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I know what it means to freeze to death
To lose a little life with every breath
To say goodbye to life on Earth
To come around again
Lord have mercy on the frozen man
— James Taylor, "The Frozen Man"
The poor man's time travel - unfortunately, it's one way.
Cryonics, as Applied Phlebotinum, is a mechanism by which a person can be frozen, halting the aging process and giving them a non-stop ticket on the Suspended Animation Express to the future. Once they get to the future, they can be thawed out and reanimated.
The result is that we get a Fish Out Of Water setup wherein a human — usually the audience's approximate contemporary — is thrust into The Future and has to deal.
It also works in reverse, as just about every cartoon and even some serious shows have played with the idea of turning a caveman or viking loose in modern society.
The Popsicle Splat, where something goes horribly wrong that kills some or all sleepers, is a potential danger.
The Human Popsicle usually takes one of three forms:
- Some mysterious phenomenon unexpectedly freezes our hero until he is found centuries later. Sometimes it's the fault of Green Rocks or overt magic, other times it's just because they got frozen inside a block of normal ice.
- Our hero uses a "sleeper ship" — a (typically) slower-than-light spacecraft which puts the occupants "on ice" to allow them to survive the travel times between stars. The ship gets knocked off course, or encounters a Negative Space Wedgie, and isn't found again until far into the future. Alternatively, in the hundreds of years the trip takes, humans manage to invent faster-than-light travel, and colonize the destination world long before the sleeper ship arrives. Bonus points if they flat out forget about the sleeper ship. Cue the proud colonists coming out of cryosleep only to find themselves snarled in space traffic. This is a use of cryonics that real scientists are actually interested in, but wouldn't dare take a stab at until all the kinks are worked out.
- A variation on the sleeper ship, in more realistic Speculative Fiction settings, is to put the hibernators on a spaceship and accelerate it to close to light-speed, letting Einsteinian physics slow down their personal timeframe with respect to the rest of us. The ship can thus reach faraway planets within the crew's lifetime, though the crew will still experience it as a one-way trip to the future.
- Our hero is frozen at or about the moment of death, in the hope that future generations will discover a cure for whatever killed them. Real companies exist today which offer this service, despite the fact that, currently, the whole "thawing you out and bringing you back to life" is an unsolved problem.
The ability to freeze and later revive some simple organisms (including human embryos) currently exists and has for some time (one motivation of cryonics is that some animals have an innate ability to survive a similar naturally induced state), but there are many technical problems with applying this to a fully grown human. Also, for legal reasons, people cannot currently be cryonically suspended until they are pronounced clinically dead, which could cause problems if brain damage occurs due to anoxia. For the sake of television, we just assume that whoever does the thawing has the technology to overcome this.
If you happen upon someone else who has been frozen, read all the manuals before thawing them out: nine times out of ten, they will turn out to be psychopathic murderers (just ask the crew of Red Dwarf).
There is an even cheaper version where, rather than actual freezing, the subject is placed in a state of induced hibernation— this will often slow but not stop the aging process, but whether or not this is relevant is up to the author.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Cowboy Bebop: Having been frozen fifty years or so ago is part of Faye's Back Story.
- Aeka and Sasami from Tenchi Muyo put themselves in suspended animation in the OVA universe while searching for Yosho, despite not needing to worry about dying of old age on the trip.
- According to Word of God, Aeka did it because she's a bit beauty-obsessed. Sasami...Did it because the trip is boring. (Did it confirm Sasami just woke up? I was unsure if she wasn't busy playing cards with the computer.)
- Yagyu Freesia in Jubei-chan fell into a glacier during a fight in Russia. Centuries later, Global Warming frees her. It's implied that she has an elemental affinity to ice, which explains how she survived.
- The end of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch reveals that Michel is not only a Fake Boss, but a replica of the real Michel, who had been frozen with Fuku, the real villain behind it all — yes, even behind the Great One.
- In Trigun, flashback sequences show a fleet of ships that left Earth looking for a new planet with a healthy sample of the human population frozen on board. These people eventually reproduce to colonize the entire old-west-style setting of the series.
- "Iceman" in Utawarerumono. Frozen by a god, so don't try this at home.
