Human Popsicle

Frozen Frys stay fresh longer.

You can freeze
Like a 30th century man
Like a 30th century man.

— Scott Walker, "30th Century Man"

The billionaire Tech Bro's Time Travel: be put into a high-tech cryonic pod at death and wake up in the distant future. Unfortunately, this time travel is one-way, unless time is cyclical.

Cryonics, as Applied Phlebotinum, is a mechanism by which a person can be frozen, halting the aging process and giving them a non-stop ticket on the Suspended Animation Express to the future. Once they get to the future, they can be thawed out and reanimated.

The result is that we get a Fish out of Temporal Water setup wherein a human — usually the audience's approximate contemporary — is thrust into The Future and has to adjust to their new environment. This can get especially thorny if their home or civilization has since been destroyed and forgotten, or changed beyond recognition, making them a Living Relic.

It also works with the past, as many works have played with the idea of turning a prehistoric caveman or a viking loose in modern society. In this case, of course, the freezing has to be by natural means which stretches the credibility of Harmless Freezing even further. (This is more the realm of cartoons and soft science fiction that can get away with it more easily)

Cryonics, the study of preserving humans or other organisms at low temperature, is frequently confused with cryogenics, the creation of very low temperatures and the study of how materials behave under those conditions. Honestly, just because a word has "-gen-" in it doesn't mean it has anything to do with biology.

Cryonics Failure, where something goes horribly wrong that kills some or all sleepers, is a potential danger.

The Human Popsicle usually takes one of three forms:

• Some mysterious phenomenon unexpectedly freezes our hero until he is found centuries later. Sometimes it's the fault of Green Rocks or overt magic (or both!), other times it's just because they got frozen inside a block of normal ice.
• Our hero uses a "Sleeper Starship" — a (typically) slower-than-light spacecraft that puts the occupants "on ice" (either literally or a Convenient Coma that slows aging) to allow them to survive the travel times between stars. The ship gets knocked off course, or encounters a Negative Space Wedgie, and isn't found again until far into the future. Alternatively, in the hundreds of years the trip takes, humans manage to invent faster-than-light travel, and colonize the destination world long before the sleeper ship arrives. Bonus points if they flat-out forget about the sleeper ship. Cue the proud colonists coming out of cryosleep only to find themselves snarled in space traffic. This is a use of cryonics that real scientists are actually interested in, but wouldn't dare take a stab at until all the kinks are worked out.
  • A variation on the sleeper ship, in more realistic Speculative Fiction settings, is to put the hibernators on a spaceship and accelerate it to close to light-speed, letting Einsteinian physics slow down their personal timeframe with respect to the rest of us. The ship can thus reach faraway planets within the crew's lifetime, though the crew will still experience it as a one-way trip to the future. This and the above are often used to Fling a Light into the Future.
• Our hero is suffering from a terminal illness and is frozen at or about the moment of death in the hope that future generations will discover a cure for whatever killed/is about to kill them. This is inspired by some Real Life organisations that offer such services, but is functionally indistinguishable from the first two kinds, except that you have to be really sick to qualify.

The ability to freeze and later revive some simple organisms — including human embryos — has existed for some time (one motivation of cryonics is that some animals have an innate ability to survive a similar naturally induced state), but there are many technical problems with applying this to a fully grown human^note  Namely, not all of your organs "freeze" at the same temperature, some react well to freezing while others react poorly, and unfreezing someone is an iffy proposition at best, usually resulting in significant organ damage. And the law does not allow people to be cryonically suspended until they are pronounced clinically dead (or if they aren't legally alive yet, like the aforementioned embryos), which could cause problems if brain damage occurs due to anoxia. For the sake of television, we just assume that whoever does the thawing has the technology to overcome this. Sometimes this problem is Hand Waved by claiming that what's actually going on is some sort of localized time stop (Time Stands Still, except inside out), although all other aspects of the trope remain the same.

In science fiction, cryonics is often either used for something that makes little practical sense or forgotten entirely when it could potentially save the life of a person killed in an accident. An example of the former is using cryonic freezing for incarcerated criminals. The various rationales that justify it range from relative safety and cheapness compared to feeding, housing, and guarding prisoners at the taxpayers' expense to being an alternative to the death penalty. However, it undermines the punishment aspect of incarceration. Being able to sleep through your long sentence and not have to endure the daily ugly aspects of prison life is not much of a deterrent to criminal behavior. And since one does not age in cryonic prison, life sentences are pointless and the prisoner has served time without having lost a significant portion of his lifespan. He may even outlive his original jailers or former victims.

Today, prison sentences of over a hundred years are given only to ensure that the felon will never be eligible for parole in his lifetime. With cryonics, this prisoner will effectively be awakened in an era that he would not have lived to see otherwise. In many stories that heavily rely on the death of Red Shirt characters to amplify drama and suspense, it never occurs to anyone to place these dead minor characters into cryonic suspension so that their lives may be saved later. And this is almost always in future worlds that should have cryonic suspension and the medical knowledge to reverse clinical death in cases of injuries or accidents.

If you happen upon someone else who has been frozen, read all the manuals before thawing them out: nine times out of ten, they will turn out to be psychopathic murderers (just ask the crew of Red Dwarf).

Monster in the Ice is something of a naturally-occurring sibling to this trope, as oftentimes the giant creatures that somehow ended up locked inside a glacier or iceberg will remain in a form of suspended animation until, eventually, the ice melts and deposits the beast in a distant, changed future.

Often overlaps with Really 700 Years Old, but the people from this trope rarely experience the time in-between freezing and thawing. Super-Trope of Cold Sleep, Cold Future, for when people are unfrozen in a dystopian or Crapsack World future.

Often necessitates Catching Up on History to see what's happened since they were frozen.

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Examples:

