Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Pez Works

Episode Date: October 5, 2019

PEZ began in Vienna as a mint meant to help people quit smoking. But once American kids got ahold of it, the candy took off and a symbol of childhood - and healthy secondary market among collectors - was born. Explore Pez history and culture with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello friends, I hope you're enjoying your Saturday, and you're gonna enjoy it a little bit more if you listen to this Stuff You Should Know select episode from October, 2015, How Pez Works. Love these pop culture episodes, everyone.

Pez. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's guest producer Noel,

and this is Stuff You Should Know. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. The Pez Edition. Nice, I like that. Another Noel cast as well. Yeah, pretty exciting. It's part of the Noel stint, sweet. Noel stint, we're gonna call it.

Do you like Pez? I like Pez. You like the candy? I do. You like the taste? I like the taste of Pez, yes. Describe to me your, what happens when you put a candy, Pez candy in your mouth.

Well, I put a Pez candy, I pull the head back. The kicker kicks it out. Pop, yes. Nice. Lingo. And I take it from the Pez dispenser with my tooth. Oh, you don't, really, you like, go mouth to mouth with it?

Sure, well, tooth to, tooth to kicker. Okay. And then I, yeah, what do you do, use your hand? Well, I don't eat Pez, but back when I was eight, I would be delighted when I would pull the head back. The little candy would shoot out, and I would pick it out with my hand and put it in my mouth. Yeah, I use my teeth.

Interesting, I would feel like I was like, going in to make out with a Daffy duck or something if I did that. Well, let's have the fun. Oh, Daffy. Oh boy. Anyway. I don't care for the candy though.

I wasn't done describing Pez. Go ahead, sorry. And then I take it onto my tongue, right? And I start to savor the flavor of it. Typically, I prefer maybe, well, definitely one of the fruit flavors. I've never had a mint Pez, or a chocolate Pez, which is new.

Yeah. I would try the chocolate one. But say like orange, we'll just go with orange. Okay. I'm sitting there, I let it sit on my tongue for all of like six nanoseconds, and then I start to bite into it. Oh yeah, you chew it.

And it's very much like, this explains why I like Pez, especially orange Pez. I want almost an entire bottle of orange flavored baby aspirin for the taste. That's why I like Pez. How old were you then? Were you a kid? No, I was like 20-something.

Did it. Yes, I was a kid. Well, did it hurt you? No, nothing happened to me. We talked about that before. Is that because they aren't even, it isn't even medicine? I wonder.

Is it just a placebo? But how could you use a placebo on a little kid? I mean, I guess it worked, but certainly there's an age where they're just like. I feel like half of parenting is probably placebo. Probably. Well, you would know now. Well, not yet.

Well, let me know. She doesn't believe my lies yet. That will come later. Yeah, I mean, surely kids are pretty dumb, so you can get them to believe anything. Sure. But there seems like there would be an age where they wouldn't make that connection

and a placebo wouldn't work. I don't think a placebo would work, like say, from birth. And I don't remember what age you can start giving kids baby aspirin. There's baby aspirin, I don't even have children aspirin. Anyway, I like pez. I like how it tastes.

I like the experience of eating a pez. All right, I don't care for pez. I also like the shape. The little brick? The brick, it helps with the taste. I saw, we did the LA podcast fest this last weekend and I can't remember her name, but a very nice young lady

brought us some different candies and things. The Lego candies. Boy, you jumped on that bag. It's like you want these Lego brick candies and you were like, yeah, give me. Second time, man. I love those things. Yeah, and that's sort of this.

I put those all in the same category, which is just like compressed sugar. Right. And like a brick form. As a matter of fact, it turns out the pez company to the state uses about 50,000 pounds of sugar every four days making its pez candies.

That's right. And here's a factoid for you. All right. It takes 3,000 pounds of pressure to compress the pez ingredients, which is not just sugar. Yeah. Into the delightful tiny disgusting brick that you love.

I don't think it's disgusting. I don't like candies. I have another one for you. Okay. They make 12 million tablets a day at their Orange Connecticut facility, the headquarters of pez. Yeah.

