

That is not even the craziest part of the saga of the noid.  That was brought to us by Kenneth Lamar Noid.  On January 30th, 1989 Mr Noid went to a Domino’s and took hostages.  He was mentally ill and believed that the commercials were an attack on him.  After demanding pizzas be made for him, $100,000, and a copy of Catcher In The Rye (ok, it was The Widow’s Son, but that would have been way cooler) Mr. Noid was not able to avoid the police and went to jail.

I doubt the commercials were really about him, but maybe they should have been.

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