• Literature

Anime & Manga

• 7 Seeds has all participants of the project being frozen sometime before the meteor hit Earth, so they could survive the apocalypse and make it safely to the future.
• In later issues of the Area 88 manga that did not make it stateside, Julianna discovers Soria (Saki's mother and Abdael's wife) in a cryonic chamber underneath her tomb. Years before, Soria was near death due to blood cancer, so Abdael had her cryonically preserved until a cure could be found. The Asranian public was told that she died giving birth to Rishar. Julianna and her Project 4 henchmen removed the cryonic chamber, burned the tomb, then took Soria overseas and had her revived.
• Armored Trooper VOTOMS has this as a means of getting injured soldiers off the front line and to proper medical care reasonably safely — "reasonably", because they're still referred to as coffins in-show.
  • More specifically, Chiroco and Fyana elect to do this at the end of the TV series, ostensibly in order to wake up in a peaceful world, one that doesn't need a Perfect Soldier or the son of God. But then they're thawed out accidentally 20-plus years later, and it turns out that Fyana was dying — Chirico just wanted to spend the time with her. Notably, the series averts Fish out of Temporal Water — a Scopedog is a Scopedog, and Chirico's still a damn good/lucky pilot.
• One of the immortals of Baccano! spent around 250 years, from the early 1700s to sometime during the Cold War, trapped in a crevasse in the Arctic Circle.
• Yuji Kaido from Blue Gender was frozen due to his having an incurable virus, with promises to be unfrozen when a cure was found. Yes, he gets unfrozen, but ends up in a none-too-bright future...
• Academy City in A Certain Magical Index has perfected this technology, but not for the usual reasons. Their combat aircraft are capable of such incredible maneuverability that the G-forces involved would kill a human pilot, so pilots are frozen, put on life support, and control the aircraft with their minds.
• Satella and Fiore in Chrono Crusade both wake up over seventy years after the events of the series after Satella freezes them both during their battle. Many years later, Azumaria's grandson is helping Satella adjust to it all while Fiore rode off with Shader into the sunset on a motorcycle.
• Cowboy Bebop: Having been frozen fifty years or so ago is part of Faye's Backstory.
• Cyborg 009:
  • Used in the 2001 version on the first four cyborgs, in order to keep Albert Heinrich/004's attempt to cross the Berlin Wall intact. While logically all four of them should have suffered considerable culture shock, Albert gets the most specific and frequent comments on how much has changed in forty years. Ivan/001 was an infant before being placed in suspended animation, and was still an infant going out: he wasn't old enough to know what the world was like before he became a cyborg to be able to make such comments after the process.
  • Francoise/003 does make similar comments in her A Day in the Limelight episode, however. She stops angsting about it soon, and it makes sense since the Aesop of said chapter is about not clinging to the past and a former life. Jet/002 simply seems to not give a crap anymore.
• Dr. STONE:
  • The story starts off this way, as Taiju Oki is about to confess his love to a girl when suddenly the entire world becomes Taken for Granite for thousands of years.
  • Happens more literally to Tsukasa after he's severely wounded. Senku places him in a cryogenic freeze to keep him in a state of near-death so he can search for the petrification method to heal his wounds.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, the Briggs Corp temporarily incapacitate the homunculus Sloth by getting it into the cold outside of the fortress, and dousing it with the fuel they use for their tanks. The fuel has a very low melting and boiling point, to keep it from freezing up in the frigid conditions, so when it's poured on Sloth, it quickly evaporates, robbing his body of heat. So it's kind of like the reverse of the usual method (encased in a block of ice) but with the usual result (total bodily shutdown). It should be noted that the only reason he came back, as well as why the heroes resorted to freezing him, is that homunculi are nigh invulnerable.
• ''Future Robot Daltanious': When Dr. Earl and Prince Harlin arrived from Earth from Helios as refugees, he set his cryo-sleep device to keep them frozen for 50 years, since they landed in Japan during World War II. Though Earl awakens in 1995, Harlin has already escaped because the device malfunctioned and is nowhere to be found.
• In F-Zero: GP Legend, this was the backstory to Ryu, a policeman from 2051. He was horribly wounded in a car chase trying to apprehend the criminal Zoda, and frozen to save his life. Zoda was eventually apprehended and put in cryosleep to serve his sentence. In 2201, Zoda was broken out of prison by Black Shadow, and Ryu was unthawed to help catch Zoda.
• The sequel to Gall Force reveals that Luffy's spacesuit has a built-in stasis mode that activated when she was left floating in space in the first film. She's brought aboard another ship and thawed out at the sequel's start.
• Gundam:
  • In Mobile Fighter G Gundam, a Mad Scientist who's about to be executed for treason is actually put into this state to have his Hot-Blooded younger son and said son's partner capture the Devil Gundam that he created. In reality, it's all a lie. The scientist never was a madman, but was framed by the son's boss and was frozen both to keep him from spilling the beans and use the old man to force his kid to work for the government.
  • The Mobile Suit Gundam Wing sequel novel Frozen Teardrop introduces cryonic stasis pods invented by Doctor J (the creator of Wing Gundam). They also have the side-effect of causing memory damage, which means the subject must have data fed into their brains to fill in the gaps. Relena had to be frozen because someone hooked her to a Dead Man's Switch that would kill three billion people and her friends needed time to find a solution. Heero was imprisoned sometime later after going berserk for yet-unspecified reasons. The novel kicks off 30 years later when the Preventer group thaws Heero and orders him to kill Relena, who was apparently brainwashed into a Face–Heel Turn.
• In Episode 6 of HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, the Monster of the Week freezes Cure Marine solid, leaving Cure Blossom to fight alone.
• Jubei-chan: Yagyu Freesia fell into a glacier during a fight in Russia. Centuries later, global warming frees her. It's implied that she has an elemental affinity to ice, which explains how she survived.