- In Saint Seiya, Aquarius Camus defeat his pupil (or student's pupil, in the anime) Cygnus Hyoga and literally creates an ice coffin for him so he can preserve the body for years, until Hyoga is ready to fight again. It takes a Golden Cloth's weapons and Shun almost dying to de-frost him and bring him back to the Sanctuary arc.
- And before that, said pupil of Camus, the Crystal Saint, was buried in an ice tomb by Hyoga himself after their fight, which ended up with Crystal's Tear Jerker of a death scene. Also, Hyoga's mother has been "sorta" buried in a similar environment aka a sunk ship under heavy ice layers and incredibly cold water placed in Siberia.
- Visual Novel Ever17 does this, involving an extremely elaborate plan to give the game a happy ending. The main character ends up waking up from Cryogenic storage to find he has two teenaged children almost as old as him, the result of a brief fling he had just before he got frozen. He takes this surprisingly well considering (They are very cute kids)
- Satella and Fiore in the Chrono Crusade manga both wake up over seventy years after the events of the series after Satella freezes them both during their battle. Azumaria's grandson is helping Satella adjust to it all while Fiore rode off with Shader into the sunset on a motorcycle.
- In G Gundam, a Mad Scientist who's about to be executed for treason is actually put into this state to have his Hot Blooded younger son and said son's Hot Scientist partner capture the Devil Gundam that he created. In reality, it's all a lie. The scientist never was a madman, but was framed by the son's boss and was frozen both to keep him from spilling the beans and use the old man to force his kid to work for the government.
Comic Books
- Comic book example: Captain America fell into the Arctic Ocean at the end of WWII and was miraculously preserved until the present day (originally, the early 1960s). His lack of death was attributed to the Super-Soldier Serum that gave him his powers.
- The science fiction comic Transmetropolitan did a Double Subversion of this trope in one issue: a 20th-century woman had her head frozen to escape a disease, but the container thawed once the company she used went under. Later, in the future, Nanomachines were used to reconstruct her, memories and all, from the remains left in the canister. In another issue, the protagonist discovers that his last ex-wife has had her head frozen with orders not to revive her until he's confirmed dead.
- The Phantom Zone in Superman comics prevents aging for those inside. One character, Mon-El, was put in there in the Present Day after he got lead poisoning, and survived until the 30th century, when a cure could be found.
- In Elf Quest the the buglike preservers can freeze time for living beings by encasing them in cocoons made out of "wrapstuff," and a bunch of the characters use this method for waiting out ten thousand years when they need to catch up with a group of time travelers.
- The Guardians of the Galaxy character Vance Astro spent 1,000 years in suspended animation for a slower-than-light trip to Alpha Centauri... Only to find Earthmen had invented hyperdrive and beaten him there by several centuries. As a bonus bummer, the long time he spent in the tube has damaged his body so that he needed a full-body life-support suit to survive.
- In Gold Digger, the character of Ancient Gina has used stasis and similar methods to survive since before the current universe started! She looks pretty good for her age.
Film
- Space travel in the Riddick setting requires suspended animation, seemingly induced by replacing the blood with blue slime.
- Well, science! states that one of the big problems with cryogenic freezing is ice crystals forming in the blood and tearing stuff up. Some sort of natural anti-freeze or, well, blood replacement, is going to be necessary.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Alien quadrilogy — suspended animation for space travel (in both cases, the trip is one of months, not centuries, but suspended animation is used to avoid the problem of having to pack several months' worth of food)
- Star Wars, Demolition Man — suspended animation as a method of incarceration
- Encino Man — accidental suspended animation
- Played straight in Iceman
- Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery — suspended animation as Time Travel
- Alien and Aliens both use suspended animation; Ripley enters "hypersleep" for the trip home, and both she and the Space Marines return to the planet in Aliens via hypersleep; Ripley and Newt then go back into hypersleep for the trip home.
- In the film version of Minority Report, it appears that potential murderers are kept in some form of suspended animation, although this is never made explicit.
- Forever Young — the protagonist volunteers for a suspended animation experiment that's supposed to last a year, but is forgotten about until 53 years later. Upon revival he is still young, but ages rapidly to his "real" age by the end of the film. (And that's supposed to be a happy ending?)
- Jason X - Having failed to execute Jason Voorhees, near-future humans simply freeze him, leaving the problem for far-future humans to solve.
