Cancer sticks, racism and hostage situations

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

At our weekly Reader editorial meeting, Publisher Ben Olson asked — as he often does — if we had any “fun” stories to give our readers a break. I, young and naive, thought it would be fun to explore defunct advertising characters. Surely, the ridiculous marketing gimmicks would be good for a few laughs.

Reader, I made a mistake.

The following is a series of depressing stories about recognizable characters, the horrors that spawned them and the havoc they wreaked, ending with a somewhat funny story. It’s the best I could do.

Cuddly buddies

Joe Camel. Courtesy photo.

Companies have had to shove many furry — and slimy — friends out of the spotlight for working a little too well on certain future clientele. The trend began in earnest with the creation of Old Joe Camel, spokesanimal for Camel Cigarettes, who represented R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company from 1988 to 1997.

The hyper-masculine ungulate was based in part on Sean Connery’s James Bond, and often sported a tuxedo and had sports cars, bombshells or fighter jets waiting in the background — not to mention the phallic design of his nose.

Joe didn’t just radiate machismo, his hip design — frequently accented by the words “smooth character” — and fluffy face proved incredibly appealing for kids. 

In 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an experiment documenting brand recognition in kids ages 3 to 6 years old. The results showed, “Approximately 30% of 3-year-old children correctly matched Old Joe with a picture of a cigarette compared with 91.3% of 6-year-old children.”

Those numbers were only rivaled by kids’ ability to match Mickey Mouse with the Disney logo. 

Because children can’t be expected to understand the consequences of smoking, the Federal Trade Commission eventually ruled that the ads were “unfair” under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits ‘‘unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”

RJR pulled the campaign, creating a precedent that led to the downfall of Budweiser’s frogs and spokesdog Spuds MacKenzie. Before they went the way of the dodo, the Center on Alcohol Advertising determined that Bay Area kids ages 9 to 11 could more reliably identify the frogs than Ronald McDonald or Smokey Bear. Understandable, considering Budweiser’s commercials were spearheaded by Gore Verbinski, who went on to direct the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.

It’s more racist than you think

When companies started rebranding Aunt Jemima’s pancakes and Uncle Ben’s rice, shifting away from the stereotypical Black characters that had been the faces of the brands for decades, many people called it “nitpicking.” Comedian Dave Chappelle even dedicated a Saturday Night Live skit to the subject.

From a modern perspective, the marketing seemed innocuous enough — especially to the consumers who thought Jemima and Ben were real people — but that’s because our cultural understanding of the racist symbolism underpinning the characters has been largely lost.

Jemima and Ben both represent the post-Civil War, Jim Crow South reimagining of history by embodying the trope of the “happy slave” who lived to serve. At the time, consumers would have easily recognized the terms “aunt” and “uncle” as the honorifics used for elderly enslaved people in place of “mister” or “mistress,” as in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The Pearl Milling Company created Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix in 1888, emphasizing its self-described “plantation flavor” and pairing it with fictional tales of Jemima’s loyalty to her slaver and her escapades while fighting against the Union Army.

If that weren’t gross enough, the brand added paper (and later cloth) dolls to the packaging in the 1890s so that kids could cut out images of Jemima and her family dressed in ragged clothing, parading around barefoot. Buying a matching bag provided better clothing, supposedly showing snapshots of the family before and after Jemima sold the pancake recipe. This campaign continued into the 1970s.

The Taco Bell Chihuahua. Courtesy photo.

As time passed, racist Mexican caricatures like the Frito Bandito and the Taco Bell Chihuahua became more popular and used similar cultural references to belittle Latinx and Hispanic historical figures. The chihuahua — real name Gidget — often sported Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara’s beret while the Bandito’s sombrero and holsters were clearly styled after Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Though Frito-Lay didn’t care that the Bandito — who spoke broken English and had a gold tooth and disheveled appearance — was offensive to Mexican people, they did take his pistols away in 1968 out of respect for Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. How compassionate.

OK, that’s kind of funny

Sometimes, even the most ridiculous characters — with no basis in reality — are still doomed to fail. In the ’80s, Domino’s launched “The Noid,” a supervillain with bunny ears that embodied every setback drivers faced while attempting to deliver pizza. The slogan, “Avoid the Noid,” told customers that Domino’s drivers could get pizzas to their destinations in fewer than 30 minutes.

The Noid. Courtesy photo.

The name was too much of a coincidence for Kenneth Lamar Noid, a man with an undisclosed mental illness, who believed the campaign was targeting him. In 1989, Noid entered a Georgia Domino’s and held two employees at gunpoint, ransoming them for $100,000 and a limousine.

Noid kept the employees prisoner for more than five hours while negotiators worked toward their safe release. He eventually offered to exchange a hostage for a copy of Robert Anton Wilson’s The Widow’s Son — a satirical science fiction story about the Illuminati, among other conspiracies — but later refused the trade.

When he eventually got hungry, Noid forced the employees to make him two pizzas, which he put down his gun to eat. The hostages seized the opportunity and fled, and Noid was later arrested; tried for kidnapping, aggravated assault, extortion and firearm possession charges; and found not guilty by reason of insanity.

It’s unclear if Noid was ever able to read The Widow’s Son, but given that Wilson died before completing the series, he would have been disappointed either way.