• In King of Thorn, 160 people infected with a deadly virus are put into suspended animation until a cure can be found. But when they wake up an unknown amount of time later, the facility has been overgrown by thorny vines and overrun with monsters... and there's no sign a cure was ever discovered.
• Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch: The end reveals that Michel is not only a Disc-One Final Boss but a replica of the real Michel, who had been frozen with Fuku, the real villain behind it all — yes, even behind the Great One.
• One Piece:
  • A more comical application occurs on Drum Island when Karoo jumps into an ice-cold river to look for Zoro. When the crew comes back, Vivi is understandably upset to see her duck frozen solid and half-submerged in the river.
  • Robin Luffy are shockfrozen solid by Marine Admiral Aokiji. Unlike other cases of this trope, though, their conditions are treated seriously, and there is panic about how they are defrosted.
  • Back when he was still a Vice Admiral, Aokiji froze fellow Vice Admiral Jaguar D. Saul during the Buster Call in Ohara, preventing him from destroying more ships. Being friends with Saul, Aokiji was anything but happy at being forced to freeze him. Then again, the Egghead arc reveals that Saul survived. Whether or not this was Aokiji's intent at the time is unknown.
  • Aokiji does it again in the Marineford arc: first with Whitebeard (it doesn't stick) and Jozu (who ends up losing an arm and is frozen for vastly longer but otherwise survives).
  • After resigning from the Marines in the Time Skip, Aokiji ran into the Blackbeard Pirates and froze Sanjuan Wolf when he tried to pick a fight with him. He eventually thawed him out and joined Blackbeard's crew.
  • While raiding Cacao Island to kidnap Pudding, her brother Cracker tries to intervene. Aokiji effortlessly freezes him and continues undaunted.
• Lorelei from Pokémon Adventures can turn anyone into a popsicle via the voodoo dolls formed from her Jynx's Ice Beam. Red was frozen for two months and when he escaped, he suffered painful frostbite for a year before finding a cure. Lorelei also tried to freeze Sird, but Sird managed to escape before being encased entirely. However, she is still suffering from the side effects and doesn't know the cure.
• In Reborn! (2004) the Evil Prince Xanxus spends eight years as a Human Popsicle after trying to murder his foster father, who used a secret technique to freeze him. He is eventually thawed out, however, he has not aged at all and is left with terrible burn scars.
• Ryu from Ryu's Path was in cryo-sleep by the time the story began. When he finally wakes up, he realizes that the planet Fuji 1 landed on is Earth, which has changed after the extinction of humanity.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Beruche from the anime tries to commit suicide by encasing herself in ice after losing to Sailor Mercury. Her Heel Face Turned sister Cooan talks her out of it, though
  • A straighter example is that the entire planet was frozen for several decades before the formation of Crystal Tokyo. Who or what did the freezing wasn't really explained.
  • Another example is after Jadeite fails Queen Beryl too many times. She puts him in what she calls "Eternal Sleep", which is essentially this trope.
• Saint Seiya:
  • Aquarius Camus defeats his pupil (or student's pupil, in the anime) Cygnus Hyoga and literally creates an ice coffin for him so he can preserve the body for years until Hyoga is ready to fight again. It takes a Golden Cloth's weapons and Shun almost dying to de-frost him and bring him back to the Sanctuary arc.
  • Before that, said pupil of Camus, the Crystal Saint, was buried in an ice tomb by Hyoga himself after their fight, which ended up with Crystal's Tear Jerker of a death scene. Also, Hyoga's mother Natasha has been "sorta" buried in a similar environment a.k.a. a sunk ship under heavy ice layers and incredibly cold water placed in Siberia.
  • In Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas and its anecdotes, there are Aquarius Degel and Seraphina; and Krest and Garnet. None of them are going to wake up, though.
• Subverted in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman episode "Gatchaman, 20 Years Later." G-1 and the scientist he was protecting appear to have been frozen for twenty years in arctic ice after a forced landing. But it's still the present day. It was just Katse's overly-elaborate plot to get the scientist's equations for a new procedure that can either be used to provide a renewable energy source — or cause an extinction-event-level kaboom.
• Yakumo from Shinzo spends 300 years in Cold Sleep, in a capsule that her father placed her in.
• In Sorcerer Stabber Orphen, Azalie-in-Childman's body does this to Lai when he finds out the truth about her. He's released towards the end of the series.
• The plot of Space Patrol Luluco is kicked off when Luluco's father accidentally bites a cryogenic stasis pill, forcing her to join the Space Patrol to pay for his defrosting. It later turns out that the pill was placed in his food by a member of Lalaco's Space Pirate crew to keep him from interfering with her latest heist.
• Tenchi Muyo!: Aeka and Sasami put themselves in suspended animation in the OVA universe while searching for Yosho, despite not needing to worry about dying of old age on the trip. According to Word of God, Aeka did it because she's a bit beauty-obsessed. Sasami... did it because the trip is boring. There's also the fact that they had no idea how long the trip would actually be since they didn't have any clues as to where Yosho had gone. They just froze themselves and gave their automated guardians orders to wake them if they found a clue.
• In Trigun, flashback sequences show a fleet of ships that left Earth looking for a new planet with a healthy sample of the human population frozen on board. These people eventually reproduce to colonize the entire old-west-style setting of the series.
• The pilot episode of The☆Ultraman has a quartet of hibernating kaiju, called Seagras, awakening after the iceberg they're sealed in crashes against the Antarctic Coast. They serve as the show's Starter Villain for Ultraman Joneus to beat up.
• "Iceman" in Utawarerumono. Frozen by a god, so don't try this at home.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, Neo Aqua Madoor freezes Anzu and Sugoroku Muto in ice, nearly suffocating them.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: In Season 8 Episode 32, Careless S. discovers what looks like the grandmaster Xiao Haha frozen in a secret room in the King's castle and thinks he froze him years ago, and he, Sweet S., and Smart S. try to unfreeze him. While he's right about the "frozen years ago" part, it's not actually Xiao Haha; when they finally do unfreeze him, they find out it's actually another old teacher of the King's, whom he froze because he was fed up with him giving him so much homework.

