Licensed Australian Ice-Creams
It all seemed so natural. You went to see the latest summer blockbuster. You became obsessed overnight. You had to buy the toys, the posters and the swap-cards. You cut out articles about the movie from magazines and newspapers and kept them in a folder. You bought the cereal and tried to collect all the little bits and pieces you could find. But something was missing.
It’s a long hot summer and you need to keep cool. You walk past your local milk-bar, they have a colourful sign in the window – “Return of the Jedi – 30c”! The sneaky marketeers have married you needs and desires, you can now eat your favourite movie, you are sold, sold, sold!
One advantage of being the driest vegetated continent on the planet is that you often have an excuse to eat ice cream. Or icy poles, ice blocks or any other type of child’s ice treat. When I was a kid we had an embarrasment of riches on the ice cream front, for whatever movie, TV show or other fad came along there was a licensed ice cream.
The golden age of ice cream was 1975-85. I remember ice creams promoting Kiss, Star Trek, Star Wars, Spiderman, Masters of the Universe and a dozen others. Often the ice creams featured competitions and premiums, like the Star Trek stickers, or Toltoys action figures. Anyway I’m sure you’ve all stopped reading by now and have skipped down to the pics, so I’ll finish up.
(Above) Rear of the Jedi Jelly box showing the Toltoys competition prizes (Amazingly the actual speeder-bike mock-up shown in the photographs was recently found here in Melbourne, that’s a story in itself believe me!)
Empire Strikes Back wrapper front (Above), and rear (Below)
A Jedi-Jelly wrapper (Above) , and Star Wars wrapper (Below). These two are the corresponding wrappers for the boxes shown above.
The Toltoys competition details on the rear of the Star Wars wrapper (below).
Finally the best stuff (in my opinion anyway!) the store displays! All are around 40cm x 25cm and made of cardboard. First of all the Jedi Jelly display (below)
(Below) Star Trek and Spiderman displays, both from 1979.
Finally as the golden era came to an end, a Masters of the Universe display from 1985. (Below)
I’m on the trail of more ice-cream items, so stay tuned for future updates!
Will
Those are incredible cool, Will. Thanks for posting them!
The Star Wars popsicles were just a normal normal popsicle in a fancy wrapper. Hehe. The Return of the Jedi one was nice. I remember eating that one.
The Black Hole had icey-poles too…the tube ones. They came in blue and 'black' which was unheard of then too 🙂
You've just jogged my memory about the Black Hole ones, I remember them now. Would love to find a wrapper or box. In Canada they had Black Hole icey poles with a competition for the MEGO toys on the box, wonder if we did too?
Hmmmm Will
Actually it was Shreddies Cereal that had the MEGO Black Hole competition, according to the MEGO Musuem.
Will
I still have dreams about the Star Wars jelly icypole, such an awesome part of my childhood, but I had forgotten about the He-man icypoles until I saw then on here and then the memory of eating a He-man (never a Skelator, what am I some kind of facist?) icypole came flooding back! I miss the 80s and their shameless, shamless junkfood promotions.
The Return of the Jedi ice-cream was awesome. I remember having panic attacks at the time knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be around for ever