The Creamy Cold Ice Cream Truck, also known as the Creamy Cold Ice Cream Van, is the main villain of the R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series called "Catching Cold". It is a mysterious ice cream truck that is said to be powered by the soul of a person who would do anything to have its ice cream.
Appearance[]
The truck design is a big truck with pink/brown/white lines, and seven big plastic ice cream scoops (including one in the front with a happy face on it wearing a hat. The tune it plays to lure kids to it is a rather ominous sounding rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel." While normal ice cream trucks take money for payment, this truck only needs one payment, a soul. It has a mind of its own but not a soul. When one is able to capture the truck, someone who has been trapped in the truck will be set free, but they'll take their place and be stuck in the truck until someone else captures the enigmatic ice cream truck. It can be seen as a symbolic villain, in the sense that the episode is a subtle yet clear warning about the dangers of substance abuse and drug addiction, with the Creamy Cold truck symbolizing a drug dealer. An example of this is when the Creamy Cold ice cream truck lets Marty and Jimmy Jeffries before him have a free cone of Creamy Cold ice cream in order to get him addicted to it, similar to how many drug dealers let would be clients have their first hit for free in order to get them addicted.
Description[]
Marty always borrows money from his family, and very rarely if ever pays them back. He soon becomes obsessed with catching a mysterious ice cream truck that only he seems to hear and see. As a mailman tells him and his best friend Ari all about the story of a boy named Jimmy Jeffries who got into the truck and the next day, he was gone. Days later Marty sells Ari a bike that his father gave him, finally earning money to buy some Creamy Cold ice cream. That night he manages to stop the ice cream truck with his policeman father's tire spike strip. After getting in Marty encounters Jimmy Jeffries, the boy whom the mailman told him about the other day now a middle-aged man driven almost completely insane, frozen in the back of the ice cream truck, who tells him that he's been waiting 30 years for someone to take his place and explains that the ice cream truck runs on the souls of those who obsessed with its ice cream. Jimmy exit the ice cream truck as he is finally free and leaving Marty in the back of the ice cream truck in order to take his place temporary that his soul will be taken next until someone else catches him, screaming for help as the truck re-inflates its tires and drives off into the night as the episode ends.