Comic Books

• Asterix: In "Asterix and the Picts", Macaroon the Pict is found frozen in a block of ice by Asterix and Obelix at the start of the story. At the end of the story, the same happens to the Roman centurion leading the invasion of Caledonia.
• The DCU:
  • Legion of Super-Heroes: This is used by Brainiac 5 to defeat Superboy-Prime in Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds. After Superboy died, Brainiac had Star Boy go back to the past, one year after Conner died and take him to the Fortress of Solitude, placing him in a healing chamber, where he would stay for a thousand years. After snagging a piece of the balding Lex Luthor's hair, they went to the Fortress in their time and revived Conner just in time to battle Superboy-Prime at full power.
  • Superman: The Phantom Zone prevents aging for those inside. One character, Mon-El, was put in there in the Present Day after he got lead poisoning, and survived until the 30th century when a cure could be found.
  • Supergirl: Modern interpretations of Supergirl involve her being put into suspended animation, with her rocket going off course and arriving decades later. Unlike most examples, the Fish out of Temporal Water aspect is rendered irrelevant beyond the awkwardness of seeing an infant cousin suddenly become an adult as her entire former life was on Krypton which was destroyed.
    • Supergirl (1972): In one issue, the titular heroine finds two cavemen encased in ice as she is exploring the Himalayas. She has to fight them off when a wizard revives them and enhances their physical prowess.
    • The Supergirl Saga: Matrix was buried in the Antarctic for two hundred years, with the explanation being that Lex Luthor of the Pocket Universe transported her there with a blanked memory, believing that the mainstream DC Universe Superman would be able to find her with his time traveling abilities. However, such did not turn out to be the case with that version of Superman, thus Supergirl remained frozen until the present day of 1988 in the mainstream DC Universe.
• In ElfQuest the bug-like Preservers can freeze time for living beings by encasing them in cocoons made out of "wrapstuff", and a bunch of the characters use this method for waiting out ten thousand years when they need to catch up with a group of time travelers.
• The Frankenstein Monster: The Monster is twice found encased in ice, first in 1898 and then The '70s, which leads to his introduction to the modern era.
• In Garfield: His 9 Lives, a comic exploring Garfield's other 8 lives, his second life was as a Viking cat who got frozen in a block of ice with the rest of his Viking crew. They eventually drifted down to modern St. Paul, Minnesota, and wreak havoc.
• In Gold Digger, the character of Ancient Gina has used stasis and similar methods to survive since before the current universe started! She looks pretty good for her age.
• An old comic started with Hitler having a man with wild long hair and dirty torn clothes raving about how it was all happening again, and how Hitler need to stop it. Hitler had him executed, and somewhat casually wondered where he had come from. His aides told him the Allies were nearly there, so he went down into his bunker, where a scientist was finishing work on a stasis chamber. Hitler killed the scientist so that he would not speak of the project and entered the chamber. Several hundred years later, he awakens with tattered clothes and wild unkempt hair. After making his way through the fortress, he finds a Hitleresque man, and the same scene from the beginning repeats almost exactly.
• According to his self-titled comic book, Jon Juan was frozen in ice for centuries.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Captain America:
    • Steve Rogers fell into the Arctic Ocean at the end of WWII and was miraculously preserved until the present day (originally, the early 1960s). His survival was attributed to the Super Serum coursing through his veins.
    • Ditto for William Burnside and Jack Monroe, the Cap and Bucky of the 1950s. Jack later went on to become the hero Nomad after being unfrozen and was even the real Captain America's partner for a little while. As for '50s Cap, he went nuts and eventually incinerated himself.
    • Bucky also fell into the Arctic Ocean and was recovered by the Soviets. While he was clinically dead when they recovered him, because the freezing water preserved his body at or near death, they succeeded in resuscitating him. They subsequently brainwashed him into being their assassin, the Winter Soldier, and started freezing him between missions in the 1950s, both to keep him under control and to preserve his youth and strength for future missions.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: Vance Astro spent 1,000 years in suspended animation for a slower-than-light trip to Alpha Centauri... only to find that Earthmen had invented hyperdrive and beaten him there by several centuries.^note  However, they did throw him a welcoming party. As a bonus bummer, the long time he spent in the tube has damaged his body so he needed a full-body life-support suit to survive.
  • Iron Man: After suffering massive neurological damage, Tony Stark faked his death and preserved his body via cryonics.
  • The Wolverine villain Omega Red was cryonically frozen after his superiors decided he was too dangerous to control.
  • In the original Squadron Supreme limited series, the Squadron creates hibernaculums as an alternative to eliminating disease. People near death would be kept in suspended animation, presumably to be revived in the future once a cure to their ailment is found.
• The Technocomix comic Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger starred a Mike Hammer Expy who was accidentally put in a cryonic chamber in the 1940s and woke up in the 2040s.
• ORPHANIMO!!: In the tenth album, the orphans end up at the north pole. There they find the frozen body of Alice's ancestor Archibald. When they thaw him out, it turns out he is not dead but was only in suspended animation. Later, he and his pet mammoth fall through the ice again, but the orphans leave him because he didn't like the 21st century.
• Sherlock Holmes and the Horror of Frankenstein begins with Dr. Pretorious discovering the Frankenstein Monster frozen in the Arctic ice, a century after the events of the novel Frankenstein. He chisels the creature free and has it shipped back to England still encased in a block of ice.
• Darth Krayt, the Big Bad of Star Wars: Legacy, had been alive since before the Clone Wars but spent extended periods of time in stasis in attempt to slow the progress of the Vong implants wreaking havoc on his body before reemerging 133 years after A New Hope to become a Galactic Conqueror.
• Spirou & Fantasio: In Le Tombeau des Champignac, the ice princess was put in a deep sleep in a preserving jar so that she could be awakened someday in the future.
• Transmetropolitan deconstructs this trope with the concept of "revivals"; people from the 20th century and beyond who had their bodies cryonically frozen shortly after death in the hopes they would be revived with new bodies later on. In the current day of the comic (whenever that is), although they have the resources to defrost and restore anyone frozen, the sad fact is no one has any need of people from the past. Revivals are mentally unequipped to deal with future life, which means that they become yet another underprivileged minority who spend most of their time staring in horror at everything, and nobody cares about them.