- Idiocracy - military suspended animation experiment, supposed to only last a year, takes two totally average people 500 years into the future, where they find they're anything but average....
- The Disney version of Sleeping Beauty did a variation on this - the three good fairies put everyone in the kingdom to sleep while trying to free Sleeping Beauty, and Maleficent presented a vision of a washed-up old Prince finally going in to save her decades later.
- It wasn't as long as decades later in the Disney version—the prince that wakes her is first seen as a little boy standing over newborn Sleeping Beauty's cradle.
- The Woody Allen film Sleeper is a well-known cinematic example.
- Genesis II (1973), in which a NASA scientist taking part in an suspended animation experiment ends up sleeping a lot longer than he expected.
- Sherlock Holmes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) and Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993).
- The four astronauts in Planet Of The Apes (1968).
- Woody Allen's charactor Miles Monroe in Sleeper. He gets frozen in the 20th century, and thawed 200 years later - wrapped in tin foil for freshness.
- Eddie!
Literature
- In Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, the titular vessel is assumed by some characters to be a sleeper ship, though later novels reveal it to be something entirely different.
- The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein starts out being based around this trope. Until the protagonist sees a bunch of things in the future he woke up in that can only be explained by his eventually gaining access to conventional Time Travel.
- The short story "Doing Lennon" by Gregory Benford features a man who has himself cryogenically frozen in order to impersonate John Lennon in the future.
- In Fiasko, the 1986 Hard Science Fiction novel by Polish science-fiction writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem, the novel opens with a young mecha pilot on the Saturn moon Titan who is part of a group of groundwalker pilots who suffer a disastrous accident. Stuck in their damaged giant robotical suits without hope for help arriving in time, the pilots choose to activate the emergency Vitrification procedure instead of waiting to die from lack of oxygen or being crushed alive by ice, in the hope that they'll be found eventually and revived later. At the time of their death, there is no medical procedure to reverse the side-effects of Vitrification. The automated procedure means they must open their space suits to make sure no body heat is retained unevenly, then preserving fluid is injected into their skulls while the cockpit opens and their bodies are instantly shock-frozen. - Many decades later, re-opened mining operations on Titan find the remains of the walkers and their pilots. Medicine has progressed sufficiently for doctors to repair most cellular damage done by shock-freezing of tissue, but the three recovered corpses are so damaged and crushed that the doctors are forced to use all three bodies and cloned tissue to reconstruct one person from three, as only one brain could be revived at all. The resulting survivor has no memories of who he is, and all available identification records from the past are sketchy at best.
- The science-fiction novel The Centurions Empire is unusual in that the narration starts in Roman times and later progresses through several centuries into the high-tech future of the late 21st century. A Roman soldier dies in winter in the Alps and is frozen inside a glacier and preserved. In the course of the novel, he wakes up several times and goes into "sleep" again. It is revealed that there's a whole centuries-old secret society who has found the secret of "immortality" by inventing a low-tech cryogenic suspension, using only natural ice and drugs. At least one character in the novel does not survive, because he selected a part of a glacier that was still flowing, and his sleeping body was crushed by the moving ice masses.
- Nancy Etchemendy's collection of short stories, titled Cat in Glass, includes Shore Leave Blacks (?), the tale of a woman who left her family to join a crew that makes long space voyages to and from Earth. The resulting time dilation leaves her completely out of synch with the culture on Earth — a woman physically and mentally in her thirties who culturally is in her nineties. As she gets laughed at and stared at and even shunned for not knowing basic technologies, you get a good idea of why these spacefarers don't like shore leave. But she's steeled herself to get through the pain in order to attend a family reunion and possibly meet her son, who is likely in his seventies. Or possibly dead. And even if he's alive, he's not likely to appreciate the factors that led her to abandon him and head for the stars. She finally makes it to her old hometown, in the middle of nowhere, only to discover that her son is still relative to her in age, having joined a similar space program as soon as he was old enough — and so he completely understands what she's been going through.
- Larry Niven:
- Short stories and novels involving "corpsicles", his name for Human Popsicles.
- The Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf's Children (co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), with a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used.
- The Revelation Space novels by Alastair Reynolds are full of Human Popsicles, as they deal with a universe in which slower-than-light interstellar travel is common. Notably, they make some attempt to deal realistically with the health dangers of cryogenics, beyond outright failure.
