I tend towards cup, but sometimes you need a spare hand.
Yes.Well, you also get a free cone, so... That's true.
Why am I turning down the free wafer? Hi, you're listening to Ingridipedia, Australia's most unhinged food podcast.My name is Ben Burchill and I'm joined by my co-host, Emily Naismith.Hi, Em.
Hi, Ben.This is a special miniseries all about zombie snacks.
That's right.The snacks that we miss and want to bring back from the dead.
So over the next four weeks, we'll be bringing back some old favourites.But to kick us off, we're heading to the freezer to resuscitate some long lost ice creams.
I've got an ice cream headache already.
Ben, if there's one thing I know about this podcast, we over-index in sexist puppet chat.Like how many times have we mentioned aggro?
I feel like Aggro's got shares in this podcast.
He really does.If you don't know what Aggro is, he's the low-rent Jim Henson puppet, popularized by his time on Australian TV, Aggro's Cartoon Connection.
Yeah, he actually started on a show called Wombat, and that was like pre-, and then Aggro was the breakout star of Wombat. And then there was Agro's Cartoon Connection.And then he did like a sort of short-lived late night kind of adult show.
And he's been a staple.Jamie Dunn, the puppeteer and voice, has been a staple on radio for about the last 40 years.
I think that is, yeah, I think that was the original intent.Given how spindly and skinny his arms and legs are, I don't think the puppet makers had ever seen a wombat.
I've never associated Agro with a wombat.
Yeah.I feel like they kind of got the, they, they got the, the wombat shape so wrong that they just moved on and never mentioned wombats ever again.
Aggro has a lot of teeth.Don't wombats just have like those two teeth?I don't know.Anyway.
And also Aggro doesn't shit cubes like a real wombat does.
Do you know?This is true.
Anyway, I'm mentioning him again today because the Aggro cone from Wendy's is the ice cream I miss the most. Like I used to beg my mom for them at the shops.
Like I remember the specific spot I'd stand in Eastland and see the agro cone up on the board and beg for it.And I basically never got it.I think a handful of times in my life I got the agro cone and they were delicious, delicious days.
Wendy's did a good crossover.They, um, I don't know if you remember Winky Dink from Cartoon Connection.Uh, probably before your time they had a Winky Dink cone.So it was covered in like, I think Winky Dink was a, like some sort of pink bird and.
Oh, is that the sherbet?I never knew what that was.
It was Winky Dink.Um, they also did this amazing Beetlejuice, um, thick shake in 1989 when Beetlejuice first came out. before you were born.
Um, and, uh, it had, it was green, it had like big chunks of mint slice in, or maybe mint aero, and it had snakes coming out of it in a real Betelgeuse way.
Wendy's had their, their licensed, uh, special edition on point.
So the agro cone was basically, to my knowledge, a soft serve, dusted in some kind of Milo type brown sprinkle.
And then I think the face of the cone was like a green and a blue smarty for the eyes, a red jaffa nose, gummy teeth upside down for the mouth, and then half a gummy banana on his like cheeks because Agro had those like yellow stripes as all wombats do, I guess, on his face.
But why did Agro, a 90s puppet,
originally an 80s puppet.He stuck around for a long time.
Why did Agro, a puppet from a 80s and 90s TV show, which ended in 1997, get chosen to be the face of an ice cream for decades?As late as 2019,
Agro was at Wendy's, like that was when he was brought back for like a special limited edition thing, but why?Why Agro?
Like there are so many different other characters that like Wendy's could license, like hello Disney characters, like actually popular non-sexist characters.
But do you think maybe it had something to do with how expensive it would be to license a Disney product, and how expensive it wouldn't be to license a puppet that's no longer on air.I think it's smart business from Wendy's.
Yeah, like, we gotta license someone, we gotta get the kids in. We can, all we can afford is agro, but we're doing agro.
Agro was also very smart with his licensing.I don't know if, I can not find it.It feels like it's been cleaned from the internet, maybe for licensing reasons.He had a range of like frozen foods as well.Like you get like agro INJ fish fingers.
You've mentioned this before.
And I've never found it.Agro caught on blur.I'm sure it was a theme, like frozen in the freezer aisle, frozen fish and meat.
What child is begging for that?
But I think it was just good business.INJ, Wendy's just smart business people.
Yeah, that's true.So Agro was brought back in 2019.The posters for it say he's back for a strictly limited time only before retiring forever.So Agro has gone.The Agro Cone is dead.Never to be brought back. And I'm pretty sure Wendy's is gone.
Which makes sense because, like, what is Wendy's without the agro cone?Yeah.
