Here's What Really Happened To The Noid: 5 Crazy Aftermaths

"How about I tell you how to get my foot in your ass."

And it's not like the producers of the show didn't have any warning that Calloway was unhinged. In 1980, he had beaten a woman with an iron rod before going on a one-man rampage through the streets of Nashville, smashing windows, wrecking cars, and mugging people (he reportedly wasn't wearing pants). Calloway escaped charges on the testimony that he'd suffered a "one-off nervous breakdown" and it would never happen again. (It happened lots again).

Sesame Street ultimately cut ties with Calloway after he began stalking teenage actress Alison Bartlett, who played David's shop assistant, Gina, and at one point showed up at her high school to propose to her. Calloway was sent to a mental institution, where he later tragically died from a heart attack during another murderous rage, and David vanished from the show.

"Today we're going to learn about 'selective memory', kids!"

You might assume this presented another teaching opportunity, but the writers opted not to put together a "sometimes our friends turn into violent psychopaths and have to be committed and we don't know why" episode. That one's even harder to explain with puppets than the fact that old people die.

His arch-nemesis was slightly stiffer cardboard, if that gives you any indication of what we're dealing with here.

The Noid infected pop culture so much in the '80s that he crossed into the realm of t-shirts, toys, and video games. But he mercifully disappeared from our TV screens by the '90s, not because the ads weren't selling pizzas, but because of the kind of public relations nightmare that only a mentally ill gunman could create.

In January 1989, a man carrying a .357 Magnum revolver broke into an Atlanta Domino's restaurant and held two employees hostage for five hours. After the police became involved, the assailant began making Hollywood-style demands -- $100,000 in cash, a getaway car, and bizarrely, a copy of his favorite book, The Widow's Son, by Robert Anton Wilson (you'd think he could just buy one with 100 grand). During the siege, the gunman kept forcing the hostages to make him pizza. As you would.

"30 minutes or less ... or else."

Eventually, the hostages escaped and the man was apprehended. His name? Kenneth Lamar Noid.

That was no coincidence. Kenneth Noid had been suffering from a dark carnival of brain problems that led him to believe that the bombardment of TV commercials inviting pizza fans to "avoid the Noid" were making fun of him, personally. The advertising campaign drove his psychosis to the point that he believed the Domino's Pizza Illuminati were breaking into his apartment while he was away to monitor him.

While he was making the exact same face, presumably.

After the incident, as well as a whole bunch of newspaper headlines that were hilarious variations of the theme "Domino's Couldn't Avoid This Noid!," Domino's decided to retire the character and fast food franchises decided to stick with mascots that couldn't plausibly be some crazy guy's real name. Though we're not discounting the idea that there might be someone out there named Chuck E. Cheese who is lovingly stroking a shotgun right now.

"So you'll totally be okay reliving it then!"

Pol Pot's extremist anti-technology Khmer Rouge regime was a group of maniacs who thought they could base an entire society around farming alone, to the point that they actually murdered anyone who knew anything beyond what time of year to plant corn. Literally, they had exams and everything, but you'd get a bullet in the back of your head if you answered any of the questions correctly.

Haing Ngor was a gynecologist, and when his wife started suffering life-threatening complications in childbirth, he knew exactly how to save her, but he faced a horrifying decision -- if he did save her, the Khmer Rouge would realize that he was smart, and would probably kill him, his wife, his entire extended family, and his dog, for good measure. So Ngor let his wife die and carried that decision with him for the rest of his life.

Here's a picture of not that.

Flash forward to 1985 -- Ngor, with no acting experience, won an Oscar for just basically playing himself. He decided that he enjoyed acting and appeared in a fair number of movies and TV shows until 1996, when he was unceremoniously murdered in his Los Angeles front yard by three muggers who apparently just wanted his stuff.

According to the tragic official story, the muggers confronted Ngor outside his apartment and demanded all of his valuables, which he was happy to give up, except for a locket he wore around his neck containing a photo of his dead wife. His refusal to surrender the locket was what apparently led to his murder.

Someone should have sent the Grim Reaper studio notes for that ending being way too on the nose.

Though there is some speculation that the true motive behind the killing may have been political -- the gang members who were convicted for the killing were Cambodian immigrants themselves, and may have targeted Ngor specifically for his activism against the Khmer Rouge. In any case, it's just another depressingly common example of a great champion of civil rights being taken from us before his time by some random asshole with a firearm.