| Catching Cold | |
|---|---|
| Season 1, Episode 17 | |
| |
| Air date | April 9, 2011 |
| Written by | Neal Shusterman |
| Directed by | Peter DeLuise |
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Catching Cold is the seventeenth episode of R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: The Series. It is based on the short story of the same name from Neal Shusterman's 2007 collection Darkness Creeping.
Summary[]
An ice cream-obsessed boy named Marty vows to track down an ice cream truck that only appears to him.
Plot[]
One day, Marty notices a mysterious ice cream truck driving around the neighborhood. He tries hard to catch it, but after struggling to find some money (his family members too annoyed by previous antics to give him any), he doesn't have time to catch it. Oddly, no one else seems to have noticed it. Some time later, he asks his friend, Ari, if he saw the Kreamy Kold ice cream truck while walking together down the street. A mailman overhears them and tells them a story about a boy he knew called Jimmy Jefferies who was obsessed with Kreamy Kold ice cream and catching the truck. The man says he doesn't know what happened to Jimmy in the end; one day he just disappeared.
That night, Marty hears the truck again. He opens his door to find an ice cream cone waiting on his porch and the truck idling outside. He eats the ice cream as the truck drives away.
After tasting the ice cream, Marty becomes obsessed. He hears "Pop Goes the Weasel", the ice cream truck's jingle, in the dripping from his sink and alarm clock, snaps at Ari for wanting to do other things than talk about ice cream, and writes and draws "Kreamy Kold" all over his homework. He even sells Ari his new bicycle in order to have enough money to buy from the ice cream truck.
Later, the night after selling his bicycle, Marty manages to stop the truck by setting a trap in the street outside his house with a spike strip stolen from his policeman father's patrol car. After discovering the truck doesn't seem to have a driver or salesperson, Marty decides to enter it and get his own ice cream. Inside, Marty encounters Jimmy, now a grown man and covered in frost. Jimmy tells Marty he had been waiting thirty years for "someone who wanted it as bad as [he] did", explaining the truck runs on the souls of those obsessed with catching it. Jimmy then exits out of the back of the truck, leaving Marty to take his place. As Marty shouts for help, Jimmy replies with a laugh, "The truck is all yours until someone else catches you! Until then, it's all you can eat!" before the truck's tires magically reinflate and it speeds off into the night.
Cast[]
- Robert Capron as Marty
- Ty Olsson as Steve
- Sarah-Jane Redmond as Janet
- Laine MacNeil as Kayla
- Nicholas Elia as Ari
- C. Ernst Harth as Older Jimmy Jeffries
- Rhys Johnson as Blue Collar Driver
- Robin Mossley as Post-Man
- Gerald Paetz as Driver of The Kreamy Cold Ice Cream Truck
Gallery[]
Differences from the story[]
- In the story, Marty never gets a taste of the ice cream until the end.
- In the story, Marty becomes the driver of the ice cream truck.
- While the episode is about addiction, the story was more about how meaningless chases ultimately lead to nothing.
Trivia[]
- This episode is based on the short story by Neal Shusterman, from his 2007 collection "Darkness Creeping". It is the first episode based on source material from someone other than R.L. Stine.
- Darkness Creeping is a combo of two smaller collections Shusterman wrote in the 90's, with a few new stories, Catching Cold being one of them.
- The cycle of someone getting trapped in the ice cream truck and taking another one's place is similar to the cycle in "Game Over".
- Robert Capron and Laine MacNeil, co-starred together in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.