Excerpt: The Toy that Keeps on Giving

In the 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a little boy named Elliot tries in vain to describe Pez to the little guy from space. You don’t need to be from another galaxy to wonder what on earth were they thinking?

Try to explain this humanoid candy cylinder to the uninitiated and the world of Pez rears its peculiar head. First you take Snoopy or whatever lovable cartoon character that adorns the top of your dispenser and pull his head off his body. Next you take the 12 candy bricks (which look for all the world like a spinal column) and insert them into his stemlike body. Now, just bend Snoopy’s head waaaaay back and viola! The candy is pushed out from his throat area. Welcome to earth, where over 3 billion of these little candies are sold each year.

With the momentum of 76 years on the market and a fan base that spans generations, Pez has triumphed over its weirdness as the first interactive candy. Yes, the long road to Spin-Pops and Pop Rocks was paved by all those Pez candy bricks. The cool dispenser stands as the first toy that gave you candy, and to a kid, what could possibly be better than that? Truth is, the phenomenal popularity of Pez has always been more about the toy dispenser than the candies, and, as E.T. discovered, taste more like Rolaids than Reese’s Pieces. Any big league pitcher or stand-up comedian will tell you; it’s all in the delivery.

Austrian Edward Haas III didn’t intend for his mint to become a candy, much less a toy. In 1927, Haas was a successful food company executive in Vienna when he developed an inexpensive way to make compressed mints from peppermint oil and sugar. They were originally formed in their classic rectangular shape so that they could be wrapped quickly and easily by machine. Marketed as a strong breath mint for adults and used as an alternative to smoking, these little rectangular treats sold in pocket tins named Pez, after the abbreviated German word for peppermint—PfeffErminZ.

In 1948, Haas engineered his first dispenser. It resembled a cigarette lighter and could be operated with one hand (like a cigarette lighter). Pez Inc. touted its “easy, hygienic” properties. Today, these dispensers are known to the Pez collecting community as “regulars.” What was next for Pez was anything but that.

In 1952 Pez came to the United States, but the American palate was not ready for such an intense peppermint breath mint (years later, the very successful Altoids proved that Pez was just ahead of its time). To crack the American market, the company did some consumer research, and the resulting changes meant a major makeover for the mint. After repositioning it as a candy, the company made Pez in fruit flavors.

To fit their new younger audience, the “cigarette lighter” had to go, and someone at Pez (no one knows exactly who) decided that topping them off with big plastic heads would do the trick. It’s reported that Edward Haas didn’t approve of this direction, but regardless of his concerns, these new character dispensers made his candy line an international success.

Pez is the Rolling Stone cover of the cartoon world. Characters that have been immortalized in polystyrene over the years read like a virtual comic Hall of Fame: there’s Daffy, Dopey, Droopy, Snoopy, Tweety, Speedy, Winnie, Wile E., Bozo, Pluto, Zorro, Dumbo, Leonardo, and Mario. From Spider-Man to Wolfman, Captain Hook to Captain America. If yanking a candy brick out of a cartoon character’s throat wasn’t weird enough, the Pez company topped that by a long shot in 1956.

What strange product did the Pez company introduce? Find out in Timeless Toys!

ISBN: 0-7407-5571-4
AUTHOR: Tim Walsh