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ОглавлениеThe original Dracula’s Secret, before it was classified ‘deadly’, to make it sound more scary.
Kids today, eh? Addled with filthy music, junk food and daft fashions, and well before they reach their teenage years. Why can’t they just grow up naturally, like we used to? I blame these raunchy new pop stars. Like that David Essex. And the Rollers, they’re wrong ‘uns. And as for that rag Whizzer and Chips...’ It’s the eternal refrain, but you heard it in the Daily Mirror first, when in the early ’70s they identified the ‘Weenies’, an ominous new, conspicuously consuming, old-before-their-time pre-teen generation. While perusing life-size posters of Kenny, these reprobates subsisted on a diet of Trebor Blobs, spaghetti hoops and ‘iced lollipops – especially the “frighteners” like Count Dracula’s Deadly Secret’. Horror again! The nation’s moral guardians would no doubt have preferred a series of ice lollies themed around the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme or Hard Sums, but it was not to be.
The spine-tingling ice under analysis came from Wall’s: ‘a creation of “black as night” water ice with a concealed centre of ice cream as bright as the moon when it’s full’. Such florid descriptions were part and parcel of the horror genre of course, and someone in the publicity department relished being HP Lovecraft for a day. The design team went that extra mile, too: the following year, the Count was on the receiving end of the industry’s first focus-group makeover, after a panel of kids demanded he be made ‘even more deadly looking’ with an additional core of strawberry jelly. Food and fanbase in perfect, fiendish harmony.
Children’s enthusiasm being the mercurial thing it is, though, the Count only saw a handful of summers before Wall’s saw fit to hammer a stick through his heart. You can’t keep a good vamp down, though, and he rose again in 1981, this time just as ‘Dracula’, but in glorious, chiselled 3D. ‘The first ever 3D lolly,’ in fact, ‘complete with protruding fangs and talons and appropriate strawberry colouring.’ This masterpiece of the ice moulder’s art was cast from a model by one Bob Donaldson, ‘who has also been commissioned to sculpt for the Queen’. European aristocracy has connections everywhere, even beyond the grave.
Love at first bite. Wall’s Dracula (1981), ultimately resurrected in 2013.
