PEZ by Shawn Peterson

Author:Shawn Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2016-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

The custom PEZ-themed chopper built by Orange County Choppers, circa 2006.

Do you know what licorice, coffee and chlorophyll all have in common? They were all once PEZ candy flavors.

Elvis Presley became the next gift set. The three-piece set in a record-shaped tin included a three-song CD. Each Elvis dispenser was a depiction of a different decade of the King’s career. The Elvis set was a huge success and finally offered consumers the chance to own a real Elvis Presley PEZ dispenser. The first mention of an Elvis dispenser came years earlier in a Tommy Lee Jones/Susan Sarandon legal thriller in 1994 titled The Client. In the movie, a young boy named Mark Sway witnesses the suicide of a mafia lawyer and is then tracked to help take down a mob family. One of the thugs sent to kidnap the boy tries to entice him by offering some candy from “Elvis PEZley.” The boy refuses the candy, remarking, “I bet it’s poisoned.” He runs off, and a chase ensues. The movie dispenser was strictly a prop but played a prominent part in the scene. It would be more than a decade before the dispenser was actually produced.

In 2008, a licensing deal with Major League Baseball saw the release of almost a dozen new baseball teams. The dispensers, in the shape of a baseball with the team logo printed in the center of the ball, were a huge hit in regional markets but presented a challenge for collectors. These dispensers would mainly be offered to markets around that team. If you want to collect them all, chances are you will have to make some trades with other collectors or take to the Internet and buy online. The license was expanded later to include several additional teams and baseball caps, in addition to the baseballs with the team logo.

Some people have made the assumption that dispensers were made for all thirty MLB teams. In fact, only twenty-one of the thirty teams have been represented. The nine teams without dispensers are Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Oakland, Washington, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Diego and Arizona. Although there is an Arizona Diamondback dispenser, it’s from the game day promotion and not part of the regular release offered at retail.

To date, NFL teams have never been licensed. The only football dispensers that have been done are for a handful of college teams and a line of non-licensed PEZ Sports balls that include a football, baseball, basketball and hockey puck. Several college team basketballs have been offered for Syracuse, UConn, Ohio State, Kentucky, North Carolina and Fairfield. Several basketball teams for the NBA were offered but only for special game day promotions. They include the Washington Wizards, New Jersey Nets, Seattle Supersonics, Connecticut Sun and Washington Mystics (WNBA).

As the decade came to a close, licensing was moving as fast as ever, and products continued to expand with additions to the Star Wars line that included Ahsoka, Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi to coincide with the Star Wars franchise movie release of Clone Wars.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.