  Spider: [Mary] could have told the future what it'd be like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides. But the future didn't want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back, gave them the hostels. Put them away with a new, unspoken, contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.
• Tales from the Crypt: In "Cave Man" in #19, a museum sub-curator who's jealous that his own exhibit is being ignored in favor of a recently-discovered frozen specimen of Neanderthal Man thaws out the body, with fairly predictable results.
• Tharg's Future Shocks: A scientist who is made into a laughing stock by his jealous rival decides to prove his naysayers wrong by inventing cryonic suspension, then putting himself to sleep for twenty years. It turns out that during this time people tore down his laboratorium and put an apartment building on top of it, so he's forced to go into suspension again, waking up after another forty years when the building is gone. When he tries to claim credit for inventing cryonic suspension, he's told that it was invented fifty-five years ago — by his rival.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): The Seal Men nab people and freeze the "extras" for use at a later date, as they can keep their captives in blocks of ice for however long they want an unfreeze them later with little to no harm done.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): When Wonder Woman lay dying from an attack by Neron and even her Justice League contacts couldn't come up with a way to help her the doctors put her in suspended animation to try and halt the decay, however, she was killed when her body was grabbed by the future Giganta who wanted to transfer her mind into it.

Comic Strips

• Buck Rogers: The original version Buck Rogers in the 25th Century gets Buck into said century via the device of strange gasses in an abandoned mine which put him into suspended animation for nearly five hundred years. The Buster Crabbe serial used an experimental gas aboard his airship. The 1970s TV show froze him solid in space.
• Dick Tracy: Pruneface. Almost frozen to death in his original appearance in 1942, writer Max Allan Collins later revealed that he had been used in a cryonics experiment, allowing him to be thawed out in 1983.
• The Far Side: One strip depicts a recently thawed-out caveman signing copies of his memoir "It Was Very Cold and I Couldn't Move".
• In Frank and Ernest, Frank wanted this once — not long — to sleep through election years.
• Safe Havens: In planning for her mission to Mars, Samantha thinks she has a much safer solution than freezing people — turning the crew into bears and letting them naturally hibernate. Given that she's a geneticist with a penchant for turning herself and her associates into various animals, this is not nearly as implausible as it sounds. In the end, even that is rejected—as it's just cheaper to install Wi-Fi on Fastrack One to keep the crew occupied. At any rate, it was a good thing she didn't transform herself into a bear as she's pregnant.

Fan Works

• Discovery (Marvelouswrites): Ahsoka (though in her case it's "Togruta Popsicle"), along with several other 501st clones, who have been frozen in carbonite to infiltrate the Citadel, are separated from the strike team while still in their carbonite slabs and lost along the way. They are only found and unfrozen long after the Empire has fallen.
• In Human Curiosity, it's revealed that the HCS has been "killing" nations by disabling their healing powers, injecting them with deadly poisons, and freezing them into a stasis. There's no way to wake them up without the poison taking effect and killing them. In Human Curiosity: The Bonus Chapters, it's revealed that the scientists only bothered with stasis instead of outright killing them because they feared that destroying the nations completely might hurt the people in the countries represented.
• Mass Effect: Human Revolution: The backstory is that David Sarif had himself and key Sarif Industries personnel, including Adam Jensen, cryonically-preserved in the hope of riding out growing anti-augmentation sentiment and seeing a less bigoted future. It's only in Mass Effect's time that the Sarif Cache is found, and only Adam is successfully revivable... and unfortunately for him, the anti-aug sentiment is as strong as ever.
• In My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic III, Frosteye had been trapped in a frozen cavern for a century by Princess Celestia due to being a mocker.
• In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, Duo sleeps among the stars until the threat of the Stardroids awakens him, summoning him to Earth.
• Planet of the Cats: The opening has this occur to protagonist Kio Kakazu, to facilitate his journey to the titular planet.
• In The Institute Saga:
  • Captain America was frozen when his enhancements started to break down. Superman revived and healed him.
  • Superman finds a number of Kryptonians in stasis later on. Unfortunately, reviving them proves problematic due to Kryptonite poisoning.
• In Son of the Sannin, Haku defeats Hidan by encasing him in an ice block and then using sealing tags to keep the ice from melting. Considering that Hidan can't be killed by normal means, this pretty much qualifies as a Fate Worse than Death for him.
• Frozen Hearts (Red Witch): To survive the Mushroom War, a group of humans such as scientists and soldiers has frozen themselves solid before ordering their jets to hibernate for one-thousand years until they thaw out.
• The Parody Fic ALIEN!!! opens with the crew of the Nostromo being painfully woken from hypersleep by the Master Computer, which involves them being forcibly injected with stimulants and having septic tubes yanked from sensitive parts of the body.
• With This Ring: After an accident with a time pool, the Renegade suggests that if they've been flung into the distant past, they could build some kind of animation suspension to hibernate until they reach their original time. It turns out, though, that they're instead in the distant future, so they have to find an alternative.
• Earth's Alien History has a few examples:
  • Catherine Langford is put in cold sleep in the 1970s to guarantee that whenever they finally figure out how to use the Stargate, they'll have someone on standby who understands it. She's eventually thawed in 2335.
  • Similarly, William Boone went into stasis after the Taelon-related conflicts, to be thawed out in case his expertise in dealing with hostile first contacts was ever needed again. For this reason, Xanatos has him brought along on the Andromeda Initiative and wakes him on Mirinol, out of the belief that TeTO needs a more aggressive stance when dealing with an entire galaxy of new species.
  • Jaime Reyes is normally kept in stasis by Torchwood and only taken out for missions that require the Blue Beetle, in order to prolong his life as long as possible.

