The Pez Outlaw is a humourous romp through the shady world of black market Pez Dispensers

Steve Glew in the true crime Netflix doco The Pez Outlaw, streaming now.

Despite the popularity of doing so, there’s a certain madness in being a collector. I should know. My garage is a pharaoh’s tomb of former obsessions.

But even with my cluttered garage and relatively open mind, I struggled to understand the collectors in the new Netflix documentary The Pez Outlaw because the thing that they prize and collect is Pez Dispensers. Their houses are dedicated shrines to Pez Dispensers, with every room and free bit of space given over to displaying thousands and thousands of those kid-sized plastic cylinders with bulbous cartoon heads that flip open to dispense a small rectangular candy, called a Pez.

Pez and their assorted dispensers which usually feature licensed characters like, say, Pokemon or Disney, are incredibly popular in the US and Europe. While they are available in good old Aotearoa, they haven’t made too much of an impact. Probably because the actual Pez candy is quite dusty-tasting and not very satisfying. I’ve tried to see the appeal of collecting these things and I just can’t. All collections seem a bit weird to outsiders but, usually, I can see or grasp why people are into collecting whatever it is. But with Pez Dispensers, I just can’t.

Not that my ignorance affected my enjoyment of The Pez Outlaw at all. This is a feature-length documentary about a chap named Steve Glew, the self-proclaimed Pez Outlaw, who became something of a legend in the befuddlingly large Pez Dispenser collecting community. Glew is an eccentric fellow, with a long Santa Claus beard, a bucket hat and an embraced dishevelledness. During the 90s, Pez America considered him Public Enemy no 1.

His story is, frankly, unbelievable. Technically, The Pez Outlaw is a true crime documentary but Glew’s crime was hardly worthy of a whole documentary. And if Pez America had just let him be I doubt this doco would ever have been made. But they didn’t. Oh, boy, did they not.

Glew lived in Michigan and was suffering from depression as well as OCD and bipolar disorder He worked in a factory doing a job he hated escaping his mundane reality by reading Tom Clancy novels and collecting breakfast cereal boxes - perhaps the one thing more useless than collecting Pez Dispensers. But it made him happy, so fair play. I judge not.

It was through his collection that he discovered a loophole in the cereal back-of-the-box promotions. He realised he could send in for the promotional toys and items as many times as he wanted. And because he had thousands of cereal boxes he was soon supplementing his income by reselling all the giveaways he was getting sent at a local toy fair. At one of these, he noticed the stall next to his was selling its items for hundreds of dollars each while his went for a couple of bucks each. Right there and then he decided to get into the Pez Dispenser game.

He overcame his agoraphobia and flew to the Pez factory in Europe in the hope of getting some rare dispensers to sell. He did better than. He hit the jackpot. After lagging his way inside he made friends with a designer before working out “an arrangement” with a senior manager. He left with hundreds of rare Pez Dispensers crammed in his bags.

He shouldn’t have been allowed to take them back into the US as only Pez America had a license to import them. However, Glew literally stumbled into another legal loophole that allowed him to bring them in on his person. He began regularly making trips to Europe bringing back suitcases and sports bags filled with rare prototypes and dispensers unavailable in America. Most would sell to the collectors for hundreds of dollars with the rarest fetching thousands.

It was all rainbows and lolly-Pez until Pez America got wind of this eccentric rogue trader bringing in blacklisted Pez Dispensers. The CEO took the breach personally, obsessing over Glew in the same way his customers obsessed over his rare Pez treasures. The doco follows the cat and mouse battle that followed.

While the people involved in The Pez Outlaw take it seriously, the doco makers realise that, really, it’s just a fun little story. It’s presented like a heist romp, with Glew narrating and playing himself in the slick re-enactments. Its tone is humourous and any darkness in Glew’s personal story is breezed over to keep the story rolling and the entertainment value high.

The true crime genre is usually about the worst humans, atrocious actions or terrible injustice, so it’s refreshing to watch one where the stakes are real but low. It’s warmhearted and a little zany but still packs an emotional punch. All of this combines to make The Pez Outlaw an incredibly entertaining sugar rush.