For our summer special season this year, we take at look back at the days with ice lollies and frozen snacks went all freaky, geeky, and intergalactic! In this first chapter we discover how ice lollies could get you into Moon Fleet, fighting Daleks with Doctor Who, encountering Red Devils and Jelly Terrors, plus adventuring with a host of Gerry Anderson characters!
Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! Well, it's still summer, or so I am told - to be honest, it's hard to tell with all the rain! However I'll take it on good faith and use it as the flimsiest of excuses to once more bang on about some novelty ice lolly tat! Now where were we in this unofficial history of frozen gimmicks and frosted crap?
Ah yes I remember! We were looking at the practice of not just tieing-in brands to your wares but actually inventing lollies to bear the brand, and last time we were charting the rise and fall of a host of '60s lollies produced in a strange chiller cabinet symbiosis with Gerry Anderson puppets shows. To briefly get you up to speed, in the early 1960s when the ice lolly industry was in its infancy it seemed like a smart gimmick to create frozen snacks that were not just running tie-in promotions but were in themselves a tie-in to a popular brand. However the frost giants Walls and Lyons Maid soon realised that while this sold many a lolly in the short term, what was popular in the playground tended to have a shelf life of only a few years. Hence rather than having to create and market new lines of branded lollies every couple of years to keep on getting a significant slice of the pocket money market, it was better to create lollies not yoked to the shows and characters du jour. Hence the early '70s saw the rise of competing flavours with snappy names and strong images of their own.
However, as is often the case, this kind of thing tends to come and go in cycles, and by the end of the '70s, branded lollies came once more into vogue. And in the icy palaces of Lyons Maid, it started in a small humble way with a range of fruit flavoured lollies, aimed at the under tens, and branded as frosty incarnations of popular cartoon characters. In 1971, Roger Hargreaves published six little story books with simple but eye-catching illustrations, and thus the Mr Men were born. The books were a huge hit and in 1974, they were adapted and animated as a TV series narrated by the great Arthur Lowe, propelling the book series to new heights of popularity.
Hence in March 1976, Lyons Maid launched the Mr Men ice lollies. Priced a 4p, these little lollies came in a rather vague sounding "mixed fruits flavour". But they were never designed to sell on their taste, rather the opening gambit was that one of six different Mr Men would be revealed when you opened the wrapper. OK not earth-shatteringly exciting but clearly they went down a treat with the playground crowd as the range would endure for several years. And while they retained the less than appealing 'mixed fruit flavour', later incarnations would have different Mr Men on the wrappers and boasted novelty sticks with jokes and wrappers with little activities such as quiz questions on them.
Evidently emboldened by the sales of the Mr Men lollies, Lyons Maid were quick to release two more branded lollies later in 1976. Having got the younger end of the market sewn up by Mr Tickles and his pals, the Sinister Three Dancing Children who ran Lyons Maid launched two more lollies aimed at capturing old kids' pocket money. First was a lolly cashing in on the huge success of The Six Million Dollar Man, and hence in the summer of '76 you could enjoy the Bionic Lolly! This was a lemonade and spearmint flavour affair that mercifully didn't cost six million dollars, and could be yours for a mere 8p. ,
I'm not sure whether it was down to Colonel Steve Austin's star burning too bright and too fast, but there doesn't seem to have been much fuss or gimmickry wheeled out the Bionic Lolly. And I always thought that the portrait on the wrapper looked more like the late great Martin Landau than Lee Majors. And that might have had something to do with the fact that around the same time Lyons Maid launched the Space 1999 lolly.
Boasting bold lime, vanilla and strawberry flavours, plus a soft centre, this was clearly a better class of icy snack from the off, and what's more, it was a penny cheaper than its Bionic rival. Furthermore the Space 1999 lolly came with free picture cards to collect! And there was even an exciting TV ad with bespoke cartoon action to plug the next arrival too!
Clearly old Gerry Anderson had a far better grasp of the tie-in lolly business than Oscar Goldman. He might not have had a TV in his briefcase, but Gerry knew what shifted lollies! And while the cards might have featured some dubious artwork, kids loved 'em. However all of this was just the beginning, for the following year in 1977, something would come out that was to change the face of merchandising forever, something from a galaxy far far away...