- Ender's Game: The relativistic version was used several times, most notably to bring Mazer Rackham forward decades so he could teach the one who would command the IF's fleet. Oh, and Ender's quip at the end of the first book that he wants to live "forever" and so decides to travel the stars. (Though as Valentine points out, physics don't work that way.)
- Orson Scott Card does more with the idea in another book, The Worthing Saga, where he projects the decay of a society through the fact that the richest people can afford to undergo routine stasis and "live" practically forever while poorer people live regular lives that are literally a fraction as long.
- Rob Grant's Colony, an SF satire, involves a man who accidentally gets stuck onboard a space-going colony ship. He's knocked out, and awakens several generations later as a disembodied head in liquid, given a mechanical body which works very badly, and is subject to the horrifying revelation that the subsequent generations have resulted in a set of humanity almost entirely populated by morons.
- Played straight in the backstory to the Honorverse. The original Manticoran colonists put all their life savings in a series of Swiss bank accounts and traveled to their new homeworld on a slower-than-light sleeper ship, knowing that within the 600 years or so it would take for them to get there, A) someone probably would have invented FTL travel, and B) they'd be filthy rich from 600 years' worth of accrued compound interest.
- Roger Zelazny:
- This Mortal Mountain is about a party of mountain climbers attempting to climb a forty-mile-high mountain on a colonized planet. Their progress is impeded by a series of what appear to be glowing creatures (an angel, a bird, snakes, a bull, a dragon) telling them to "go back" and trying to make them fall. It turns out that these are holographic projections generated by a computer programmed to prevent anyone from entering a cave in the mountain. In the cave is the last survivor of the first expedition to colonize the planet, who has been cryogenically preserved to allow her to survive the disease that killed all the other colonists from the first expedition.
- The Graveyard Heart is about a group of people who spend a year in cryogenic preservation, then come out of it for a single day, and keep repeating this cycle.
- The Far Arena features a Roman Gladiator coming to the modern day. Among other things he freaks out about finding crucifixes around people necks, effortlessly butchers a top fencer in a duel, and reveals a huge amount about roman life to researchers.
Live Action TV
- Star Trek: Khan, one of the best remembered villains from the original series, was found aboard a 20th century sleeper ship in the episode "Space Seed". A Klingon sleeper ship also appeared in a Next Generation episode (here, unusually, the goal seemed to be not to allow a long trip, but to ensure there would still be Klingons around in case a war went badly).
- Humans from the 20th century who were cryogenically frozen to survive illness appeared in the episode "The Neutral Zone" (Season 1 finale).
- Similarly, Star Trek Voyager: "The 37s" features characters from the early twentieth century in suspended animation. One of them turns out to be Amelia Earhart.
- Stargate SG-1: A number of races possess stasis pods, which can preserve a humanoid (with very slow aging) for many thousands of years. Stargate Atlantis twice touched on the fact that this form of stasis does not completely halt aging, as all the frozen characters they encounter, having spent 10,000 years in statis, have aged well past their natural lifespan and would die of old age within hours (at best) of defrosting.
- Power Rangers In Space: Zhane was preserved in a stasis pod for several years while his injuries healed.
- Power Rangers Time Force: In the year 3000, criminals are frozen and miniaturized for storage.
- Zyuranger: The Zyuranger were frozen in their native time to come back in the present.
- So Weird: "James Garr": the titular character had been frozen years earlier, and was revived. This story touched on the possibility that such preservation might not preserve the human soul.
- Red Dwarf: Lister is transported three million years into the future while in a "stasis booth" (a bit more complicated, as it actually froze him in time). Stasis units are used or mentioned several more times in the series, along with "Deep Sleep" units, which appear to induce some form of hibernation. In series seven, a body is found literally encased in ice, although this is apparently done by a virus in the body, with no technological assistance (no explanation is given as to how the virus does this).
- Knight Rider: "Knight Rider 2000"'s central premise was that, by the year 2000, criminals would be cryogenically suspended for the duration of their prison terms.
- Doctor Who: Humanity froze itself to wait out an environmental catastrophe in "The Ark In Space", the Cybermen froze themselves to conserve resources in "Tombs of the Cybermen", and a number of other stories featured cold preservation.
