Speaking of George Lucas being a money grubbing whore....

Which Phoe from Elsewhere and I actually were....

Anyway, I'm warning you about the onset of a long boring rant about Pez dispensers.

I took a look at the new Ep III pez dispensers. Which, I'll back up for a second and let you know that in high school, I collected pez dispensers. But I wasn't really a good collector, if you're thinking of the people who buy them, let them appreciate in value, and then resell them. Or have rare ones, and display them. Basically, I bought a whole bunch of cheap, common ones that will never really be worth anything, and used them to eat a boatload of Pez. Which isn't even that good. But it came with the dispensers.

My favorite were the star wars pez dispensers. The originals were: c3po, darth vader, storm trooper, yoda, and chewie. I took a dorky pride in combining my passions for star wars and pez. I'd actually take darth vader to school and do impressions of him for my friends, who forgave me for this because I would share my pez. Yeah. This was in high school, not grade school. I'm a hopeless dork.

And then when Ep I came out, there was Luke, Boba Fett, Ewok, and Leia. Which... why there wasn't a Luke and Leia in the original set is beyond me, not to mention why there's STILL no Han. So that was pretty cool.

But I was really pissed when Ep II came out. I'd begun to realize that my pez dispenser collecting was kind of stupid, some of them I didn't even particularly like, and they were just laying around cluttering up stuff. But I was still ready and willing to get the new ones. Except the new ones sucked! They were R2D2, which would be pretty cool, and Jango Fett and Clone Trooper. What a load of crap! Jango Fett is Boba with different colors, Clone Trooper diverges only slightly from Storm Trooper.

So the ones for Ep III (I couldn't help but look) are Death Star (kind of cool), the Emperor (way cool), General Grevious(sp?) (eh) and new chewbacca. What the hell. For the love of all that is good and holy, why? No Han or Obi-Wan, but TWO chewie's? I'd eat candy out of Jabba the Hutt before new chewie!

On top of that, Pez is always putting out collector versions of the old ones, only C3PO is shiney, or Yoda's see through or whatever, and charge like twice as much for them. It just sucks. All the time I used to think of getting the Ep II ones just so I could say I had the complete set. And I think of doing that for III now, but am holding strong.

In Lucas's defense, though--this might just be the pez corporation. They're always doing stupid things like making a clear version of an existing dispenser, tacking the word "crystal" in front of the name, calling it a collector's edition, and charging twice as much. Another reason why I quit buying them. But if I'd said that at the outset, I couldn't have named this rant "Speaking of George Lucas being a money grubbing whore...."

Oh, and speaking of Phoe from Elsewhere, here are some pez dispensers I think she would enjoy :P