Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Crashed Out Over This Cartoon // The Kenneth Noid Story

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

The Kenneth Noid story is a bizarre and tragic piece of fast-food history involving a 1989 hostage situation fueled by extreme paranoia. Domino's Pizza was running a highly successful advertising campaign featuring "The Noid," a claymation character who tried to ruin pizzas, alongside the slogan "Avoid the Noid." Kenneth Lamar Noid, a 22-year-old man from Georgia who suffered from severe mental illness, became convinced that the commercial campaign was a personal attack directly mocking him. Believing the company was out to get him, he entered a local Domino's restaurant, held two employees hostage for over five hours, and demanded $100,000 and a getaway car.

You're no longer young people. You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No. It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to before my beta block works off. My co-workers don't take me seriously. It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney.

So this man's obsession with a Domino's Pizza mascot is about to go. go very wrong. Now the guy's name is Kenneth and Kenneth is 22 when the story starts and he's living in Atlanta, Georgia, and Kenneth has a big problem. Domino's Pizza is trying to destroy his life. Yes, that Domino's Pizza. Why? Well, one day, around 1986, Kenneth is watching TV and a commercial comes on for Domino's Pizza. And that is when he sees it for the first time. The Noid. Now, the Noid is a mascot for Domino's during this time. It's claymation. It's kind of creepy. The whole goal of the noid is to sabotage your pizza getting delivered on time. So Domino's comes up with the slogan, Avoid the Noid. So Kenneth sees this character and he starts thinking, oh shit, they must be

talking about me. Because Kenneth's full name is Kenneth Noid. Now Domino's isn't talking about Kenneth in their commercials. That's ridiculous. The name is just a coincidence. But he thinks that because he has severe mental issues. Regardless, this bothers him. But there's not much he can do about it, so he moves on. Some time later, he's watching TV again, and another Domino's commercial comes on featuring the Noid, and it continues to bother him. Then he sees it again, and again, and again. These commercials, they're on all the time, all featuring that stupid, annoying, Claymation mascot. And to make it worse, Kenneth feels like it's mocking him, laughing at him. Even the slogan, Avoid the Noid, seems to be telling the public to avoid him and reject him,

and he doesn't want to be rejected. He already doesn't have a lot of friends. And unfortunately for him, as time goes on, the Noid character continues to get even more popular with the general public. So Domino's uses it in more and more ads. And suddenly, this thing is everywhere. There are noid toys, noid clothing, noid candy. I found a noid wristwatch and a noid flashlight. Here's a noid plushy. An annoyed jigsaw puzzle.

There's an official noid comic book. There's a whole ass noid video game for the original Nintendo and a completely different noid video game for the PC. And if that isn't weird enough, it even makes an appearance in Michael Jackson's Moonwalker movie. All right, you get the point. This thing is popular in the 80s. and poor Kenneth can't escape it.

Everywhere he looks, all he sees is the noid mocking him. And over time, he begins to legitimately believe that the literal owner and founder of the Domino's Corporation, Tom Moynihan, has created this character specifically to ruin his life. Then he starts getting paranoid and he thinks maybe Tom is spying on him, breaking into his house and whatnot. And Kenneth, he can't take it anymore. And he decides he has to do something.

about it. And here's where things get really out of control. So one day in 1989, he loads up a gun he has, and then he walks over to a nearby Domino's store, and there are two employees working that day. And Kenneth walks right up to them, and boom, he pulls out his gun. And he demands that they get the Domino's founder, Tom Moynihan, on the phone, because he believes Domino's owes him money for using his name in their ads. Now, these employees, they just slang pizzas all day. They don't know how to get in touch with the founder of the whole corporation. So one of them, thinking on his feet, he picks up the phone and he calls the only number where he knows someone will pick up, the Domino's Safety Hotline, which is the company hotline used to handle any problems that might come up at work,

and this happens to be a big problem. So this employee calls the hotline and a woman picks up and the employee explains what's going on that there's a guy in the store with a gun pointed at him who wants to talk to the founder. But the woman on the other end of the phone is convinced that this is all one big prank call and she doesn't take it seriously. And of course, this isn't a joke. And Kenneth wants to let them know. So he points his gun at the ceiling and blam, blam, he fires two shots to prove that what's happening is very real. And the woman on the phone quickly realizes that, yeah, he's serious. And Kenneth, yelling loud enough for her to hear him, he tells her not to call the police.

He warns her that if police show up, he's going to start shooting and kill the employees. Then the employee hangs up the phone. So Kenneth has decided that at this point, no one is going to come in or leave the store. This is now a full-blown hostage situation. Now, the woman on the hotline, of course, she calls the police immediately. And from here, the news of what's going on in this store reaches Domino's headquarters in Michigan, and the execs there are rightfully freaking out. So pretty quickly, police get a police negotiator involved.

And the police negotiator calls the Domino's store, and Kenneth gets on the phone, and police negotiator tries to get him to let the hostages go, but Kenneth doesn't want to do all that. He just wants to talk to the founder. Then around this time, the police show up to the restaurant, and they've got the whole store surrounded. And this is exactly what Kenneth didn't want. So blam, blam, he fires warning shots into the ceiling so that they know he's serious. Then he gets back on the phone with the police negotiator, and he gives them a list of demands in exchange for the hostages. He tells them he wants $100,000 cash, and a white limousine to use as a getaway car for some reason.

And from there, he says he wants a private plane to Mexico. He also says he wants a copy of the book The Widow's Son. It's a science fiction novel because he has severe mental problems, and he believes that the novel has all these hidden answers in it for him, like it's some kind of conspiracy. He actually says that he will trade one of the hostages for that book. And funny enough, an officer goes out and finds a copy of the novel, and he brings it to the door, and he offers it to Kenneth.

Kenneth suddenly changes his mind. He decides he doesn't want the book anymore and that he doesn't want to release either of the hostages. And so from here, Kenneth starts talking to himself in front of the employees, just rambling, saying a lot of things that just don't make sense. So it seems like he's starting to spiral and there's no way for these hostages to get out of this. Until. Until Kenneth starts to get hungry. Because at this point, this standoff has been going on for hours, and Kenneth, he needs a little something to eat. So he tells the employees to make him a pizza with the works, everything on it. Until they make it.

And, you know, Kenneth doesn't want them to potentially attack him with the pizza cutter, so he tells them not to slice it at all. So now, Kenneth is sitting there eating this big-ass uncut pizza, and he has to, like, hold it with both hands, like it's one big slice, which means he has to set his gun down to do it. Once he sets that gun down, the two employees use this opportunity to slip out the back door and boom, they run outside, and now they're finally free. And so, bam, Kenneth gets arrested.

Here's a picture of him. And so ultimately, he goes to trial and he's found not guilty, if you can believe it, by reason of insanity. It turns out he is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, which explains why he thought Domino's was after him and trying to mock him by using his name. And so anyway, he spends three months in a psychiatric hospital, and after that, he is released. And years later, in 1995, he's actually still convinced that Domino's is out to get him, and he sadly unalives himself.