And three billion pez bricks are consumed in the US alone each year by people like me who like pez. Yes, roughly 12 at a time, because that's how much the standard dispenser holds. And if this kind of thing floats your boat right now, go check out How Stuff Works Brain Stuff series on YouTube and specifically look up the one on Pop Rocks that I did a year or two ago.

It was really interesting stuff. Yeah. Candy manufacturing is fascinating. I don't care what you say. No, I like manufacturing processes. I just don't like to eat candy. I got you. You know what I mean?

Yeah. You just go to the plant, watch it made and then turn down the free samples. Like, no, thank you. I find that disgusting. Yeah, they're like, now would you like to try some? No. I don't do that on beer tours.

I'll sample that. You mean I went to the maker's mark distillery? Oh, did you dip your own bottle? Yes. No. No. Yes. We definitely have one, but I don't remember if we'd,

I guess we did dip it. Yeah, I think that's the thing. But it was like a mini. So maybe not. Maybe we bought a mini that was like just a mini to commemorate it and they made you buy like a fifth or something and dip your own bottle and we're like, meh. Gotcha.

It's fine. Because we'd be like, we would want to open it. Yeah, we didn't dip our own bottle. I forgot that was exactly the conversation we had. Wow, you guys put a lot of thought into that one. Anyway, it's a pretty cool tour to tell you the truth. I strongly recommend it. Yeah, I've never done a distillery.

I'd like to do that. There's a new one here in Atlanta in Avondale. Oh, really? Yeah, whiskey distillery. Nice. Well, I can tell you go on any whiskey tour and you will find what Mila Kunis is talking about with the angel share stuff.

It's a real thing. The evaporating whiskey fills the place where they're aging and barrels. And it's actually really dangerous. The place could blow up at any time. Like a flower factory. Very much so, a sugar factory, right? But the smell is one of the most amazing smells

I've ever experienced in my entire life. Like smell good or just weird? Good. Oh, wow. Great. Like the half of a percent of whiskey that is just glorious, it's in the air. Right.

It's amazing. Oh, man, now I'm thirsty. All right, so let's talk Pez. OK. In 2011, this is something I didn't know. There was a wedding while I did know this part in the United Kingdom between a guy named William and a little lady named Kate.

Waity-katey. Do people call her that? Some people did. What, like that she's overweight? No, no, that she weighted around. Oh, OK. It's like, man, how mean can people get? Yeah, that would be even meaner.

So they made specialty Pez dispensers out of Prince William and Kate for that. And they were expensive, $13,360 at a charity auction. Clearly, that's the most expensive Pez dispenser ever sold. Not so, my friend. What? Supposedly, that is the $32,000 in 2006 for an limited edition astronaut themed.

It was from the 1982 World's Fair. And there were two of them, two in existence. Yeah, that's why it's expensive. And what's neat is that auction took place on eBay, which is very appropriate that Pez dispensers are sold on eBay because the guy who founded eBay, what's his name, Pierre? Pierre Oma D'Arre. Right.

He founded eBay in part. He was inspired to found eBay because his girlfriend at the time, I think his wife is his wife now, collected Pez. And he thought, hey, this would be a really great place. We may not have eBay today if it weren't for Pez. Pez dispensers. Isn't that crazy? Collecting Pez dispensers, which is a relatively new thing.

It really took off in the 80s. Late 80s, actually. It wasn't until the late 80s that people really started collecting Pez dispensers. And now it's here. Remember the Tweety Bird episode? I had to go back and look it up. But once I did, I started to remember.

Yeah, I think Elaine and Jerry and George are at a George's girlfriend's piano recital. And Jerry put the Tweety Bird Pez dispenser on this lap, or on Elaine's lap. And Elaine started laughing, ruined the performance, and then she was later outed when she laughed again in front of that lady. Right.

And then the Tweety Bird Pez dispenser also factored into the plot because Jerry and his friends had an intervention for another friend who had a drug problem. Oh, yeah. And he was resisting, resisting. And then, for some reason, Jerry brought out the Pez dispenser in the wave of nostalgia that washed over this guy, caused him to admit that he had a drug problem,

but then he became hooked on Pez. Well, and nostalgia figures in a lot. It really does. Kids from the, well, kids of all ages grew up with Pez. Kids of all ages. What am I, a circus announcer? Yeah. Step on up.