I guess they've still got Winky Dinky.Emily, it's interesting that you brought up licensed ice creams as what you miss.I miss licensed ice creams as well.
My ice cream childhood graveyard is populated with icy poles that were available for a short time that I would describe as lazy cash-ins on a stick. So take the Star Wars Return of the Jedi icy pole that was released in late 1983.
It had blue Jedi jelly, it was encased in raspberry and blue flavoured sugary ice and sold for 30 cents.So it had no Star Wars shape, like it wasn't shaped like a lightsaber or the Millennium Falcon.
It was just an icy pole shape.It had no discernible color theme.I mean, Luke's lightsaber in Return of the Jedi is green.I mean, maybe the red is Darth Vader's lightsaber, but why, what is that blue?
It's lazy.And I probably ate 30 of them in 1983, 1984.But the one I want to bring back the most is the Alf icy pole.
Okay.I think I missed the ALF train.That's a very eighties, isn't it?And he's, he looks more wombat, to be honest.
He does.He does.He, he was, ALF was an alien.Alien life form is the acronym.Um, older listeners will remember him.He was a wisecracking cat eating alien.His real name was Gordon Shumway.Uh, he came from the planet Melmac.
He lived with the Tanner family and no, they weren't related to the Tanners from Full House.It was just a common name used. in 1980s sitcoms.So it was a big show.
I had the merch, like it was a very, very, it was the peak of merch, like Garfield merch was big and there was a lazy, lazy Garfield ice cream as well.Didn't look anything like Garfield.And it was, this was a cash in, but it wasn't shameless.
Firstly, it was in the shape of Alf. Um, and it had a chocolate back and it was made of like two tones of caramel type ice cream.
Um, in that respect, it was kind of like a bubblo bill, but yeah, but the real bonus and actually a tier above bubblo bill, because. Alf's eyes and nostrils were made of like this delicious jelly.It was like a raspberry jelly and it was delicious.
Like it was so jelly-ish, but, um, and as the ice cream melted, it became even more like jelly and less like a kind of hard thing.So just imagine this.His eyes and nostrils were delicious in the way that Bubble O' Bill's nose is pointless.
Yeah, that's the worst part of bubble-o-bill.I used to just give it to my brother.
It shatters your teeth and then it doesn't, you end up swallowing it anyway.And that jelly, I've never seen it repeated in an icy pole since 1987.So please, Peters, find the ALF jelly eye technology and bring it back.
Ben, I know Maxibonds are still around, but I want them to bring back Maxibond risk. Like that's the one we didn't know what flavor you were getting until you opened it.So you could either get vanilla, honeycomb or mint.
And I listened to a podcast recently that kind of said that we have no uncertainty in our lives anymore.
Like we know if there's traffic up ahead through Google Maps and we can look up a menu before we go to a restaurant, like everything is so planned and certain.So we really need to shake things up again.
And I feel like there's no better way to do that than bringing back Maxibon Risk. We've just got to ease our way back into... It's manageable risk.It's a safe risk.
Yeah.It's not, have we chosen to end democracy?It's more, what flavour is this ice cream going to be?
I might get mint.I might get honeycomb.
I mean, they're very different moods.
They are.So there is a risk.There is risk.And when I think about it hard, I'm like, would I ever buy a mint Maxibon?No.Would I like it if I got a Maxibon risk? I'd have to.Probably.That's what I have to do.Yeah.Cause that's the game.
Yeah.It is a little bit like the way that streaming services have ruined the way we used to watch TV.
You would just turn on TV and something would be on and you'd be like, I would not have chosen to watch Cocoon starring Steve Guttenberg, but I'm going to watch Cocoon starring Steve Guttenberg and Wilfred Brimley and Jessica Tandy.
We're here now, and this is what we're doing.
Yeah, and I'm just gonna watch the last three quarters of it, and that will be fine, and you would be happy, and you would enjoy it.
But you would not choose Cocoon, starring Steven Vandenberg and Ilford Grimley and Jessica Tandy.
No, you'd never even get to that page on Netflix.No.Like, that doesn't exist.No.That movie's never been selected to be watched.No.
That's making me want to search it now.Is it there?
So yeah, 2024, society's too safe.We need to bring back Maxibon wrist to make life interesting again.
Manageably interesting.Yeah.
Emily, it's interesting.We're talking about graveyards and we're talking about zombies because I want to talk about an ice cream that needs to come back.I want to talk about the most unhinged ice cream of the 1990s.The street's grave robber.
Do you know about the streets grave robber?No, this sounds spooky.I don't like anything scary.So I would have avoided this.
I honestly, I don't really remember it being around, but it is totally my jam as a kid.I loved things.I loved garbage pail kids.I loved slime.