Welcome once again dear fiends to the 'Orrible 'Ouse of Terrible Old Tat! And while summer is still here (well, as much as it ever is in Britain), we are continuing our explorations of the contents of chiller cabinets from years gone by! Now then, in recent raids to the cryogenic vaults of the 'Orrible Old 'Ouse... well, some old cardboard boxes at any rate... we've previously uncovered some SF tie-in lollies of yesteryear. However allying your lollies with a popular brand is nothing new...
Now the British frozen snack market was dominated by two titans, twin colossi of the chiller cabinets. One was Walls, whose Sky Rays and Dalek's Death Ray lollies we have already encountered. The other however was Lyons Maid, whose long-serving logo of three children performing some strange ritual dance, presumably to summon up an ice cream van, still lingers in the minds of men as a potent occult symbol meaning "ice lollies sold here".
"And oh how they danced... the little children of the ice cream van..."
And way back at the dawn of the Ice Lolly Wars, Lyons Maid very quickly got in on the tie-in gimmick. However they had their own spin on it, for rather than doing a promotion that tie-in an existing lolly to something popular (as Walls' Sky Ray had done with it's Doctor Who campaigns) instead they launched a pair of lollies directly tied to popular properties. These were the Zoom and the Seajet, the official icy snacks for Fireball XL5 and Stingray respectively. A few years later they would repeat the same trick again with more lollies twinned with various Gerry Anderson puppet series. Hence in 1967, came a Thunderbirds lolly, the Fab, which was priced at 6d, and consisted of strawberry fruit ice and vanilla ice cream, with a top dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.
Of course, there were the usual promotional campaigns to accompany these ice-cold treats too. You could collect wrappers and get models of the famous vehicles from the show - collecting Zooms got you a miniature Fireball XL5, while Seajet wrappers could net you your very own Airfix model of Stingray. Additionally often the lollies came with colourful cars to collect, with Zoom first offering cards featuring Steve Zodiac and co., but offering Thunderbirds cards in the later '60s.
Then in 1968, they launched a Captain Scarlet lolly called Orbit - this one was a tad more expensive at 9d, and was pretty much a re-tooled Zoom, but flavoured chocolate and orange. Meanwhile the Zoom lolly itself got yet another puppet partner, and was tied into Joe 90!
However it is interesting to note that several of these breeds of lolly outlived the properties they were launched to cash in on, with the likes of Zooms, Orbits and Fabs eventually dropping their puppet pal brandings, and would populate the chiller cabinets as brands in their own right for several years to come. Possibly this might explain why the bosses at Lyons Maids - who I still suspect were actually the slightly sinister trio of dancing children on the logo - decided to not create anymore closely branded lollies for quite some time. Instead they concentrated on making lollies in ever more inventive flavours with names like Cornish Treasure, Red Devil and Apple Jack. However in the late '70s, this trend for branded lollies would return bigger and better... But that's a tale for another day...
Ah Lego! How I loved thee! But I built wardroids and space cities, an Tie Fighter and X Wing for my Star Wars figures, a Nautilus style submarine for my little Lego fellas and even a motorised K9... One of the earliest toys I remember owning and one of the last to go before hormones demanded I put aside childish things... Bestest toy ever invented? I think so...
Now the possibilities offered by unlimited bricks, time and space are damn near infinite! And while I'd be tempted to to attempt some arty cleverness in the vein of Nathan Sawaya, a more appropriate answer would be the project I'd have done given this opportunity as a nipper...
And that would be a massive undertaking inspired by one of my other childhood obsessions, the scifi TV sagas of Mr Gerry Anderson... which I never had nearly enough bricks for back then...
Yes, I'd build Lego Mini Figure scaled versions of all the Thunderbirds and their super secret base, Tracy Island. But I wouldn't stop there... I'd go on to translate his whole universe in little plastic bricks; from Captain Scarlet's Cloudbase in the heavens, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol HQ at Marineville in the seas, and the moonbases of UFO and Space 1999! All with their attendant vehicles of course!