What are they called? I was going to say circus MC. A barker. Ringmaster. A circus barker. Well, there's two different. Those are two different things, I think. Oh, really?

Unless you're in a low-budget carnival, then it's maybe the same thing. Yeah, I would be. But the barker's the one who's like, step on up. Well, guess your weight. He's trying to get people to come in. The ringmaster's the one who's running the show once the show starts.

I feel like I'd be the barker. Would you? You need to be the ringmaster. You'd have to wear a straw boater hat and, like, striped suit. Yeah, I'd be the barker. And you'd be the guy that, like, swings from things with his teeth. Do us strong teeth.

As opposed to my brittle, weak teeth. When I fell off and there's just some of my teeth jammed into the trapeze bar still. Well, you're like a Looney Tunes cartoon now. Yeah, but imagine it in reality. It's even worse. It is. I feel like we should take a break.

No. And regain our composure. OK. All right, we'll be back right after this. Stuff you should know, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound, like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so we're back. And I think we should start in the traditional way, when we handle our pop culture casts, and talk about history. Because I thought it was a pretty interesting history, actually. Yeah, I'd love this article. Edward Haas III.

He was an Austrian. He was, he made sweets. He was a confectioner. Well, his family was in the grocery business, and he was successful in that. But yeah, his heart was in candy. Like yours? His heart was in candy.

It was also in hygiene. I get the impression that he was a very strong germaphobe. Well, it's probably good when you're running a candy factory. Yes, you know? He was also anti-smoking. And he decided he went to a chemist, a pharmacist, and said, hey, give me some really strong peppermint essence. And he used that with some sugar and made mints, basically

a protoaltoid, and put them in little tins, and marketed them as quitting smoking, or smoking cessation aids, basically. If you're trying to quit, you needed something to put in your mouth, just chew one of these pez mints. That's right. And he got the name pez from the abbreviation, the German word for peppermint, which starts with three consonants,

which is always fun. Come on, you took German. You know German. Well, I mean, I would just say, pfeffermints. I like that better, but it does start with two p's and an f, but shorten that and take out letters from the beginning, middle, and end, and you get pez. So like you said, you can either use this to try and quit

smoking as a sort of an early version of nicorette gum, you can use it if you do smoke to make your breath fresh, because no one wants to smell you stinky smokers. And we'll wrap them up in like a little candy bar at first, and that's how we sold them for like a year. Well, yes. They were also sold in tins, right? And he invented pez in 1927, or that's

when they first hit the market. But again, I get the impression that he was a germaphobe, and he didn't want everybody to put their grubby hands into the same pez tin and touch the other ones that other people were putting in their mouths. And he probably imagined all the poop and bacteria, and who knows what on those people's hands touching his beloved pez.

So he thought there has to be a better way to dispense pez. We need some sort of, I don't know, pez dispenser. That's right. And so there was an employee at his company, Oscar Uxa. And you know what Oscar Uxa does. He's a dispenser genius. Yeah. And he says, hey, how about this?

Why don't we make a dispenser that looks like a cigarette lighter? Because this is for smoking suspension, right? Yeah. And I'll have a little contraption on here that a kicker that'll spit out one at a time. And he said, it's genius. Right.

Edward Haas kicked the Kleenex boxes off of his feet and stood up and hugged Oscar Uxa. Yeah, and by the way, they're selling them in tins again now in peppermint, with a little throwback retro looking, one of the pez ladies. Pez girls. Yeah, the pez girls, which were supposedly like this very sexy thing to sell pez.

Did you see them? Yeah, they look like bell hops. Oh yeah, they're basically drawn like pin-up girls, except not nearly as racy. And they have little bellboy hats. Sure, a lot of them did. And they went from the 40s, I think, all the way up until the early 80s.

They used pez girls to market pez. Do you know what they reminded me of was back in the day when you would have, like, be at a club and a woman would come around. See ya, cigarettes? Yeah, they would have a little tray that was hung around their neck with cigars and cigarettes and mints and who knows what else.

Pez? I guess pez. I guarantee you, pez was in there. You're probably right. So they were a hit among adults in Europe. Big time. Yeah, they did the trick. Yeah, they were already pretty popular.

