Plastic snowman-shaped flavoured icecapades

Out of any of the toys and games in our catalogue, this was probably the one that was most consistently denied us in our youth. Paradoxically, Mr Frosty is neither a toy nor a game. It’s just a thing we wanted, though it was very much situated somewhere within the last forty-or-so pages of Freemans, so it counts. The parental argument against buying one went something like this: it’ll join that collection of stuff you only use once and then leave in the back of the cupboard forever. This, of course, was completely correct (as anyone who’s ever owned a Soda Stream will be able to corroborate).

But, whilst acknowledging that one indisputable truth, don’t forget that we’re talking about the time when a frozen drink normally came in a clear plastic tube that gave your fingers frostbite. A Slush Puppy, or anything approaching it in those days, was a luxury. So to own something that promised to recreate the “crushed ice soft drink” experience in your own kitchen seemed like a crazed futuristic fantasy.

And fantasy it was. For what was Mr Frosty if not merely a plastic machine for breaking ice cubes into bits¹? Essentially, the best he could hope to deliver from the flue at the base of his polar innards was something akin to a Lilliputian “sno-cone” (the American non-slushy sort). We had no name for this in the UK; thus was the “ice crunchie” born. Percy Penguin, claimed the blurb on the box, was there to provide a fruity flavour (“Thank you, Percy!”) - for which, read “squirt some cordial over the top”.

However, these were not drawbacks by any stretch of the imagination. The potential parties you already had planned in your head cast you as barkeep in your road’s coolest crushed ice soft drinks nightclub. Mr Frosty, of course, was resident in the chill-out room².

²Mr Frosty has recently undergone what people on daytime telly call “a makeover”. Gone are the days of a rudimentary snowman-shaped toy, the current retail version has something of the Ghostbusters’ Staypuft Marshmallow Man about him. Or that artificially white ice cream they sell in the ‘States. Perhaps he should be called Mr Softee? Crucially, that difficult-to-crank handle now forms part of a very chi chi red, white and blue bobble hat. He is, however, still suspiciously unwilling to divulge his first name. Still preserving that air of mystery for ver laydeez, eh, Frosty?