Curtis Allina, a candy company executive who presided over a powerful innovation in marketing that was less about the candy itself than it was about the container it came in  and who in unintended consequence created a universe of enraptured collectors  died Dec. 15 at his home in Olympia, Wash. Mr. Allina, who helped bring the world the modern Pez dispenser, was 87.

The cause was heart failure, his son, Johnny, said.

For nearly three decades after World War II, Mr. Allina was the vice president in charge of United States operations at what is now Pez Candy. In 1955, at his urging, what had been an austerely packaged Austrian confection for adults took on vibrant new life as a children’s product.

That year, the first character dispensers, as they are known in the parlance of Peziana, were issued, giving birth to what is today a highly collectible pop-cultural artifact. Instantly recognizable, the dispensers are slim plastic containers, usually anthropomorphic in design, whose heads  modeled after those of TV characters, cartoon figures or historical personages  flip back to disgorge brick-shaped pieces of candy.