But once they packaged them into these cigarette lighter dispensers, they really cemented themselves as iconic candy. People said, look, you just pop it open and then candy comes out and you put your teeth on it. It's wonderful. It makes your monocle pop off. So they went nuts for the stuff.

And then he said, you know what? Let me expand, the United States is where it's at, 1952. He found out that kids in America were delighted over this because I guess kids in America were like adults in Europe at the time. And they loved the way these things popped out. Plus it probably made them feel a lot like they were smoking. You think?

Probably. I never got the tie to the lighter. It was completely lost on me. So you, like, flick a lighter? No, I get it now. But I never had made that association until I knew this. OK, so imagine a Pez dispenser without the head. Oh, yeah.

That's what the original. I can imagine that because I used to take the heads off mine. OK, all right. But so that's the original Pez dispensers, which are called regulars now, the first ones, before they started adding heads. They're very much resembled like a nice, slim lighter. So if you're a kid, like this kind of thing,

like there's the manual thing where you're flicking a lighter, then there's the oral fixation that's satisfied by putting the mint into your mouth. And it's mimicking smoking, which is one of the reasons why it was, or one of the ways it was marketed. The idea was that it would alleviate that desire for those Freudian fixations that you had when you were a smoker, if you were trying to quit.

If you were a little kid and you wanted to smoke, but you just couldn't get your hands in cigarettes yet. In other words. A good way to do that. You didn't have arms. In the 50s, yeah, probably. I saw candy cigarettes the other day in a store, by the way. I thought those were completely made.

Yeah, I thought they were completely gone. OK. If you want to know a candy that I think is abhorrent and disgusting, candy cigarettes. Gum cigarettes are awesome. Do you remember those? The kind where you puff them in the pot of sugar? Oh, those are great.

The candy cigarettes, they're just like sticks of candy that are disgusting. Oh, no. I'm talking about the gum that would blow out fake smoke. I love that. They still make those. But the gum cigars, I think, were gross. They had some weird chemical taste to them.

I didn't ever saw that. They were not one and the same, which is surprising. And they still make those, and they still make big-leaked chew. Yes. Like, it's amazing that they can still, like, with good conscience, market tobacco products to children. Yeah. And that they're allowed to.

I remember probably the greatest tasting gum of all time. Juicy fruit? Big red? No, no. All right. It was a Rambo gum that was sold to commemorate Rambo 3. Tastes like sweat. No, it had, like, it was marketed as, like, black raspberry

or something like that. But it didn't taste like that at all. I've never tasted anything like it. You know, usually, like, you run into a taste years later. Like, there's only 10 tastes or 10 cents, you know? This was, I've never experienced it before or after. And it was the best tasting gum ever. But it was in the big-leaked chew pouch.

Wow. And it was big-leaked chew shred. So, clearly, it was made by the same company for the makers of Rambo. But the flavor they used was perfect, man. It was like sweat and gunpowder. And you could get it for, like, one summer. What, did it have a cartoon version of Stallone on it?

No, it was a photo of him with, like, the very famous rocket launcher. OK, the rocket launcher. Yeah, from Rambo 3. And it was just a picture of it on the big-leaked chew pouch. Wow. Yeah. And I loved it.

I guess they had to market it that way, because first blood gum didn't go over so well. Exactly. Tastes just like blood. Man, I'm learning all kinds of things. Well, hold on. Hold on. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

All right. Oh, no, we're getting super distracted. That's what it is. In the 50s, kids very surprisingly liked pez. But they were like, this is pretty strong mint. And I'm a little kid. I like fruity-flavored stuff. Yeah, I like the dispenser.

But you're going to get your game going with the candy. Exactly, and Haas and company listened big time. So they kept mint pez still. But they started releasing lines of fruit-flavored ones. And cola. They had one called chlorophyll. Yeah. Coffee-flavored.

A yogurt one that probably was just European. What is the chlorophyll? I couldn't get a read on what that was like. And I looked. I think it's like a mint. It's a definite mint flavor. Did they just use the wrong word? There's another.

There's a gum out there that has a similar sounding name. It's just like a very bright mint. Not peppermint. It's not as sweet. It's mintier. OK. But yeah, chlorophyll. It's interesting.

Right. But they had other stuff too, like orange and, I think, cherry, maybe something like that. Sure. Traditional flavors. Yeah, but not peach. There's a fun trivia fact for you. They have had peach flavors, but it was never released in the US.

