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Human Popsicle is a trope about time-travelers being cryogenically frozen. The title can be easily confused for things like Harmless Freezing, where someone gets coated in a block of ice and is just fine afterward, or for when people fall into ice-water and freeze instantly.

Examples will be alphabetized by namespace, comments and potholes will be bolded.

Wicks needed: 54/54

Results:

  • Correct: 19/54, or ~35%
  • Misuse: 7/54, or ~13%
  • Science, no time-travel: 3/54, or ~5%
  • No science, time travel: 10/54, or ~18%
  • ZCE/unsortable: 15/54 or ~27%


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    Correct 
  1. Terminator Twosome: Demolition Man inverts the trope, sending two people from the present into the future. One is a psychotic criminal "mistakenly" unfrozen from Cryogenic Sleep, the other is a present-day cop also in cryogenic sleep for a crime he was framed for by said psychotic criminal, unfrozen to deal with someone simply too evil and dangerous for the wimpified future cops to handle.
  2. Victorian Novel Disease: The Pale Bride of Analogue: A Hate Story suffered a non-Victorian version of the trope. Though the exact nature of her disease is left ambiguous, it compromised her immune system and left her with only a few years to live. The situation was so bleak that her father opted to place her in suspended animation instead. When the mysterious Girl In A Box was awakened centuries later, culture and technology had regressed so severely aboard the ship that her new adoptive family simply couldn't grasp that she was ill. All they saw was an unusually pale, beautiful girl.
  3. We Are as Mayflies: In an extreme example, the titular Transformers may very well be incapable of dying of old age, so long as they remain properly nourished. Indeed, throughout the entire franchise, no Transformer has ever been observed to die of natural causes, on or offscreen. The characters from the first series went into suspended animation four million years ago, and when they woke up, all their old acquaintances were still fighting the war. They're rarely shown as being affected by old age (except for one character, Kup), and one character, Vector Prime, may very well be nearly as old as time itself.
  4. Animation.Happy Heroes: In Season 8 episode 32, Careless S. discovers what looks like the grandmaster Xiao Haha frozen in a secret room in the King's castle and thinks he froze him years ago, and he, Sweet S., and Smart S. try to unfreeze him. While he's right about the "frozen years ago" part, it's not actually Xiao Haha; when they finally do unfreeze him, they find out it's actually another old teacher of the King's, whom he froze because he was fed up with him giving him so much homework.
  5. Anime.Turn A Gundam: Cryostasis is how the Moonrace are able to live for several hundred years. Some have even been in stasis from the Black History, such as Corin Nander being a veteran from the After Colony era. This is done to keep overpopulation from overwhelming the Moon's limited resources. People are frozen and un-frozen in shifts, meaning that children can physically age more than their parents, such as when a little old lady refers to a young woman as "Mama".
  6. Awesome.Jason X: Jason manages to chop someone's arm off, whilst cryogenically frozen. The wound would have been lethal if not for future medical technology. Even doing time as a Human Popsicle, Jason is still a killer.
  7. Characters.Freefall: Uplifted chimps were designed as soldiers who could be held in cryo most of the time. Which might explain how Bowman has lived nearly a century when chimps usually die before their sixties.
  8. Fanfic.Not Quite Shodan: The main character's origins are still occasionally mentioned, and in one case allow Ivy to be sympathetic to a teenage boy found in a capsule after being frozen since 1993.
  9. GrandUnifiedTimeline.The Postwar Era: After stealing $1 million worth of gold bullion, Farwell, DeCruz, Brooks and Erbie enter suspended animation for 100 years so that they will be free to sell the gold without being pursued by the authorities. (The Twilight Zone (1959))
  10. IDidWhatIHadToDo.Live Action TV: Wayward Pines: Dr. Pilcher predicts that humanity would doom itself in a matter of centuries. His attempts to warn the world community result in him being the laughingstock of the world. Being already wealthy, he starts a project to use cryogenics to preserve the best and the brightest to repopulate the human race about 2000 years later.
  11. Literature.Blindfold: All starships are equipped with cryotubes to allow people to spend most of the journey (50 years) asleep. Dokken keeps one of them in a secret location, using it periodically to "skip forward" to see his plans unfold without taking The Slow Path. He also feels tired, if he waits too long before entering the tube, as it appears to be "recharging" him. This is also what has allowed him to survive for over two centuries and has given him a broad perspective on life in the colony. The unfortunate side effect is that Dokken is now sterile.
  12. Literature.Proxima: Yuri was cryogenically frozen by his parents at some point in the 21st century and awakened on Mars in the mid-2100s.
  13. Manga.King Of Thorn: The story begins when the main character, Kasumi, and 159 other people are chosen to go into cold sleep until a cure is found for their mysterious disease, the Medusa virus.
  14. Manga.Trigun: The entire original generation of humans on Gunsmoke. The "Old Men" in Sky City are still held in suspended animation for reasons unexplained. Low context but seems to count.
  15. Podcast.Swindled: Colton "The Barefoot Bandit" Moore makes a rare public re-appearance after his parole when he attempts to crowdfund enough money to have his cancer-stricken mother cryogenically frozen. Unfortunately, the goal falls short and Colton's mother dies.
  16. Recap.Animaniacs Episode 40: Brain's plan is to freeze him and Pinky for 40 years.
  17. Recap.Bob Chipman: At the end of the tape, Retrothinker turned himself into a Human Popsicle to be frozen until 2025, where he could awaken in the future and experience a new golden age of games and technology without having to wait for it.
  18. VisualNovel.Snatcher: Gillian and Jamie were both put into suspended animation during the '90s, where they remained for 48 years.
  19. Webcomic.Arthur King Of Time And Space: In the baseline arc, the False Guenevere dies of her Incurable Cough of Death, just as she does in the sources. In the space arc, they Human Popsicle her and find a cure many years later.