Films — Animation

• Dragon Ball Z: Broly – Second Coming: Broly, due to his injuries from his defeat against Goku, went into a seven-year coma. Consequentially, the crater from his arrival on Earth became a lake and froze during this time.
• In Eight Crazy Nights, after Davey shoves Whitey into a port-a-potty then kicks him down a hill, he comes out covered in feces; Davey sprays him off, and he freezes into a block of ice. Davey comments:
  Davey: Smell you later, poopsicle!
• Ice Age and the sequel several times: once with the creatures (dinosaur, sloth-creatures, flying saucer) in the wall of the cave, and the other with Scrat right at the end. In the second film, two carnivorous water-dwelling creatures are thawed from the melting ice.
• In Monsters vs. Aliens, the Missing Link is a half-ape half-fish that was found frozen and was thawed out by scientists and went on a rampage when he was unfrozen.
• An especially heartbreaking case in Mother for a Little Mammoth, where a baby mammoth gets frozen in the ice and, as he wakes up in modern times, begins crying for his mother only to find out she will never come.

Films — Live-Action

• 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns: Feeling a deadly ennui, Holmes placed himself in suspended animation in 1899, planning to awaken in 2000, hoping that the future would hold new challenges. An earthquake woke him up in 1993.
• A Walt Disney-esque character in Able Edwards (the first feature film shot entirely in front of a greenscreen) is unfrozen in the future... only to be unsalvageable because of damage sustained by being frozen. They can clone him though.
• In Adorable Snows Woman, pilot lady Lucie de Saint Pierre survived an airplane crash in mountains in the Roaring Twenties and woke up in 2002. The family that is in her house by now has to act as if they were her new servants.
• In A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, The Swintons' son Martin has been placed in suspended animation until a cure can be found for his rare disease.
• An American Pickle has a variant that doesn't involve frost. Jewish immigrant worker Herschel Greenbaum accidentally falls into a vat of brine at the Brooklyn pickle factory he works at in 1919. The brine somehow preserves him and he wakes up one century later in a New York City he doesn't recognize anymore, with only one surviving member of his lineage.
• Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery: Suspended animation as a kind of Time Travel — Dr. Evil only wanted to survive his space exile, and Powers, to be there when his nemesis returned. Mr. Bigglesworth lost his fur to "feline complications due to the reanimation process," according to Mustafa.
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is about a dinosaur frozen in Arctic ice until a nuclear test thaws it out and revitalizes it, thus making it the original Nuclear Mutant. The movie does briefly address the improbability of this, when the hero is trying to convince a prominent palaeontologist of the beast's existence.
  Lee: I don't know if this will be of any help, but you remember, doctor, a few years ago, an expedition unearthed a herd of mastodons in the Siberian tundra. Dead thousands of years, yet their fur was still intact, the meat still edible.
  Doctor Elson: That's quite right, my dear. But they weren't alive. That's the important difference. They weren't alive.
• In Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America undergoes this trope. The reason behind it is revealed to be due to his deliberately crashing Red Skull's flying-wing bomber, the Valkyrie, into the Arctic Ocean to save American lives. By the time he defeated the Red Skull and could take control of the plane, he was too far away from any usable landing sites.
  • Later on, in The Avengers, Iron Man refers to him as a "Capsicle". A brief flashback sequence◊ also shows a clearly-frozen Cap being examined by scientists. Realistically, the scientists are very shocked when they discover he's still alive.
  • And in The Winter Soldier, it's revealed that Bucky Barnes survived and has been put in cryogenic stasis, only being thawed when HYDRA needs him.
• In Chiller, after being unfrozen, Miles Creighton was changed (he became a cold-blooded killer).
• Dark Star features an interesting version, in that the ship's skipper is technically dead and frozen in a block of ice, but thanks to a device is still able to talk to visiting crewmembers. And when the ship blows up, he "survives" intact inside the ice.
• The Devil's Messenger': In "The Girl in the Glacier", scientists discover a 50,000-year-old woman frozen inside a glacier.
• Pretty much the entire plot of Encino Man, starring Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser. Fraser's character is a caveman thawed in modern times by two high school students.
• Fierce Creatures: The new zoo owner; Rod McCane, has made plans to have himself frozen and wait for a cure if anything happens to him, both to ensure his immortality and to spite his son, Vince (since Rod would be legally alive, Vince wouldn't be able to inherit his money). When Rod gets shot in the head near the end, Vince panics and tries to pack his body in ice, until Rollo points out there's no cure for fatal headshots.
• Forever Young: The protagonist volunteers for a suspended animation experiment that's supposed to last a year, but is forgotten about until 53 years later. Upon revival, he is still young, but ages rapidly to his "real" age by the end of the film. And that's supposed to be a happy ending? Maybe bittersweet: he did it because his girlfriend was in a coma and believed to be as good as dead from being hit by a car. He meets her, alive, in the end.
• Genesis II (1973), in which a NASA scientist taking part in a suspended animation experiment ends up sleeping a lot longer than he expected.
• In the French comedy Hibernatus, starring Louis de Funès, a major character is frozen in ice and glycerin (allowing him not to die) when on a scientific mission in Antarctica in the early 20th century. He is discovered in present time (The '70s). A small town is changed back to what it was in 1905 in order to preserve him from the shock of discovering his hibernation... Hilarity Ensues.
• In the film Iceman, "Charlie" is discovered in a block of ice, thawed out and revived, after 40,000 years of being a Caveman Popsicle.
• Idiocracy: Military suspended animation experiment, supposed to only last a year, takes two totally average people 500 years into the future, where they find they're anything but average...
• Interstellar. When Dr. Mann is woken from his cryo-pod, he says he never set a wakeup date as he'd either be rescued or he'd be marooned on the planet forever, so it would be best never to wake up.
• Mars Needs Women. The Martians launch Operation Sleep Freeze to abduct five women and sleep freeze them so they can be taken away to Mars on their small Flying Saucer. They hide the saucer in a derelict ice factory because it has all the required chemicals in place.
• Late for Dinner is about a man and his mentally challenged friend from the sixties accidentally being cryonically frozen and waking up in the nineties. Played pretty seriously. Shortly after "waking up", they go to a nearby hospital, still unsure what happened. One of them tells a black doctor how strange it is for a black man to be allowed to practice medicine.
• In The Man with Nine Lives, Dr. Leon Kravaal develops a potential cure for cancer, which involves freezing the patient. But an experiment goes awry when authorities believe Kravaal has killed a patient. Kravaal freezes the officials but accidentally freezes himself along with them. When thawed out years later, he and the others are alive and healthy.
• Not a part of this trope but the name is mentioned in Mr. Deeds by a reporter in reference to Preston Blake freezing atop a mountain.
• Once Upon a Time (2017): Mo Yuan is kept in a block of ice and looked after by Bai Qian.
• Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Who later becomes reheated leftovers.
• In Sexmission Two scientists, after a botched cryo experiment, find themselves in a Straw Feminist society (a global war wiped out most males). Naturally malcontent with their new role, they decide to fuck the system.
• Sherlock Holmes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) and Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993).
• Woody Allen's character Miles Monroe in Sleeper. He gets frozen in the 20th century and thawed 200 years later — wrapped in tin foil for freshness.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, they flat out use the term with regards to some cryonically frozen augmented humans.
• Star Wars features Han Solo frozen in carbonite as a method of incarceration. And decoration! Though as a slight variation, the characters make it clear that they aren't sure how effective the carbonite freezing method they employ will be on a human subject. Darth Vader was essentially using Han as a guinea pig to see if it would work later for Luke Skywalker.
• This is how the creatures from The Thing (1982) were found by human explorers, both in the films and the original short story. One character in John Carpenter's version speculates that, facing defeat, the Thing might simply return to the ice and await the next group of suckers to uncover it.
• In a very early and short-term example, The Three Stooges flee trouble in an ice cream truck — a couple of hours later Moe and Larry pull Curly from the back, who is frozen solid. They thaw him out over an open fire on a rotating spit.
  Moe: Twenty minutes to a pound. (chuckles) We'll be here a month!
• Transformers (2007): Project Iceman... a.k.a. "I AM MEGATRON!"
• Twilight Zone: The Movie: Discussed in "Kick the Can". Mr. Conroy tells the other residents of the Sunnyvale Retirement Home that his son has promised to have him frozen that he dies. Mr. Weinstein mockingly calls him "Popsicle Head."
• In Vanilla Sky the main character is horribly disfigured in a car crash. After that, things get weird. It turns out that after the accident he committed suicide and had himself frozen until they had the technology to revive him and fix his face. While he was "sleeping", he was supposed to be in a state of lucid dreaming where his life was perfect. But his subconscious felt guilty so instead he was living in his own personal hell.
  "Tech Support!"
• Willow: Thought Bavmorda's Forced Transformation was bad? She has worse in stock. Bavmorda had sealed her husband and his entire capitol inside glass for many years to seize his throne for herself.