Yeah, I'm a weirdo. I don't like peach flavors or peaches. So since they realized that kids are going bonkers for this candy, which bonkers, that was another good candy too. But I don't know what that is. It came out in the 80s. It was great. OK.

They decided to try to make pez a little more parent-friendly. Because even back in the 50s, I think parents were like, I don't want you teaching my kid to smoke with this candy. Right. So they said, well, let's change it from a cigarette lighter into something different, a toy. And we'll add a beloved cartoon character on there. How about that?

And parents said, that's fine with me. It was genius. Yeah. Because what he did was he combined candy with a toy. And not only a toy, but a collectible. And it was genius. For kids, all they needed, they were pretty cheap. And so kids could buy them.

They could go around and probably find enough money on the ground in a given day to go buy a little pez dispenser. Right. Or build like a soapbox racer and sell it to the rich kid in the neighborhood and buy a bunch of pez. Did you just eat fundip? Yeah.

That's another thing, too. I didn't like the stick that you had to lick. But the sugar was just great. So the sugar stick that you dipped into the sugar? The sugar stick didn't have enough flavor for me. Yeah. I was thinking about fundip the other day when I was driving for some reason.

It was just remarkable to me that they would just make a sugar stick that you'd dip in different flavors of sugar, and you would then eat the sugar off the stick and then eat the sugar. Right. Well, they didn't even try back then. And that's like, that's crazy.

Smacks used to be called sugar smacks. Yeah. And then they changed to the honey smacks, and they were like, let's just go with smacks. Oh, is it just called smacks? I believe so. It's not sugar smacks? No, it hasn't been sugar smacks for years.

I don't need much cereal. Like, they would get chased out of the grocery aisle whenever they tried to restock that if they still called it sugar smacks. Just don't mess with Captain Crunch peanut butter. That's all I got to say. Captain Crunch has one out now. I saw on the cereal aisle the other day.

It's sprinkled donuts, Captain Crunch, and it looks awesome. Yeah, I just, the peanut butter is so good, even though it tears up the roof of your mouth. It's worth it. But that's a fatal flaw, don't you think? Not to me. Ali, I'll get a box of that like, every three or four years, I'll get a box of that, like when Emily's out of town.

Dinner time. Because if she would come home and see that, she'd be like, what are you doing with this at our house? Yeah. Are you a child? Yeah. So I have to save those moments. All right, so it's 1970.

Haas is super rich, because he's selling tons and tons of these dispensers. He sells the company. And they move, well, the manufacturing of the dispensers is actually now in China and Hungary. And like Slovenia, I think, too. Central Europe, and now Asia as well. But the actual candies are and have been for a very long time,

made, I believe you already said, at a plant in Orange, Connecticut. Yep. And they kept it going. Pes was always a privately owned company. I don't think it's ever been public. But they kept the whole thing going, even after Haas departed.

And that was helped very much by this explosion in collecting that came from the mid-80s, I would say. And as a result, Pes itself added feet to the dispenser so that they could be displayed from that point on. And they realized, like, oh, wait, people are collecting these. There's like a secondary market that's generated. So let's feed the addiction.

Exactly. And so they added feet to it. So now a Pes dispenser can stand up. But that was introduced in 1987. So if you see feet on your Pes dispenser, you know that it's at least 1987 on. All right. So let's take another quick break here.

And we will come back and talk a little bit more about the odd collecting of Pes dispensers. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point. But we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, people started collecting Pez Dispensers, partly because they came of age at a time, about the mid-80s, when they were high on cocaine and had a lot of disposable income,

and were nostalgic for their childhoods. Yeah, I have a theory, and it's not like I'm sure everyone knows this. But I think Pez Dispensers became collectible because you couldn't throw it away, like you would eat the candy, and what are you going to do as a kid? You can be like, let me throw away this Garfield toy now.

Well, not only that, you can even put it on your chef. Right. Your chef? Your chef. You're like, stand still, chef. Stop making that stew. Weird. So I can put this Pez Dispenser on your head.

