There's nothing in particular I want for Christmas but I especially don't want a set of Pez Dispensers that look like the original cast of Star Trek. And just in case they have them, I don't want a set of Pez Dispensers that look like any later cast of Star Trek, either. I'm getting the feeling no one else does, either. Yesterday, I saw the Shatner/Nimoy/et al set for sale in a Ralph's Market, marked down from $19.95 to $16.95.
I was once a casual collector of Pez Dispensers. Somewhere in this house, there's a box with about fifty of them and (probably) a lot of very stale candy. It was a childhood fetish but it was bolstered about fifteen years ago when I met a high executive of the Pez Company and he put me, for a glorious year, on the Pez comp list. I was already receiving freebees from most of the major comic book publishers but for twelve months there, I could go out to the mailbox every so often and find a crate of comics and a crate of Pez…the greatest fantasy of most nine-year-olds. You get your comics for nothin', get your Pez for free…
But at some point — about the time I would have had to start paying for them — I lost interest in collecting Pez Dispensers. I also lost my taste for the candy…and now, I've given up candy altogether so I may never Pez again. Which is a relief because otherwise, I might feel the need to own Pez Dispensers in the shape of Kirk, Spock, Uhura and the rest.
The one thing that interests me about these is that they're likenesses of real people. Back when I paid attention to such things, I recall the Pez Company had a firm policy of not making Pez Dispensers of actual humans. They had offers from a number of celebrities to be turned into Pez Dispensers for little or no money. They also had inquiries from wealthy folks who wanted to pay to have Pez Dispensers made of themselves. To all of these, they said no.
I see that in recent years, they've made dispensers of several TV and movie characters like this. Have they changed this policy or is the idea here that it's a Pez Dispenser of a fictional character, Captain Kirk, and not of William Shatner? On the other hand, given some of the things Shatner has done as himself, I'm not sure the distinction even matters…