I'm a collector of many many things. I usually just tell people that I collect hobbies. My first collection of things that I paid for (ie.. not rocks or bugs) was PEZ dispensers. I started when I was in middle school by buying a Smurf dispenser for 79 cents at a drug store in the mall. In a matter of months I had a line of them on the windowsill by my bed. Skip forward 25 years and I have a little over a thousand with custom display cases. I'm still really into them, but I stopped being a completist about 10 years ago. I still buy almost every new dispenser I see, but I don't go crazy with exclusives, chases, and foreign releases any more. It's pretty rare when two of my hobbies overlap, but when they do I get very exited. Just like every other plastic medium, female characters often get unfairly left out out of the mix. Sure, there are lots of girl-centric lines like Princesses, Barbie, My Little Pony, etc. But the girl characters in most of the other licenses never see the light of day. Let's check out Wonder Woman below!
Above is a mockup of a boxset that is expected to be released soon. I found my dispenser polybagged as seen below.
Here are pictures of the two previous Wonder Woman PEZ Dispensers. One the left is the "soft-head" version from 1979. She came with a variant (or "error") version that inexplicably had red hair. These soft-head versions can be pretty pricey because the rubber usually did not age well and many did not survive the toy bins of the early 80s. The version on the Right was originally released in 1981. She regularly appeared in assortments throughout the 1990s. There are two versions of this dispenser as well, one with a raised star on her tiara, and one with a flat printed star.
PEZ dispensers began using the "bust" format in 2005 with their Disney Princess and Bratz lines. Before that all dispensers were always just a head on a stem (like the older versions above). I didn't like this change at first, but it has since really grown on me. It's now the go-to style for most human characters: Superheroes, Princesses, Winx, POTC, Star Trek, Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, the Presidents, etc.
Time for some Group and Comparison Pics!
Here she is with the rest of the current BvS assortment.
And with the first modern female superhero, Catwoman (released in conjunction with Dark Knight Rises, despite being in comic style).
And here she is with my other two movie Wonder Women so far:
Multiverse version and the Basic Series.
Cheers!
Fun! I will have to grab the Batman version at least. I used to have a much bigger PEZ collection than I do nowadays, but every now and then I come across one I can't resist.
ReplyDeleteThey're showing up at AC Moore stores. That's where I got mine on Wednesday. In Europe, they're just re-releasing the existing Batman and Superman dispensers with movie-themed color schemes (and no Wonder Woman). I kind of want them, too.
Delete