The boulevets can wait. But the whole thing is, they're reloadable. Like you get the little packet of 12, pop it in there. And you want more. Like if it's one of those same deals, like collect all four. But this is not all four. This is constantly new licensing deals being cooked up. Everything from Looney Tunes to Star Wars to Hello Kitty,

which was the other stroke of genius, was partnering up with these iconic brands and cultural icons to say, hey, a Chewbacca head on this thing. They're grown adults that'll buy that. Right. The thing is, is Lucasfilm definitely charges a pretty penny or did before they sold to Disney. Now it's even more, I'm sure, to license anything

from Star Wars, right? So Pez also very frequently came up with their own stuff as well. There were the Pez pals. There was a very famous misstep called Make a Face Pez, which is like a tiny Mr. Potato Head, where you could put on different eyes and mouth and stuff. But of course, these things were a major choking hazard.

Yeah, that's what I thought to say. And actually, there's a lore among Pez collectors who are called Pezheads that if you look at some of the 1972, 1973 Indian chiefs that were released, their headdresses are marbled. They have marbled color. Oh, wow. And they're saying that those are ground up Make a Face

dispensers that they reused in the headdresses. That sounds like a Pez enthusiast conspiracy theory to me. But it's pretty cool, isn't it? That is pretty cool. Another one that they released was a series for the Bicentennial that includes the funniest character of all time, in my opinion, the colonial soldier with a head wound.

OK, I thought you were going to say the Paul Revere. I think there is a Paul Revere. No, there is, which is I thought would be pretty weird. There's a Paul Revere, Daniel Boone, who looks like he has like a well-formed beehive on his head rather than a coonskin cap. There's an Uncle Sam. Yeah, there's a Betsy Ross.

And then there's the head wound soldier. He's got like that white gauze on his head with a little blood dot coming through. And he looks just kind of out of it. It's a really weird Pez dispenser. That one's probably my favorite, although I like a lot of the Halloween themed ones from the 70s. Yeah, some of those glow in the dark, which is pretty neat.

Like Mr. Skull, did you see him? Yeah. Or Dr. Skull, I think. I think he's probably my favorite. Or the pumpkin from the 70s on the green stem is probably the best Pez dispenser of all time. Well, there have been more than 450 dispensers since 1955, including three different Santas.

And the Santa is the best selling of all time, which makes sense, of course. Yeah, especially the first one. Because the dispenser wasn't just a little Pez dispenser. It was like the whole body. Sure. But then they're like, this is way too expensive. Yeah, they're like, I bet you people just buy it with the head.

And they did. The Salvador Dali tribute, I don't know if it's a tribute, I bet it was, is my favorite in 1968. It's like a delicate hand. It was a hand with a green eyeball, and it's just very cool looking. Yeah. Like I would want one of those.

Of course, I wouldn't pay thousands of dollars for it. No. I'd like to just find one on the street. It is pretty neat, though. Yeah. Do all of them cost that much? Oh, what, that specific collectible? No, but I mean, I would say they range into hundreds and thousands,

if it's really rare. But what was interesting about this, I think Patrick Keiger pointed out, like it's compared to a lot of other collecting hobbies. Pez dispensers are relatively cheap. Yeah, not too bad. You can get into them pretty easily with a minimal amount of money. One of my favorite Pez dispensers is the Pez Gun series.

Oh, really? First, it was a ray gun, and then they made it into a hand gun. Sure. And then when Star Wars came out in 1980, they released another space gun that looked an awful lot like Han Solo's gun. Yeah. But it wasn't really, so you don't sue them. Yeah.

But a kid would put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger to dispense the candy. Wow. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Unbelievable. They have had some kind of weird ones over the years, like the airline pilot and stewardess, which, I don't know, is that a big seller?

I don't know. Well, this is back in the day, I think, when they were. They were revered figures in culture. Yeah, the pilots weren't drunks, and the flight attendants weren't flight attendants. They were stewardesses, and they were fancy clothes. But they have hard chiseled features. They look like real people. They look like pilots and flight attendants from the Mother Road during the Depression

or something, you know? Yeah. Like really chiseled features. And actually, apparently, the Pez Company says that they very infrequently do real life humans. Those bicentennial figures were the first humans they ever did, or real life humans, I should say. And they didn't even do fictitious ones very often, like a stewardess or the pilot, because they just found that the human face wasn't nearly as interesting as, say, like,

a bubble man. Yeah. You know? In 2006, they issued the first ever Pez dispensers of living humans when they decided to pay tribute to the fellows from Orange County Chopper. That makes me so sad. That goes down in history. That's the worst one ever.