- Farscape once featured a stasis process which turned Crichton into a metal statue.
- Firefly: When we first meet River, she appears to have been preserved in this way. However, that was for medical purposes, and she was presumably only frozen for a short period of time.
- The Twilight Zone episodes:
- In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", a criminal gang steals a million dollars in gold bars, then go into suspended animation for 100 years so they can spend the loot after the statute of limitations runs out.
- In "The Long Morrow", an astronaut is placed in suspended animation for a long trip to another star system.
- In the pilot episode of Lost In Space, the Robinson family are in suspended animation for their journey to Alpha Centauri.
- Adam Adamant Lives!: the title character is frozen in a block of ice in 1902 and thawed in 1966. Not only does an ordinary London hospital manage to thaw him with complete success, but his clothes don't even get wet in the process. Even the matches in his pocket still work just fine.
- In Cleopatra 2525, the main character is a stripper put in suspended animation for 500 years after a failed boob job (yes, really). And in the final Cliff Hanger episode, it was revealed that so was the Big Bad. Well, minus the boob job. It wouldn't look good on him.
- The 1960s British kids' puppet show Space Patrol (known as Planet Patrol in the US) had spaceships with "freezer cabinets" because, realistically, journeying around the Solar System took weeks or months.
- The titular character of Buck Rogers In The25th Century gets a one-way ticket to the future when his life support systems are frozen as well.
- The 1967 show "The Second Hundred Years" starring Monte Markham as the prospector who had been frozen in a glacier for decades.. AND ALSO his identical-looking, identical-age grandson. This trope was the entire concept of the show.
- VR5: We learn in one of the final episodes that a character killed early on was cryonically preserved.
- Played straight in an episode of seaQuest DSV, "Games," where a notorious war criminal is kept in a cryogenic freezer - until the freezer malfunctions, at which point everyone realizes that the killer pulled a Dead Person Impersonation by killing the prison warden and putting him in the freezer instead.
- The News Radio 'what if' episode "Space" takes place in the far future and Joe has to be revived from suspended animation to fix the reactor core. When he can't, the staff has to go into stasis (except Matthew and Bill) until the problem can be solved. Unfortunately, Matthew kicks out the plug on the stasis machines and kills them instantly.
Music
Professional Wrestling
- The original plan for WWE wrestler John Heidenreich's character was that he was a Nazi supersoldier who had been frozen since 1939. This idea was nixed in favour of making him a psychopath who wrote dreadful angsty poetry, talked to his "inner child" known as Little Johnny, tried to make friends with audience members, and supposedly kidnapped and anally violated announcer Michael Cole. Only in wrestling could the Nazi thing be more tasteful than the things they actually had him do.
- Another wrestling example is Wrestling Society X's Matt Classic, a wrestler who was supposedly in a coma (without aging!) for 40 years and uses old-fashioned, 1960s style moves such as the airplane spin, judo chop, and full body slam.
Video Games
- The two main characters in Crystalis emerge from suspended animation.
- A lot of futuristic videogames use this trope. Some examples:
- The opening sequence in Freelancer shows four "Sleeper Ships" pounding their way through the Coalition blockade and heading towards the Sirius sector.
- In Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, the Human colonies in Planet come from a big spaceship, the U.N. Unity, sent by the United Nations to build a colony in another planet, filled with thousands of cryogenically frozen people.
- Crew for new ships in Homeworld are awakened from the massive bays of frozen colonists onboard the mothership. How many there are in total depends on how many you save in the second mission, up to 600,000.
- In the Half-Life series, stasis used as a plot device when long passage of time is needed, as the game follows the philosophy that everything the main character experiences must also be experienced by the player, and it wouldn't be too popular with either gamers or programmers if they had to go through several years of mundane experiences. So far, stasis has been used three times throughout the series: Once in the twenty-or so years between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2, once to depict the passage of a week in the middle of Half-Life 2, and a much shorter stay of less than a day between Half-Life 2 and Episode One.
- Many Sci Fi-Games tend to use the more advanced and less explained variant called Stasis. In Starcraft for example it is used as a prison and offensive/defensive technique. Interestingly enough: ships in a stasis field are still able to float.
