I thought, since many of you have asked, it’s time to showcase my Pez collection.
What is a Pez? It’s a horrible, horrible candy that I never eat. I really hate them – they taste like medicine to supertasters such as myself. However they are often sold with little sculptured dispensors, and occasionally I have been known to buy them just for the dispensor. Many people collect these avidly (indeed, the pursuit of rare Pez dispensors is what led to the original creation of ebay). I don’t. I just buy them at the checkout line in Wal-Mart every now and then.
Over the years these became a bit of a ‘gag gift’ for Christmas. In the last few years that trend increased as I started giving AW collectors sets every Christmas. Alas, 2014 bore no such set (so you’re safe this year Adam).
But enough blathering, let’s get to my collection:
That’s the first collector set I bought. It was released a few years ago and has characters from the original Lord of The Rings series. It sits proudly on a shelf, never to be opened. I gave this one to Adam and I believe it quickly became his favourite Pez set of all time.
This Star Trek: TNG set is also a couple of years old now. I had trouble finding it at first, and then was never able to find the limited version that replaced one of them (Beverly?) with Locutus of Borg. Again I gave this to AW, and again he treasured it, but not as much as SFL, who surely lists this on top of her list of favourite Pez collectors sets 😉
Last year’s Hobbit set, obviously following on from the LOTR set from 2011, is another that proudly adorns a shelf in my library. Again AW got this one for Christmas last year, but it’s probable that Bernard (who was there) loved it even more than AW since he was heard to bellow “What a grand Pez Collectors Set!”
Many times these past twelve months I daydreamed about what sets they could have done for xmas 2014… Avengers? Guardians Of The Galaxy? Godzilla? AKB48? Sadly, the store shelves remain bare of new sets this year.
Say it with me now: OMG! I bet you didn’t know about the US President series now did you? This is of course an entirely original idea by Pez, since they couldn’t have possibly been influenced by the US President series of $1 coins that started about the same time. Happily, I was able to collect both. (Jokes aside, the sculpting on these guys is very impressive). This first set came out way back, and (as with almost everything in this post) I purchased it on a whim in Wal-Mart one night. Months (years?) passed and I assumed there would never be another. But then…
And (oh my god, why) then…
Yes I have five different sets. These aren’t particularly expensive (I think about $10 or $12 per set) but even so I don’t know why I bought them. Even now I weep a single tear as I see them all on my shelves.
Pause for a moment here to remember I hate Pez candy and will never, ever eat it.
Here’s a C3PO Pez:
And this is a C3PO Pez:
And here, good readers, is a C3PO Pez:
What’s that you say? “They are all the same?” But are they?
Check out these completely different R2D2 Pez’s for instance:
Yep, completely different.
I’ve been purchasing Star Wars pez’s for aeons, and most of them have ended up in boxes destined to be forgotten for ever. It took some time to collect up as many as I could find for this photo:
But I’m quite sure that’s not the extent of the collection. I also suspect there are some I don’t have, since (once again) I never bother to check what’s available, I just buy one every now and then at the store. If you ever see a SW Pez I don’t own, please buy it for me 🙂
So what’s left? Well… nothing. I have no interest in any other Pez’s! I only buy the licensed sets (+ Presidents) and the SW stuff. There’s about eighty-megillion others out there but I don’t care. I’m not a collector of Pez’s. In fact I’ll go further to say I sortof hate them, including the ones I own. And I really, really hate the candy.
So please don’t give me a Pez, since I hate them. Unless it’s one I don’t have from the above series, in which case I must own it 😉