But I mean, those were the first guys to ever have living. No, trust me. Why? Why? I don't know. A licensing deal. Yeah. They opened the floodgates after that.

After that, it was on. There's like a kiss collector set. Well, of course, because Gene Simmons, he'll put his face on anything. There was, what else? Well, people get turned down a lot. You said that other little fact sheet, Kim Kardashian wanted a Pez dispenser. Yeah. They said no.

Yeah. They turn down people all the time, because apparently everybody wants one. I would suggest just go make your own bobblehead, because you can get that done. It's on the same. Well, you could just put candy in your bobblehead. There are newsletters. There's a Pez collector's news. There are conventions, and there is even a museum that a husband and wife started in

California that started out weirdly as a museum for computers and Pez dispensers. No. I think they were a computer sales company. Oh, I thought they displayed like vintage computers. No. Yeah, it was a computer dealer, and they were selling computers, and just to kind of make the place look a little more interesting, they also displayed Pez dispensers in between. Gotcha.

And they found that people were way more interested in coming to see the Pez dispensers and weren't buying computers, so they transitioned over to a straight up Pez museum, the Pez, or the museum of Pez memorabilia in Burlingame, California. Yeah, and you can pay some money to go in there and look at all their rare and vintage Pez dispensers. They have one. He paid three grand for the Pineapple-Wearing Sunglasses because it was... From the early 70s, I think.

Yeah, it's nothing special to look at, but again, it's rarity. They didn't make many of them because it was ugly, I think, probably. Yeah, I thought it was kind of cute. Did you? Mm-hmm. Did you like the California Raisins? Yes. Okay, there you go.

That explains it. Have you seen Straight Outta Compton? No, not yet. Is it good? Oh, you haven't seen that yet? I haven't been to any movies. You should. California Raisins appear by mention.

Wow. They're mentioned in a surprising way. I look forward to seeing that on television. Oh, you should go see it, man. Yeah? Yeah. All right, I'll go see it in the movie theater. What else?

They tried vitamins for a little while. Yeah, I didn't think that was a bad idea. I put a little vitamin C in there. Parents might be more willing to throw up some money for the kid, but they said, no, we're not in the vitamin business. Let's just stick to the sugary pressed candy. No, and the guy who said that was a guy named Scott McWinnie. Scott McWinnie was president.

He started out, I think, at General Mills or something, or General Foods, and he moved his way over to Pez in the 90s or the 80s? No, the 80s, because that quote was from 1984. He was president of Pez for a little while, and he, much to his chagrin, got into a war, basically, an economic war with the guy who is known as the Pez Outlaw. Yeah, you dug this up. This was really interesting. The article, what was it called?

It was a terrible title. Michigan Farmer makes $4 million in Pez dispensers in three years or something. Yeah. It's a terrible title. It should have been called the Pez Outlaw. Yeah, but it was in Playboy, and it was pretty good long form reporting. Yeah. Basically, what happened was in the 90s, a dude named Steve Gleeu, G-L-E-W, found out

that, hey, over in Canada, they're selling different dispensers that you can't get here in the United States. Let me go over there. Let me buy some of these and resell them to collectors, and it worked, and all of a sudden, the light bulb went off, and he said, I think I can actually make money getting Pez dispensers from other countries. Yeah. He found a hookup, that mysterious woman who approached him from the Eastern Bloc, wherever

she was from. Yeah, and he ended up, he and his son, Joshua, started making trips to Central Europe, oftentimes right along the border of war-torn Croatia, and found these factories where Pez was being made and found very bribeable factory workers who would take molds and make new Pez dispensers to his liking, and then he would sell them as basically like Pez freaks or one-offs or something for hundreds and hundreds of dollars, but he would spend a quarter or maybe a dollar on each. Crazy.

And he supposedly made quite a bit of money. He claims four million. Yeah. I believe if they made the number of trips that they were making, I think that he did. His downfall was that he overextended himself. He took out a massive loan and basically hired a factory to make a bunch of misfit Pez dispensers. Yeah. And greed was his downfall.