- Mass Effect offers a biotic talent called "Stasis," although it seems to temporarily paralyze victims rather than any of the more conventional applications of this trope.
- In Day Of The Tentacle, the broken Chron-O-Johns are incapable of transporting organic matter, which means that a hamster from the present day gets the popsicle treatment to be used in the future. Restoring the hamster requires nothing more than a microwave and a sweater that's been forced to take The Slow Path by spending two hundred years in a tumble dryer.
- Play straight with Jean Bison in the second Sly Cooper game.
- Nina and Anna Williams from the Tekken series were frozen for the twenty years between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3. Nina's resulting amnesia has since been a consistent part of her character, but neither woman is portrayed as ever having any trouble adjusting to having missed the past twenty years. Indeed, the real point was presumably to preserve these two characters in their early twenties while introducing adult children of characters from the previous games.
- In Project Eden has a character frozen in time for 15 years, he manages to get though the situation (His release) with apparently minimum confusion and headaches despite the fact that one of his daughters is now an adult (and part of a futuristic police force)and the other daughter has gone mad and started making monstrous freaks and selling drugs.
- In Street Fighter III, Remy's ending shows him checking on his deceased older sister, who is encased in ice.
- Samus' gunship in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption includes a cryostasis pod built into the pilot's chair, presumably because of space restrictions on the amount of oxygen, food, water, etc. the ship can carry. The Federation also uses cold stasis to transport nasties like metroids, Phazon and the like, with predictable results.
- In a late part of the game Space Quest 5, Roger Wilco is forced to freeze his love interest to protect her from a... mutagen that is slowly turning everyone in the story into blobs of garbage (or something like that). He puts her into a stasis pod that actually has a very major hint for the puzzle on the instruction panel. ("Freeze Minister of ... 30 seconds" Anything else kills you, or her. If you take too short, she wakes up as a shambling blob and kills you, any more and you can't possibly bring her out of hibernation)
Web Comics
- In Schlock Mercenary, the (real) Gav Bleuel put himself into suspended animation in the 21st century, and is later awoken (after being found in a disused storage locker) in the 31st, where he is accidentally duplicated nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
- For fun in this
 Loserz strip.
- In Freefall, long-faring space travel is done in "cold sleep".
Western Animation
- Futurama: Fry is thrust into the year 3000 when he falls into a cryonic pod. We later find that his girlfriend, Pauly Shore, and That Guy had all undertaken the same process (the last of which was frozen to survive terminal boneitis).
- Demona in Gargoyles. Though in her case, she was not frozen, but was instead made immortal nearly a millenium ago when her soul was magically linked to Mac Beth's.
- The other survivors of Clan Wyvern (including her then-lover Goliath) fit this trope far more closely, having been placed into stone sleep "Until the castle rises above the clouds." and reviving atop the tallest skyscraper in the world about 1000 years later.
- Batman The Animated Series: Mr. Freeze himself was not cryonically preserved, but his condition and powers resulted from an accident while cryonically preserving his wife.
- Parodied in the South Park episode "Prehistoric Ice Man", in which a man is discovered frozen in ice, is successfully thawed... and turns out to be from 1996. Later, in the tenth season episode "Go God Go", Cartman tries to freeze himself in the snow on a mountain top to avoid having to wait the last three weeks for a new video game console. An avalanche covers him and he isn't found and unfrozen for 500 years, awakening in a Buck Rogers parody.
- Avoided in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, where the ship and body of The Viking Prince, frozen in a glacier for a thousand years, were the MacGuffin... but it was the genetic material of the dead body they were interested in, with the possibility of the Prince's survival never even being raised.
- Similarly, in Avatar The Last Airbender, Aang gets frozen into an iceberg for a hundred years. Word Of God says he survived because of the Avatar Spirit.
- Parodically referenced by The Simpsons in the episode where Bart uses a walkie-talkie to imitate a child trapped in the bottom of a well. Prof. Frink suggests that the town use cryonics to freeze the boy so he can be rescued in the future. Poking fun at the trope while combining it with patented Simpsons Somebody Elses Problem humor. Also used straight in the episode Jasper Beardley tries to cryonically freeze himself to see the future in the Kwik-E-Mart's freezer section, except that he woke up after just a couple days.
