The 7 Most Awful Corporate Mascots

Sun Tzu once said the most important part of selling a product is the person making the sales pitch. With the advent of multimedia marketing the mascot or face.,m has become an increasingly crucial component of rolling out any new product. Sometimes those mascots don't make the right pitch and sometimes even when they do succeed we're still left scratching our heads. Join us as we examine some of capitalism's dubious advocates with the 7 Most Awful Corporate Mascots.

I see somebody graduated with a degree from a two year school of design!

The Nasonex Bee looks like something that flew out of the Turkish ripoff of "A Bug's Life", farted out of a Pentium III and voiced by Antonio Banderas, who has quickly become the poor man's Antonio Banderas.

Since his initial crude incarnation, the Nasonex Bee has been softened up a little bit with an improved bee model. He still looks terrible, Antonio Banderas still does a convincing Ricardo Montalban by way of John Kricfalusi, but at least now I'm not worried the bee is going to get de-rezzed by the MCP's minions.

The new Nasonex Bee is just some proto-Shrek bullshit that talks like ladies night at a Tejano line-dancing bar. It's as forgettable as the original was unforgivable.

When it comes to nonsensical corporate mascots, it's hard to beat the Noid. Before we dive in, and in the interest of fairness to the Noid, I think we should acknowledge that his job as a mascot was to sell the pizza equivalent of bed bugs. This is the sort of pizza where you open the box, see it's covered in half-cooked cockroaches, and just shrug and eat it anyway because that was about what you expected.

That said, placing damaged goods in the hands of a giggling claymation villain probably isn't the best idea for a product rollout. You may have forgotten, but the Noid represented pizza doom. He was a pizza gremlin who smashed pizzas, made them get cold, or figured out how to put Hep-C on a pepperoni. Pizza fans were implored to "avoid the Noid" by ordering from Domino's.

Unfortunately for the Noid, that little plastic support thing was invented to prevent your pizza from getting smashed and Domino's failed to corner the market on insulated pizza bags. Soon after his appearance in a Nintendo game, the Noid was sadly hunted to extinction by pizza quality control measures.

If there is a heaven for dead corporate mascots I am sure the Noid is up there somewhere, frolicking atop clouds with the Hamburger Helper hand and the Jolly Green Giant's misbegotten relative Sprout.