And Mark McWinnie took them on and started releasing basically Pez's own version of these counterfeit weirdo dispensers at a lower price and drove the dude out of business. This could be a little documentary. Easy. You know? Easy. Also, that reminds me, have you ever seen the Jelly Belly documentary? No.

Oh, it's so sad, but it's so good. What's it called? I don't remember. Just look up Jelly Belly Documentary and Weird Owls in it. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, then I definitely won't see it. No, you really should, man.

It's a great documentary. It's just, it's very sad. And that one and the Showbiz Pizza one is great too, yeah. I used to love Showbiz. You'll love this documentary. I like Showbiz more than Chuck E. Cheese even. There's a huge backstory to it that you were unaware of. Can I read you this one, excerpt?

This is from the story about the Pez outlaw. A 1993 toy convention changed Steve's life forever as he tells it, a mysterious woman opened her jacket and showed him a silver glow Pez, a holy grail for Pez collectors. She whispered to him in broken English, there are many more where I come from. That's so great. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And then she, I get the feeling she was like two guys in overcoats and sunglasses came

and hurried her away. Yeah. He said, but what's your name? Her two center bites came out of the woodwork and like pulled her down to hell. Ivanka. Yeah. It's a pretty good article. Look up stupid title Michigan farmer Pez Playboy and it'll bring it up.

I think Longform had it at one point. Speaking of Ivanka, should I talk about Donald Trump? Probably not. All right, I was surprised when I found out, I found mention of like Pez dispensers being nostalgic. I was like, definitely not for me. Then I went to Pez.com and clicked on collectors corner giggled for the rest of the day. Well they have pictures of like every single one they've released over the years, year

by year. And I definitely felt nostalgic and I don't even think of Pez as factoring in largely into my childhood at all. Same here. I was a little nostalgic looking at these. It's cute. So go to Pez.com and check out the collectors corner and I think you will waste a lot of time there.

Agreed. And I think that's it because Chuck just grabbed the listener mail email, which is usually a signal for me to shut up because it's mean to me after the mics aren't recording any longer. Oh please. And if you want to know more about Pez, type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, you guys are right, Screw College.

Remember when we had a little soapbox moment? Was this from the animator? Yeah. Yeah. I thought this was good. Hey guys, I wanted to show you a quick email to thank you for mentioning the idea that you don't need to go to college for some professions on the How Publicist Works episode. It really struck a chord with me.

I'm an animator and I desperately wish it would be treated as a trade, which it is, but not as a high art form that requires a fancy $100,000 degree. Most of what I learned, I actually learned on the job, got almost nothing for my college classes. While the contacts I made in college were very valuable down the road and nothing is quite as nice as moving out and being on your own in art school, it came with a hefty price. It is now 10 years later.

I've been working steadily this whole time and I'm still paying off my college student loans and I make a good amount of money. That's just sad and I know so many people were in the same position but without steady work and she says that she worked at Adult Swim for a while too by the way. There's a stigma about not going to college and I think it's part of the reason so many people are being crushed by student loan debt now. It's a very American stigma too. It's not like that all around the world.

I know. Stupid Americans. I think there's probably a lot of these kinds of jobs that don't need college degrees out there like a podcaster and it might be cool to hear a podcast on that sometime. I'm not sure what you call it. Maybe how not going to college but landing a nice job and making a living anyway and sticking it to your parents' works. Maybe just do one on student loans or something.

Anyway, thanks for keeping me company while I animate. Keep it up. You guys are top notch and that is Margie. Thanks Margie. That was a great email. Agreed. We appreciate that. Yeah, you college all together.

Sometimes it's very useful. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not the end all be all for everyone on the planet to go to college. Yeah. No, it's true. I mean, it's true and I think that there hopefully is a large awakening going on because a lot of people say that the current bubble, if you're looking around for the next bubble,

student loans. Yep. Yeah. We should do something about that sometime. Let's do it. We actually, Margie gave us the URL for her blog, it's m-a-r-j-i-b-o-r-d-n-e-r.blogspot.com. I imagine you can go check out her stuff there. What'd you think?

Yes, sir. Nice. So, if you want to get in touch with Chuck or me or both of us or even Noel, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever

have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.