- Spongebob Squarepants had an episode with Squidward being locked in the Krusty Krab freezer and not let out for 2000 years; he ended up in a parody of the Shiny Future (literally everything was chrome) filled with Spongebob clones, and ended up in a fetal position screaming "Future!"
- Narrowly avoided in Sherlock Holmes In The Twenty Second Century: Lestrade is convinced that Moriarty somehow survived his "death" at Reichenbach Falls as a Human Popsicle, but Holmes eventually finds a very dead Moriarty still entombed in the ice — but a tiny drill-hole into the ice prompts Holmes to deduce that their adversary is actually a clone of Moriarty. Of course, Holmes's insistence that the new Moriarty could not have been the same man, reanimated, is a bit odd in light of the fact that Holmes himself was transported to the world of the future when his own well-preserved corpse, which had been packed in honey (a reference to Holmes's retirement as a beekeeper) after his eventual death, was reanimated and rejuvenated by a bunch of Applied Phlebotinum.
- Probably because he was THERE, to make very, very sure Moriarty was Deader then Dead, not Mostly Dead. (And did the deed himself.)
- Omi uses the "Orb of Tornami" with his particular ice incantation to freeze himself into the future twice in Xiaolin Showdown. This makes him, technically speaking, the oldest character to appear in the series, and also the youngest looking. In a show where the most powerful goodies and baddies never age, that's an achievement.
- Duck Dodgers' titular hero, according to the theme song and certain episodes, was one of these. The members of Megadeth were apparently frozen as well.
Western Animation
- Thundercats: The Thundercats used a hibernation system to make the long trip to Third Earth. Though we are told that this slowed but did not stop their aging, only Lion-O showed any signs of aging (presumably because he was at an age where four or five years made a big difference).
- Lion-o's capsule actually malfunctioned, and didn't inhibit his aging physically.
- Which would have meant that the trip was about 10 years long, Or that Thundercats have a looong childhood.
Other
- The original, earliest versions of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century got Buck into said century via the device of strange gasses in an abandoned mine which put him into suspended animation for nearly five hundred years. The Buster Crabbe serial used an experimental gas aboard his airship. The 1970s TV show froze him solid in space.
- Transformers played around with this trope, a bit; thanks to their millennia-long lifespans, the Ark and Nemesis crews were knocked into a coma-like stasis lock after both ships crashed...and didn't awaken until the volcano the Autobot ship crashed into erupted and jarred the ship's computer active, forty-five million years later. This is also an example of the trope working in reverse, as the crash happened shortly before Earth's post-dinosaur Ice Age.
- Skyfire is a closer example of the trope, having been buried in ice for millions of years before the Autobot/Decepticon war reawakens him.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: The passengers on the last live ship on (Brontitall in the radio series; Frogstar B in the novels) are put in suspended animation because the ship's robot crew refuse to take off without a supply of lemon-soaked paper napkins. The planet is dead and no napkins are coming, so nine hundred years later the passengers are still waiting.
- And also regularly woken up so they can be served coffee. And aging noticeably from their brief periods awake.
- The ship heading toward prehistoric Earth that Arthur and Ford end up on carry millions of frozen marketing execs, hair specialists, phone hygienists and the like. Apparently they're regularly taken out of stasis for exercise routines - perhaps being frozen for too long is bad for health? Also, the crew isn't frozen - the Captain has been in his bath since takeoff.
Real Life
- The common wood frog has freeze tolerance: it survives freezing temperatures with ice nucleators regulating ice formation as well as massive amounts of glucose as a natural anti-freeze. Though the frog is frozen, the glucose helps prevent "freezer burn"—cellular damage caused by ice—that would essentially kill anything. When warm weather returns, it is dependent on a chemical reaction that should restart its heart, thus recirculating fluids and returning the frog to life.
- Tardigrades. Just...tardigrades.
- To clarify: Tardigrades, small invertebrates approximately one millimeter in length, can enter a dehydrated state and survive without food or water for over ten years. As for the "frozen" half of being a popsicle, they can be chilled to 1 Kelvin (that is, one degree above absolute zero) for a few minutes and survive. And this doesn't even touch on their other abilities, such as surviving being put in the vacuum of space and directly exposed to the Sun.
- They're working on it. Recent successful thransplant of frozen pig's liver means that some major breakthrough apparently has been achieved.
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