    Misuse— No time-travel or science 
  1. Characters.Boxxy Quest The Shifted Spires: In the Facebook Snowfield, he tries to Smoke Out, but the powder combines with the snow to freeze him solid.
  2. Characters.Dice Funk Ilium: When the Sacrum collapses over her, she takes possession of the First Frost, and the Hydra forms a protective ice bubble around her and itself to shield them from the falling rubble.
  3. ElementalPowers.Video Games: In Genji: Dawn of a Samurai there are four basic elements which can be use both by the player and the enemies and each of them has a status effect and color: Fire (Red, set ablaze), Ice (Blue, freeze), Lightning (Yellow, paralyze) and Poison (Purple, intoxicate). Used to mean "ice powers".
  4. Funny.Hololive Holo No Graffiti: Flare's exasperated by the sudden amount of Ayame, and approaches the "cooling element" with apprehension. When it's revealed that it works by thoroughly freezing the one who eats it, as demonstrated by Watame and Fubuki, Flare decides to have none of it. Harmless Freezing
  5. Literature.Wings Of Fire: The fate of the IceWings who lose the Diamond Trial, as well as Foeslayer when she isn't being killed over and over again by the dragons in the trial, until she is freed by Winter. Not a lot of context, but doesn't imply any sort of time-travel cryo-state...
  6. Recap.Evil Con Carne S 0 E 6 Tiptoe Through The Tulips: Ghastly is a sexy human popsicle for her sleeping method. Huh??? Putting it here mostly because sleeping doesn't imply any sort of time travel stuff
  7. Series.I Zombie: : One of the benefits of being a zombie is that they can be frozen and later thawed without any preparation or difficulty. When Blaine takes over the gangs in the first season, he keeps spare thugs in the freezer. In the second season Major freezes the zombies on his hitlist while they work on a cure, rather than killing them like Max Rager wants. Justified Harmless Freezing

    Possible misuse; Scientifically frozen, but no time-travel 
  1. Anime.Zoids Chaotic Century: This is how the group first finds him, frozen solid by an experiment of his trying to create artificial snow.
  2. Characters.Lab Rats: Gets frozen solid by his brother's new freeze ray after Chase tricked him.
  3. ComicBook.Iron Man: While he was clinically dead for a bit, Stark was immediately put into a cryogenic state so that Dr. Sondheim and Abe Zimmer could get to work literally rebuilding his nervous system.

