| 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 Kreamy Kold ice cream truck driving around the neighborhood. He tries hard to catch it, but after struggling to scrounge up some money (his family members being too annoyed by previous antics to give him any), he doesn't have time. Oddly enough, no one else seems to have noticed the truck. Sometime later, Marty asks his friend, Ari, if he saw the Kreamy Kold ice cream truck while walking together down the street. An unnamed mailman overhears them and tells them a story about a boy he knew in his childhood called Jimmy Jefferies, who was also obsessed with Kreamy Kold ice cream and catching the truck. The unnamed mailman doesn't know what happened to Jimmy as one day, he just disappeared/vanished without a trace.
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 keeps hearing "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 the new bicycle his dad gave him in order to have enough money to buy from the ice cream truck.
The night after selling his bicycle, Marty sneaks out of the house and manages to stop the truck by setting a trap in the street 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 an obese grown man covered in frost who appears to have lost his sanity. Jimmy tells Marty he had been waiting 30 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 ice cream truck, leaving Marty to take his place. As Marty shouts for help, Jimmy then maniacally laughs, "The truck is all yours until someone else catches you! Until then, it's all you can eat!" The truck's tires magically re-inflate and it speeds off into the night, with Marty trapped inside like a caged animal.
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 Kold 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 also co-starred in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies.