If you never traded PEZ dispensers with your friends as a kid, did you even have a childhood?

The only thing better than a tasty candy is a tasty candy that you can play with. PEZ accomplished both of these goals, offering us little sugary rectangles, all from the open heads of our favorite cartoon characters! How cool is that?

But what goes into the creation of a PEZ dispenser? 

Former PEZ U.S. President, Scott McWhinnie, lifted the curtain during an interview in Collecting PEZ by David Welch.

"We are obviously consumers," said McWhinnie. "We are watching movies...we are watching TV...we have children. There's a group of us internally, and we sit down and we talk about if we're interested in acquiring a license for a different character or if we want to develop our own character that's not a licensed character."

Some characters enjoy a longer reign than others, and some go through multiple iterations, depending on how popular it is.

"The Mickey Mouse dispenser has probably changed about twenty times since the first initial one we put out," said McWhinnie. "You could have a whole collection of Mickey Mouses, each one could be different. They might get revised for many different reasons to improve something technically involved...the Disney Company and ourselves may have gotten together to say, 'The character has changed a bit over the years, so why don't we make it like today's Mickey Mouse?'...We have to keep up with the likeness. All of those things cause change with the dispensers. And in doing so, they might become valuable to the collectors, but that's not the reason we do it."

McWhinnie also shared a secret regarding how the company chose which characters deserved a place on their sacred dispensers.

"Another rule of thumb is we tend to do oldies but goodies, or in the licensing business, what's referred to as classics, as opposed to this week's or this month's hot movie or TV show," said McWhinnie. "There are many reasons for this. I'll be honest with you, one of the reasons being, we want the item to be on the market for as long as possible so that we can pay out the mold costs."