Live-Action TV

• The 100: In "Damocles Part 2", the cast goes into cryo to wait out the Earth's recovery after it was decimated yet again. The unfrozen characters seem fine despite 125 years having passed instead of the agreed 10.
• Adam Adamant Lives! The title character is frozen in a block of ice in 1902 and thawed in 1966. Not only does an ordinary London hospital manage to thaw him with complete success, but his clothes don't even get wet in the process. Even the matches in his pocket still work just fine.
• In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., when the rest of the main characters are sent to the future and Leo Fitz isn't, he ends up spending 74 years cryogenically frozen to join them.
• In The Amazing Extraordinary Friends, the superheroine Blaze was put 'on ice' for several years by the series Big Bad. When she was eventually thawed out, she had become the villainous Ice.
• Meanwhile in Angel, this is how Vampire Hunter Daniel Holtz came to the present: frozen inside a statue by the demon Sahjhan.
• Babylon 5:
  • Used to hold injured or ill individuals until they could reach more advanced medical help. This includes a few dozen Shadow-modified telepaths the crew recovers. The cryo tech is later used to sneak the telepaths past bioscanners.
  • "The Long Dark" also involves a ship sent from Earth shortly before First Contact (and use of FTL) with a married couple in stasis chambers. Unfortunately, only the woman survives. Her husband is dead, but not due to a malfunction. Actually, he is "eaten" by an Eldritch Abomination that hitched a ride on the ship.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): The consciousness of a particular humanoid Cylon is to download from his or her body into cold storage indefinitely.
• In the pilot episode of Better Off Ted, Phil the scientist is put in a cryonic tube for three days. Ted says that "We froze him. Like a human leftover."
• Brave New World: It's revealed New London's founders were put in stasis while an AI they created made a (supposedly) better society on their behalf, which they ran after waking up. Mond turns out to be from the times before.
• The title character of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century gets a one-way ticket to the future when his life support systems are frozen as well.
• One episode of Castle has a Victim of the Week who had a monitoring system to alert a cryonics company to collect him for freezing upon his death. This causes several problems for Castle and Beckett when the company in question absconds with the body before the police arrive.
• In Cleopatra 2525, the main character is a stripper put in suspended animation for 500 years after a failed boob job (yes, really). And in the final Cliffhanger episode, it was revealed that so was the Big Bad. Well, minus the boob job. It wouldn't look good on him.
• Dark Matter (2015): The Seers' ship keeps people with predictive abilities on board this way, to stop them from escaping.
  • Used voluntarily by the crew of the Raza for some extended journeys and to preserve terminal patients until they can be treated.
• Barnabas Collins, on both versions of Dark Shadows, spent well over a century chained up in his coffin. Granted, as a vampire, he could've lasted that long anyway, but due to this long siesta, he had to play catch-up when freed, much like a regular Human Popsicle.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Cybermen froze themselves to conserve resources in "The Tomb of the Cybermen".
  • Both "The Ice Warriors" and "Cold War" involve Ice Warriors being found in a glacier, thousands of years after they crashed on Earth.
  • The Silurians all entered "hybernation chambers" when the Moon arrived in Earth orbit, because they thought it was going to crash into the Earth (or, given recent revelations, maybe because they were scared of the big dragon creature who laid it). All Silurian stories involve humanity coming upon some of these chambers and accidentally waking the Silurians up.
  • In "The Ark in Space", Humanity froze itself to wait out an environmental catastrophe.
    • Ironically, the Doctor himself makes the cryogenic/cryonic mistake while belittling poor Harry's intelligence.
  • At the end of "Destiny of the Daleks", Davros is cryonically frozen by the Doctor until the next Dalek story.
  • Kane in "Dragonfire". He's an ultra-low-temperature humanoid alien who can't endure above-freezing conditions, and whose ungloved touch can freeze someone to death within seconds.
  • "A Christmas Carol" has the Eleventh Doctor end up on a world where a greedy family lends money to people in return for a family member put on ice as collateral. The large part of the episode involves the Doctor and a kid unfreezing a beautiful woman every Christmas Eve for a day until the kid grows up and falls for her. Unfortunately, she is terminally ill with only a few days left to live, as shown by the counter on her pod.
• Earth: Final Conflict: A Roman judge who alien visitor Ma'el placed in stasis is to be awakened every 100 years to see if the Taelons have disregarded his warning and came to Earth. Should that happen, the judge is supposed to ram the Mothership with Ma'el's ship.
  • Three cryopods were found that were 200,000 years old. Turns out they were originally from a spacecraft that will launch decades in the future but was sent back in time.
• Eerie, Indiana: In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson's late husband created the most astoundingly effective Tupperware in the history of mankind. She has been using Foreverware to keep both herself and her twin sons Bert and Ernie young since 1964.
• In Eureka, Fargo's grandfather is woken from (accidental) cryonic freezing. For the entire episode, he's trying to figure out the 'new world' as 50 years have gone past.
  • Not in the new timeline, though. It's mentioned that Fargo became the head of GD in the new reality thanks to his grandfather's influence.
• Farscape
  • Once featured is a stasis process which turns the future rulers of a particular planet into metal statues; during this time, they're still aware of everything occurring around them, so that when they're eventually revived, they'll have seen and heard enough of the politics going on in the building to function as effective monarchs. The statue stasis is specifically mentioned to be only safe for Sebaceans. Crichton barely survives the process the first time and would likely have died if attempted again; even the first time causes him so much pain that his statue doesn't look very "kingly," what with kneeling on the floor and screaming in agony. Interestingly, after his statue is beheaded by a Scarran, a Peacekeeper agent glues it back on, allowing him to be "revived" with few difficulties beyond those caused by his incompatibility.
  • The second season finale featured a massive cryonics facility beneath Diagnosan Tocot's surgery, where Tocot and Grunchlk store the bodies of all the patients that didn't survive their treatments. Most of them are pretty much beyond saving, and are only kept around as donors for luckier patients; unfortunately, because they're frozen before they actually die, the souls of the "donors" remain trapped in their bodies. However, one or two of the frozen residents turn out to be perfectly healthy- among them being Jool and a very irritated Scarran agent.
• Firefly: When we first meet River, she appears to have been preserved in this way. However, that was for medical purposes, and she was presumably only frozen for a short period of time. Also, the Alliance was looking for a brother and a sister together, not one man with a crate.
  • During the hospital job; there is a passing mention of a cryo department, implying that preserving people as human popsicles is within the standard of care in The Verse - at least on the wealthy Alliance planets.
• On Fringe, the amber chemical that is used to contain interdimensional rifts sometimes traps people within it when it solidifies. The government declares people who get ambered legally dead, but the episode "Amber 31422" reveals that the people trapped inside are in suspended animation and one person is successfully revived. In "Letters of Transit" late in the fourth season, Walter and later Peter and Astrid are revived from amber in the year 2036 after being 'frozen' for 21 years.
• General Hospital built a storyline about archvillainess Helena Cassadine's mysterious experiments in a subterranean lab beneath the hospital. It turned out she had cryonically frozen her elder son, Stavros, after his death twenty years earlier, and was preparing to "defrost" him
• Knight Rider: "Knight Rider 2000"'s central premise was that, by the year 2000, criminals would be cryonically suspended for the duration of their prison terms.
• Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: The Zyuranger were frozen in their native time to come back to the present.
• On L.A. Law, an old friend of Jonathan's from law school turns up and tells him she's dying of a brain tumor and wants him to help her get a court order to have herself cryonically frozen. Opposing her, the state claims that such an order would be tantamount to the courts licensing euthanasia for sick people.
• The main premise of The Last Train, where a meteor strike is about to hit the earth causing bringing about the end of civilisation as we know it, so the nation's top scientists are stored as human popsicles in an underground laboratory whilst the general public is kept ignorant. The main characters are all random strangers travelling on the same train who get also get made into human popsicles when a junior scientist traveling on the same train realizes she won't make it to the facility in time and activates one of the freezing devices. She initially has a hard time convincing the others of what really happened when they all thaw out.
• An episode of Lexx has a group of teenagers convince their unpopular friend to steal his father's spaceship and go for a ride. Apparently, space travel using this method requires suspended animation, so they program the timer for a year. Unfortunately for them, they mess up the programming, and the timer is never activated. They're picked up centuries later by the titular Living Ship. One of the teens accidentally lets the undead assassin Kai loose with instructions to "kill everyone". Naturally, Kai slaughters all the teens in the most graphic way possible.
• Logan's Run: In "Crypt", Logan, Jessica, and Rem discover a 22nd Century cryonics facility. A message recorded by Dr. Mildred Krim in March 2120 reveals that six people — the telekinetic Dexter Kim, the architect David Pera, the doctor Rachel Greenhill, the administrators Frederick Lyman, the roboticist Victoria Mackie and the genius Sylvia Reyna — were placed in suspended animation as they had contracted a plague in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust. Although Krim and her team were able to find a cure, they did not survive long enough to administer it. As such, the six sleepers remained in suspended animation until they were revived by the Runners in 2319. The cure is contained in two vials, each containing enough for three people. However, as the Runners are about to revive them, an earthquake strikes and one of the vials is broken. It is therefore up to Logan, Jessica, and Rem to decide which three deserve the cure based on their skills. The decision is taken out of their hands when Lyman and Mackie are murdered by Sylvia, who is revealed to be a lab technician who altered computer records and assumed the real Sylvia's identity so that she would have a chance to survive. Kim, Pera, and Dr. Greenhill decide to return her to suspended animation, which thereby becomes her Cryo-Prison, and take the cure themselves.
