What was supposed to be a simple robbery quickly graduated into something far more serious. .357 Magnum in hand, he took two employees hostage in a standoff that would stretch on for five hours. He demanded they call the national headquarters on his behalf, asking for $100,000 and a white limousine – perhaps the most conspicuous get away vehicle imaginable.
The gunman also asked for a book. Initial press reports weren’t certain of the title, which was later revealed to be The Widow’s Son. The second installment of The Illuminatus Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson's 1985 novel finds an 18th century figure deeply immersed in a world of conspiracy, perpetuated by the freemasons, English monarchs and Rosicrucians, among others. When a copy of the book arrived, he rescinded his end of the deal.
The next demand was simpler: he wanted a couple of pizzas. It had been several hours, and Kenneth Lamar Noid was hungry. Gun in lap, he tore into the food, at which point his two hostages escaped. Out of options, Noid surrendered to police and was arrested inside the Domino’s. Though charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault, extortion and use of a firearm (discharged twice during the incident), he avoided prison time by reason of insanity.
Noid was, indeed, mentally ill. The hostage situation stemmed from his belief that Domino’s owner Tom Monaghan had intentionally used his name for the company’s wildly successful ad campaign, which had launched three years prior. Designed by California Raisins creator, Will Vinton, the Noid was the mischievous manifestation of the things that might befall a delivery driver.
The 30 minutes or less guarantee was dropped in the mid-90s, after several reckless driving lawsuits. By then, the Noid campaign had already disappeared. Domino’s quietly sunset the character within a few years of the hostage incident. The pizza chain, however, denied any connection.
“The two things happened, but the two are not related,” Domino’s marketing executive, Tim McIntyre, said in a public radio interview years later. “We tried our best to set the record straight,” he added, “but it’s one of those things where, you hear the story, it’s sensational, it’s bizarre, and myth becomes fact.”
Fourteen months prior in Chicago, the WGN signal cut out during a 9PM news recap of the Bears/Lions game. After eight seconds of a black screen, a familiar face cut in. Corrugated metal swiveled in the background, in a rough approximation of early computer graphics. For 14 seconds, Max Headroom’s smiling, sunglassed face simply bounced up and down to the whirring sound of distortion. He wouldn’t utter a word before the signal returned to the intended broadcast, through the quick work of station engineers.
"Well, if you're wondering what's happened,” sport reporter Dan Roan said with an uncomfortable chuckle, “so am I.” He added that, “the computer that we have running our news from time to time took off and went wild.” He restarted the Bears/Lions segment again from the top. The rest of the broadcast continued without apparent incident.
Three hours later and five blocks away, local PBS station WTTW was airing “Horror of Fang Rock,” a 1977 episode of Dr. Who, wherein the Fourth Doctor investigates a malfunctioning lighthouse. This time, Headroom got full minute-and-a-half. Without the silent vamping, a distorted, muffled voice emerged.
“That does it! He’s a frickin’ nerd,” he cackled. He quickly launched into a tirade against WGN broadcaster and “frickin’ liberal,” Chuck Swirsky before he bent out of frame to pick of a can of Pepsi. “Catch the wave,” he added, evoking the slogan from Headroom’s various New Coke TV spots, before tossing the can away.
“And as the content got weirder we got increasingly stressed out about our inability to do anything about it,” the station’s directed Paul Rizzo noted, decades later. What followed was, perhaps, even more shocking to PBS viewers than the initial image of a figure in a rubber Max Headroom mask hijacking Dr. Who.
Headroom leaned into the camera and held up a middle finger encased by a dildo. He picked up and dropped the can again and then hummed the theme to Clutch Cargo, a short lived, low budget animated series from 30 years prior. The video cut to a shot of Headroom bent over, while another figured spanked his exposed buttocks with a flyswatter. “Don’t do it! Noooooo!” he shouted, before the signal cut out. The hijackers had ended the transmission of their own accord, before the station was able to properly respond.
The FCC investigated the incident, noting that Headroom and his associate likely accomplished the hijack by beaming their own signals toward the stations’ respective broadcast towers. “I would like to inform anybody involved in this kind of thing, that there's a maximum penalty of $100,000, one-year in jail, or both,” an FCC spokesperson told the press.
Two days after the incident, NBC affiliate WMAQ spoofed it, inserting clips of the fake Headroom into its own sports broadcast. Viewers understandably believed it to be another hijack by the same actors. Ultimately, however, they would not reemerge after the first two incidents.
Unlike Noid, Headroom and his accomplice were never identified.
Sources:
Angry Gunman, Named Noid, Arrested In Botched Domino’s Robbery, Say Police https://apnews.com/article/28544b5002d7d32520920549e84ddb1e
30 Years Later, Notorious ‘Max Headroom Incident’ Remains a Mystery https://news.wttw.com/2017/11/21/30-years-later-notorious-max-headroom-incident-remains-mystery
Max headroom incident With Subtitles (1987) https://youtu.be/jjeUuakHsLw
An Oral History of the Noid: a Tale of Pizza, Guns, and Madness https://slate.com/culture/2018/04/studio-360s-oral-history-of-the-noid-dominos-pizzas-infamous-80s-mascot.html