Everyone has their favorite Pez dispenser. Darth Vader, Mickey Mouse, or the 1982 World’s Fair Astronaut B, which apparently sold for more than $32,000. That’s an expensive way to pretend that you’re taking vitamins as a kid.
But among the strangest and easily one of the most ill-advised dispensers has got to be this Pez gun, which shoots candies with the simple pull of a trigger. Now, these little suckers aren’t so easy to find anymore. The Pez website lists the Pez candy shooter, introduced in 1965, as retired. Makes sense. But the little shooter is going viral on Reddit, where many Redditors are unsurprisingly shocked to learn of its existence, wondering how we ever became such a gun-obsessed society.
This actually isn’t the only firearm-adjacent Pez dispenser the company made. Pez went out of its way to make a more realistic gun in ’65, apparently. Predating the shooter is a series of Space Guns, which came locked and loaded with tiny sugar pellets that children could aim at friends or shoot directly into the back of their mouths. It’s a lot of fun. The company even revived the Space Gun in 1982 at the height of Star Wars mania. Weird that they haven’t brought them back.
One of these even made it to a 2019 episode of Pawn Stars. In the segment, Corey Harrison has to call his Pez guy Steve, a local candy expert whose ready to talk Pez. As Steve explains, Pez discontinued the Space Gun “pretty quickly” because the toy is, get this, a choking hazard. But at least the toy comes with a “gun permit,” so everything’s above board. Of course, the seller gets haggled down from $500 to $300, but at least, he made it to an episode of Pawn Stars and got enough money for the gun to buy his wife a “wonderful anniversary gift.”