I loved... Is this your bootleg Cabbage Patch doll?Is that the real name?
No, garbage pail kids.You don't know about that?That was like a whole collectible cards.They had their own movie.It was like a takeoff of Cabbage Patch Kids, but they were all gross.
And like, you know, they would like dead or they were, you know, and they were really macabre, like really, really macabre shit.
Well, I already found Cabbage Patch dolls scary.Yeah, that was scary enough.
No, but like they had names that, you know, like, I wish I could remember some off the top of my head, but they were like, you know, Savage Steve or like Shrunken Head Susie or whatever.And they would be like dead. Kids love that stuff.
They love darkness and they move towards it.I think maybe it goes back to manageable risk.A little bit of manageable fear and manageable danger in their lives.And that was the idea behind the street's grave robber.
It was a plastic tub of chocolate ice cream. filled with jelly lolly bones and you were given a shovel shaped spoon.So yes, it was designed to replicate the experience of desecrating human remains.Have fun kids!
Yeah, so it was like jelly bones that you dug up and you ate with your shovel spoon.So where did it go?Oddly enough, people didn't like the idea of children defiling and consuming human remains.
That's a lot for the 90s.
I've got a few quotes from an unsuccessful 2015 Change.org petition that tried to bring back the grave robber.It was not successful.It received 75 signatures.So somebody's already tried to bring it back.But I think maybe 2024 is the year.
Yeah, is it still open? So this is some of the background that that Chain Jog petition points out.
In 1996, the Honourable Alan Corbett, leader of A Better Future for Our Children political party in New South Wales and member of the Legislative Council, had this to say.
My complaint centred around the naming of this particular ice cream after what is, after all, an objectionable and illegal practice, and the promotional displays for this ice cream, which feature a gleeful skeleton staring into a dirt-coloured grave in which small bones or personal effects of the deceased are presumably uncovered as a child scoops out the ice cream with a plastic shovel.
I believe this promotion trivializes an illegal activity.Streets has shown a great deal of insensitivity to the friends, relatives and partners of deceased persons.
I object to a child's natural curiosity about death, heightened no doubt by the awkwardness many feel about the subject, being exploited for the sake of Streets' profits.
Just thinking my son would love that.
Here you go little guy, eat some human remains.So yeah, not long after this media got hold of it, Daily Telegraph got a hold of it, grave robbers were quietly discontinued.But I feel like we've moved on.
I feel like it is time for our nation's young to cannibalize graves once again.
I think so.We're having conversations around voluntary euthanasia.We need to be having these conversations.Absolutely.
Come on streets, grow a pair, bring back desecration of graves by children, bring back grave robbers.
Which of these ice creams will we bring back from the dead today?
Well, I want to bring the aggro cone back from the dead.
Okay.Emily, how are you going to bring back the aggro soft serve from Wendy's?
Well, I got a cone from Macca's, soft serve, 50 cent cone, wildly still 50 cents.I didn't expect that.And then I've dusted it in Milo, which I assume is what Wendy's did.And now I'm going to place a green eye and a blue eye.
Why were the eyes different colors?Is that something that was aggro related?I don't know.
We're going to put a jaffa for the nose.I'm going to put these.
Half banana cheeks.And then the upside down teeth.
This is the aggro cone brought back from the dead.He's melting at a rapid pace.But I just also love the idea of aggro being an ice cream, like the most sexist, inappropriate puppet.Like imagine the sexual innuendo that aggro would say.
Oh, the testing.Yeah.Give us a lick, Darl.
Oh, Marianne.Oh, Marianne.Oh, get this into your mouth. Oh, yeah.
All right.Now I really don't want to eat.Sorry.Sorry, Marianne.
I mean, Emily.I'm going to try it.
Yeah.I'm going to go for his cheek and his eye.
I mean, I feel like it can't not work.
No, I mean, like it's basically just a delicious ice cream with lollies on top.Um, yeah.I'm in the Eastland food court.I'm I've won in the battle against my mum to get a Agro, boy, this is embarrassing.
The third set of teeth you've lost in one minute.Um, okay.Did we successfully bring the agro cone back from the dead?
I'm covered in ice cream, but yes.
In that way, it's pretty similar to the Eastland fruit court.
I'm just five years old again.
Okay, that was our zombie snacks ice cream episode, but Em, which ice cream is next to go?
I'm sorry to say, but I think it's going to be Splice.
I like Splice, but I had one the other day and it was the worst, the worst.Like something has happened and it was still like all the pine lime bit had just evaporated.There was just like 20% pine lime and the rest was just ice.
I don't want, I don't want to live in a world where there's no Splice.
Sign in
