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The PEZ Outlaw has to be one of the most interesting yet crazies documentaries I’ve seen in a while. It is in a sense a true-crime documentary, but it is unlike any that you have ever heard of.
Steve Glew was a machinist suffering from depression until he began collecting cereal boxes, a casual hobby that grew exponentially once he discovered PEZ dispensers. An obsession that would turn into one of the craziest law-breaking acts you’ll ever see.
The PEZ Basics
The chances that you’ve never heard of PEZ is low, but in the small chance that you haven’t, they’re a small and hard candy that many compare to chalk. But it’s not the candy that’s the big seller, but the dispensers. PEZ dispensers are tubes that can hold up to 12 PEZ sweets and each one has a “head” that pushes out one of the PEZ candy tabs. The heads come in a variety of designs ranging from generic shapes to characters from popular intellectual properties such as Marvel, Star Wars, Looney Tunes, and The Lord of the Rings.
The Austrian company sells both candies and dispensers around the world and they have become a mainstay in popular culture, appearing in television shows, movies, and even manga. As we learn in The PEZ Outlaw, the Austrian company has full say in what dispensers are sold internationally, and that is where our outlaw, Steve Glew, comes into play.
The Legal Black Market
Due to the sheer amount of different dispensers available, ranging in colours, characters, and even sizes, Glew discovered that there was a whole host of dispensers unavailable to purchase in the United States. Finding that collectors were keen to get their hands on these products Glew and his son flew to Europe to purchase these dispensers and fly them back home where they made a hefty profit thanks to the eager collectors who were willing to spend thousands of dollars on a single dispenser.
Through obtaining these previously unavailable dispensers, Glew was able to start his own company that specifically dealt with acquiring PEZ dispensers and selling them on the black market. The catch was — it was entirely legal.
Thanks to sheer negligence, PEZ USA held the United States patent to the dispensers, but they never registered their trademark with the US Customs and Borders Protection which would stop any unlawful transport of PEZ into the country. This grand mistake allowed Glew and his team to legally transport the goods into the US with little to no issue at all.
Glew would even travel to the European factories and bribe PEZ staff into giving him bags of pre-production samples, One such dispenser was the prototype of the Bubblegum Man, which was never meant to be sold on store shelves, but thanks to Glew, collectors were able to obtain it for a good $12,000 per prototype – a price many were more than willing to pay. Glew’s business with collectors became so lucrative that the sales from the samples alone helped Glew pay off his daughter’s tuition.
PEZ USA vs. Glew
The whole story sounds made up, which helps make The PEZ Outlaw one of the wildest documentaries I have ever seen. And I haven’t even mentioned how PEZ USA was able to back at Glew. Eventually, Glew began to create his own unlicensed PEZ dispensers, and thanks to the variety of designs and colours, it earned him a hefty 1 million dollars in sales. But since he didn’t own the patent or trademark, PEZ USA thought back by copying Glew’s designs so they could sell them at cheaper prices under their official PEZ label.
A Little One-Sided
The documentary features many reenactments that reminded me of a heist film. They paint Glew as if he’s a mastermind figure that was able to craft the biggest con of all time when in reality it was PEZ USA that allowed themselves to be taken advantage of, thanks to the loophole they inadvertently created.
The PEZ Outlaw won’t be the greatest documentary you’ll ever see, it’s not even the best made one, but the crazy story will hook you in and keep you invested in the cartoonish mania of Glew’s business.
It doesn’t delve too deep into the circumstances as to why Glew started his business and by focusing squarely on Glew and his team with very little insight into how PEZ dealt with him, besides his feud with angry PEZ USA CEO Scott McWhinnie, it often becomes too one-sided, and this is helped by interviews of various PEZ collectors. The interviews mainly involve Glew, his family, and the collectors he helped, but there are too few from the opposing side. This small discrepancy paints Glew in a glorified light that isn’t often challenged. But then, at the end of the day, he was rarely breaking any laws.
The PEZ Outlaw is quite the unexpected wild ride and despite having mixed opinions on the documentary, it still is an entertaining film that would be a minor hit on either Netflix or HBO Max.
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