"One of the most stupidest Pez tie-ins"

(for Mary Lu who first suggested it)

Visiting the various discontinued consumer product graveyards like Everything for a Dollar, Big Lots, Odd Lots, Dollar General, Family Dollar, or whatever local variant you have is one of the best things about living in modern America. The other day my wife and I were killing time with a friend in Everything for a Dollar while waiting for our movie to start seating, when I saw something above me on a shelf that reached out to me like a voice from a burning bush, like a chorus of seraphim, like a grail-shaped beacon: Pez Flavored Popcorn.

“Hey, Pez is not a flavor,” I hear you saying. And you are right. Pez flavored Popcorn comes in four very un-pez like flavors: Grape, Lemon, Strawberry and Orange. I can hear you saying "Yuck! that sounds disgusting" right now. That was what my wife and our friend said when I excitedly dragged them over to the Pezcorn. It was only 2/$1.00, and I had to beg my wife to get four boxes.

But I have a theory about food. If something unadulterated like snails or seaweed sounds disgusting to you, and people try to tell you it is edible, go with your instinct. Don't eat it. But when combinations of food sound weird, like popcorn and Pez dispensable candy, don't be too quick to judge.

Just about everything you eat is a combination of unlikely sounding ingredients that fuse together to form an entirely new and probably satisfying whole. I mean everything.

Take water. (Huh?!? Oxygen & Hydrogen? They're both highly flammable you know. You want me to drink that? Haven't you heard of the Von Hindenberg? Oh God, the Humanity! I'll probably flame on like Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, lighting his farts. Oh, twwooo parts hydrogen. Well, that's different.)

Or Pizza. (OK, you are going to take some flour and water mix it with some yeast. Hello! Yeast infection? OK, then what? Put tomatoes turned into a liquid sauce and milk turned into a curdled solid on top of the yeasty wheat & water, and baked until the solid sour milk melts. Wouldn't it be easier to just pour the milk on the tomato juice and infected wheat mess and save a step?)

For that matter even carmel popcorn, from which Pezcorn is obviously descended, sounds fairly unlikely. Whoever thought of putting burnt sugar syrup on their exploded corn was a genius, but I bet they had to overcome some strong sales resistance from the skeptics.

So I am always willing to try weird or unusual sounding combinations. Occasionally you get burned. Pineapple on pizza? I don't think so.

But somebody must have liked it, and that is the safety net of my theory. Just picking up a snail or grabbing some seaweed or one of the many edible parts of the pine tree and starting to nosh is easy. But, would someone go to all the trouble of concocting some exotic combination of ingredients if the end result was going to make you chunder? Would someone risk making that combination of strange stuff a selection on the menu of their high-class restaurant or invest the millions of dollars it takes to manufacture, package, market and distribute a product if it was likely to be anything less than wonderful?

Well, OK, apparently sometimes, yes. Which brings us back to Pezcorn. The stuff isn't terrible; in fact I kind of liked the lemon and grape. My wife even grudgingly admitted to liking the strawberry. But obviously if it was for sale in that "Island of Misfit Toys” of consumer culture the Everything for a Dollar Store, then it failed to impress a substantial portion of the buying public or at least the test sampling public.

Everything that ends up for sale at the odd lots stores (or the “remainder stores” as my book-oriented wife calls them) represents some kind of failure. A failure to connect with the taste of the masses. A failure to comprehend the needs or desires of people with too much disposable income to spend. Though, apparently still not disposable enough to spend it on Pezcorn.

All the discontinued, ill-conceived, inexplicably produced or imported, and abandoned misfits of the richest, most wasteful, most novelty hungry culture on earth end up there, and that is why I find the place so fascinating. It is as if you stepped into an alternate reality where Pezcorn exists (because I have never seen it at the K-mart or the Giant Eagle), or somehow a gross of some artifact from a slightly askew universe has fallen off an inter-dimensional truck and landed on the top shelf of Aisle 3 between the Chunky Style Apricot Cranberry Salsa and the Ren & Stimpy Gummi Boogers.

Big Lots is the Philip K. Dick of shopping. Check it out and have your reality shifted.

If you want to try Pezcorn (not available in stores, but now like everything else in the universe a collectible), then visit The Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia Online Store for Collectors where you can buy one box of each flavor (a high fiber sugar-high inducing total of four) for $10.00. Or just go take a look. Scroll down about 2/3 of the page. The boxes are shown in all their vibrant consumer-friendly primary colors.

If you don’t want to have the unmediated experience, then at least visit this cached auction listing (just for the four empty boxes [pictured] the unfortunate had already eaten the corn) from the Yahoo SOLD.co.au auction site, which should help explain why the people voted “No” with their dollars. I quote in part, “Well this would have had to be one of the most stupidest Pez tie-ins as the popcorn did not taste like pez nor did it have a pez dispencer in it”.[sic] And that covers a lot of Pez tie-ins including Pez Lip Balm and Pez Circus Snow Domes. And while you are there please do me a favor and look at the Pez critters shown on the boxes. I recognize the surfing alligator Pez, the hornblowing umbrella wielding clown Pez, and the hoop swinging beany wearing parrot Pez, but can someone tell me what that hybrid Purple Dino Duck on the skateboard thing is supposed to be. It looks like Barney and the Pittsburgh Pirates mascot had a baby in Flatland.

Stop by the Official Pez Site to see what’s available at the Pez Store, find out Stuff About Pez and enjoy other Pez Fun.