PEZ Visitor Center - Orange, CT

Back in October, Mrs Dex and I went to Mohegan Sun Casino to see Duran Duran (pics here!). We stayed over night and since it was only an hour away, we went to the PEZ Visitor Center.

And I'm so glad we did! It was a lot of fun and they not only have an incredible display of PEZ dispensers but also all sorts of things from the history of PEZ.

The first thing to greet you as you enter is this enormous display of PEZ dispensers. Also, how great is that little bench that looks like candy rolls? I'd love to have something like that!

Admission to the Visitor Center is only $5 per person and each admission gets you a $2 credit if you buy anything. Best $3 I've ever spent! That also includes a souvenir lanyard.

The pressed pennies are not part of admission. They have a machine with four different designs. Two of the designs are generic PEZ images so I went with the ones that have the name of the place.

You also get a pamphlet that lays out the "museum" area. What's shown here is just a small section, the entire place is a museum!

 

Just inside is this wall that tells you about the history of PEZ and it's impact on pop culture. There are examples at each decade of dispensers from that time.

Here are some of the original PEZ dispensers. They started out as a convenient way to carry mints. It wasn't until the 1950s when they started putting heads on them.

This is one of the display cases in the "museum". They're grouped by theme. I tried to get at least one close up pic of an interesting section in each case. If you check out my pics on Flickr, you can zoom in and browse each case.

Not only is this a Visitor Center, but it is the US production facility for PEZ. There's a windowed area that looks in on where they do the packaging. Sadly, production doesn't run on the weekends so we didn't get to see any action here.

 

 

This is just one of the pieces of PEZ history on display, an actual uniform worn by a "PEZ Girl" to hand out samples.
 

In addition to all this, as you'd expect, there's also plenty of merch available.

 

 One of the things I just had to get was this limited edition Halloween dispenser. It's the PEZ mascot dressed up as Frankenstein. You can only get it online or in person here.

In the interest of keeping this post relatively short, let me tell you I took A LOT of photos, over 130!. If you want to get a better look at everything, head over to my Flickr page. There was so much to see it was hard not to photograph everything.

I'd also suggest going to the Vistor Center's website where you can watch a quick video tour or even take a virtual tour right from your chair.