    Possible misuse; Frozen through non-scientific means, but still time-traveled 
  1. Anime.Pokemon The Original Series: If you count Pokémon, Pryce's Piloswine counts. In "As Cold As Pryce", we learn it was frozen in a glacier for many years, and defrosted harmlessly.
  2. Characters.Lego Marvel Super Heroes: Cap was frozen towards the end of World War II and only recently revived.
  3. Characters.MCU Red Skull: In a sense, he serves as this to Steve Rogers' journey as Captain America. Captain America: The First Avenger - Steve's MCU debut - involved Cap battling a Tesseract / Infinity (Space) Stone-wielding Red Skull before getting frozen and unthawing in the 21st century. The ending of Avengers: Endgame has Steve travelling back in time and returning the Infinity Stones to their respective eras, which included the Soul Stone in 2014's Vormir - which was when and where the Red Skull was serving as the Stonekeeper.
  4. Characters.Wally And Osborne: A giant prehistoric penguin that was unfrozen by Wally and Osborne. Tends to abuse Osborne.
  5. Characters.Xena Warrior Princess: Xena and Gabrielle go to sleep for thirty years in coffins of ice and awake to find Eve has aged to adulthood.
  6. ComicBook.Viking Prince: In one Sgt. Rock storyline, Jon is found preserved in ice during World War II.
  7. DarthWiki.Millville Mornings: In the Time Travel arc, Clark gets frozen when he falls into the lake on an ice fishing trip. He gets found a thousand years later by ice farmers in a world that's mostly flooded.
  8. Film.Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: A prehistoric giant octopus and a megalodon shark have been frozen in an Alaskan glacier for millions of years when they're suddenly freed by illegal sonar experiments / a panicked pod of whales / a crashing helicopter / global warming / ice melting due to the proximity of a gorgeous scientist in a minisub — it's not clear which.
  9. Literature.La Saga Du Pretre Jean: At the end of book 3, Nikanor encases you into a block of ice to magically preserve you for the Time Travel. You start book 4 still frozen, and depending on the dice roll you may thaw soon enough with the caravan carrying you or even in the city itself.
  10. Recap.Nexus The Jupiter Incident: The game's main character, Marcus Cromwell, is the son of Richard Cromwell, the first human born in space and the captain of the ill-fated Noah's Ark. His ISA ship is shot down by corporate forces near Phobos and is left drifting for nearly ten years as a Human Popsicle. Stuck in space, assuming that's how he froze.

    ZCE/misc/unsortable 
  1. Afraid of Needles: The protagonist of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time died of cancer before the book begins (he got better). He reflects on how that experience cured him of any fear of needles.
  2. Characters.The Silence Trilogy: A hypothesis as to what happened to them in part of their legend.
  3. Characters.The Venture Brothers Team Venture (Ook Ook): Even manages to get refrozen between 1969 and the present day. Pretty sure this doesn't have enough context.
  4. DarthWiki.Marcus On The Brink Of Forever: Classic "only trope is listed" ZCE
  5. Fanfic.Blue Sky Waffles: Chell is one, carried over from the games. And so, at the end, is Wheatley.
  6. Fanfic.Human Curiosity: What happens to the Nations that are killed.
  7. Film.Vanilla Sky: David becomes one.
  8. Literature.The Legend Of Yan Kan Mar: Well, not exactly human...
  9. Literature.The Mystery Of Urulgan: Ron in his spaceship.
  10. Manga.Sentai School: The Freezer Gang.
  11. OneManArmy.Video Games: Is used in a pothole regarding Gordan Freeman from Half-Life. I don't know the game, so I don't know if that's correct or not.
  12. Recap.Batman Beyond S 1 E 3 Black Out: How Inque is ultimately defeated.
  13. Recap.Smallville S 07 E 09 Gemini: Clark is revealed to be frozen in a pillar of ice in the Fortress of Solitude. With no "why", this goes here.
  14. Webcomic.Madness In A Box: Gertie was originally the daughter of a pirate. She wandered off, got frozen for 200 years, and is now being cared for by Dr. Thurman. Putting it here only because we don't get told how she got frozen.
  15. WebVideo.Gritty Reboots: Marceline is frozen in the Ice King's fortress in the Adventure Time trailer, with the implication that Ice King put her there himself for some reason.

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