• The Mandalorian: In the first episode, a captured bounty sneaking around the title character's ship finds a rack of carbonite slabs with impressions of terrified people in them, then finds himself joining them. Makes you wonder what exactly Mando had meant earlier when he said "I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold."
• Gets a reference in Mystery Science Theater 3000. After Mike and his robots return to Earth after 500 years, they find that Pearl, the mother of their old adversary Dr. Forrester is still around thanks to “some very fancy cryogenics”.
• The New Avengers: Used in the 2-part "K Is for Kill" story. In 1945 Russian soldier Stanislav stole the secret of longevity from a Tibetian monk. He created an army of 252 sleepers that were stationed all over Europe. In 1965, one of them awoke by accident and went on a rampage in Berkshire. 12 years later, the same thing happens to a larger group in France. Only in death do the Russian soldiers show their advanced age.
• The NewsRadio "what if" episode "Space" takes place in the far future and Joe has to be revived from suspended animation to fix the reactor core. When he can't, the staff has to go into stasis (except Matthew and Bill) until the problem can be solved. Unfortunately, Matthew kicks out the plug on the stasis machines and kills them instantly.
• Once Upon a Time: After using the Spell of Shattered Sight to turn Anna against Elsa and imprison her sister in a a magic urn, Ingrid the Snow Queen freezes the kingdom of Arendelle. When the kingdom thaws and Anna and Kristoff are captured by Hans, Hans informs them that 30 years have passed while Arendelle was frozen. This makes it easier for Anna and Kristoff to reunite with Elsa in present-day Storybrook.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Lithia", Mercer is a soldier who voluntarily was put in experimental cryostasis, where he was then kept for the next forty years. He wakes up to find himself the last man on Earth. It turns out that other men were put in cryostasis too, and eleven others also released.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers in Space: Zhane was preserved in a stasis pod for several years while his injuries healed.
  • Power Rangers Time Force: In the year 3000, mutant criminals are frozen and miniaturized for storage.
  • Power Rangers Dino Charge: Koda, a caveman, discovered the blue energem right before falling into a river of ice, being preserved thereby until the present day. In this case, the energem presumably helped preserve him from the usual effects of being frozen in ice for millennia (i.e., death).
  • Power Rangers Dino Fury: Zayto was an alien knight who put himself into stasis after he was unable to find a way to destroy the Sporix that he and his team were fighting. He's awakened in the premier to help Ollie and Amelia when they also become Rangers.
• Red Dwarf
  • Lister spends three million years into the future in a "stasis booth" (a bit more complicated, as it actually froze him in time). Stasis units are used or mentioned several more times in the series, along with "Deep Sleep" units, which appear to induce some form of hibernation. In series seven, a body is found literally encased in ice, although this is apparently done by a virus in the body, with no technological assistance (no explanation is given as to how the virus does this). And in something of a subversion, the body itself didn't get preserved very well, either.
  • In another, they find a genuinely frozen corpsicle that originated from a prison facility. The odds of the contents are split evenly between an attractive female warden or an omnicidal mass murderer. It turns out to be the murderer.
• Saturday Night Live — the "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" character plays to the jury's sympathies by claiming this or that modern phenomenon 'frightens and confuses' him.
• Played straight in an episode of SeaQuest DSV, "Games", where a notorious war criminal is kept in a cryonic freezer — until the freezer malfunctions, at which point everyone realizes that the killer pulled a Dead Person Impersonation by killing the prison warden and putting him in the freezer instead.
• The Second Hundred Years was a 1967 Fantastic Comedy about a Gold Rush prospector who had been frozen in a glacier for decades, thawed out, and moved in with his now-elderly son... and also his identical-looking, identical-age grandson. This trope was the entire concept of the show.
• So Weird: "James Garr": the titular character had been frozen years earlier, and was revived. This story touched on the possibility that such preservation might not preserve the human soul.
• Stargate SG-1: A number of races possess stasis pods, which can preserve a humanoid for many thousands of years. Stargate Atlantis twice touched on the fact that this form of stasis does not completely halt aging, but merely slows it down; all the frozen characters they encounter, having spent 10,000 years in stasis, have aged well past their natural lifespan and would die of old age within hours (at best) of defrosting. The same happens later with Merlin (yes, that Merlin) in an SG-1 episode.
  • Subverted in one two-parter episode of SG-1, when the team wake up and are told they have been in stasis, only to find it was a trick by Hathor to learn the secrets of the SGC.
  • Another episode has them finding a woman frozen in ice in Antarctica, supposedly predating humans on Earth. She woke up when thawed. She was an Ancient, not a human, which discounts time travel.
  • Played completely straight with the time-dilation field. In which time slowed so much that people stayed in place for centuries or millennia.
  • In another instance, an ancient ship accelerated to near-light speed and so its people got preserved for millennia.
• Star Trek:
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" gives us Khan and his followers, found in their cryo-sleep pods aboard the Botany Bay.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, humans from the 20th century who were cryonically frozen to survive illness appeared in the episode "The Neutral Zone".
  • Scotty from the original series uses a variation, as revealed in the Next Generation episode "Relics". By storing himself in the transporter's pattern buffer, he skipped the intervening years until rescue by essentially not existing.
  • Similarly to "The Neutral Zone", the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The 37's" features characters from the early twentieth century in suspended animation (this time by the aliens who'd abducted them, rather than human technology). One of them turns out to be Amelia Earhart.
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Thaw", the crew find a few aliens that are in a stasis chamber years after they should have left. Janeway, being who she is, feels that they must investigate.
• The Tomorrow People (1973) does this with a frozen and secretly alien Adolf Hitler.
• In Torchwood, various characters are frozen/unfrozen in the Torchwood Hub, including someone who was dead for half the season. Presumably, those still frozen (including Jack's brother) are dead now that the Hub is destroyed as of Children of Earth.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", after stealing $1 million worth of gold bars, Farwell, DeCruz, Brooks and Erbie place themselves in suspended animation for 100 years so they can evade the authorities and spend the gold when they awaken in 2061. Erbie died when a rock broke his suspended animation animation. As it turns out, it was All for Nothing as a way to manufacture gold was discovered during their long sleep.
  • In "The Long Morrow", the astronaut Commander Douglas Stansfield is placed in suspended animation when he is sent on a mission to a solar system 141 lightyears from Earth on December 31, 1987. He removes himself from suspended animation in June 1988 so that he will be the same age as his love Sandra Horn when he returns to Earth in 2027. When he does eventually come home, he discovers that Sandra had herself placed in suspended animation shortly after he left. As such, he is now 71 and she is still 26.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • "Quarantine" concerns Matthew Foreman, who was frozen in 2023 and revived into a seemingly idyllic but stagnant future in 2347. It's eventually revealed to be... not so stagnant...
  • In "Stranger in Possum Meadows", Danny Wilkins is placed in cryostasis aboard Scout's ship as the human specimen in Scout's study of Earth. However, he is frozen for at most several hours before Scout begins to feel guilty and returns him to his mother.
• VR.5: We learn in one of the final episodes that a character killed early on was cryonically preserved.
• "Bronzing" in Warehouse 13 is functionally equivalent, except the victim remains conscious.
• The second episode's Monster of the Week of Ultraman: Towards the Future is Gigasaurus, a sauropod-like monster discovered slumbering in Antarctic ice which awakens after being excavated by the humans. It goes on a rampage as soon as the Gudis virus infects it, and the episode ends with Ultraman Great putting the monster back to sleep by freezing it back.
• The Reveal in Wayward Pines is that hundreds of people have been placed in cryopods (most of them kidnapped) in order to wait for humanity to destroy itself and for Earth to recover. The titular town actually exists in the 41st century. In Season 2, it's mentioned that it took decades for Pilcher to perfect the freezing process. Apparently, besides actual freezing, volcanic ash is used to kill off any bacteria that might enter the pod. The process appears to be harmless. One character is revealed to have undergone it hundreds of times, awakening every twenty years for a day in order to keep track of the state of the world and to maintain the equipment. By the end of Season 2, the pods are used again to survive an Abby attack on the town, but only half of the available pods are charged, resulting in hundreds of people being left to be slaughtered.
• Wiseguy. Mark Volchek runs the town of Lynchboro, Seattle as a personal fiefdom. The OCB is sent in to investigate him, only to find that his big plan is merely to build a cryonic storage hospital for the entire town in order to sate his own phobia of death.
• Xena and Gabrielle of Xena: Warrior Princess were accidentally frozen and slept for over twenty years by Ares. They stayed there.

Music

• Alice Cooper's "Refrigerator Heaven", wherein the POV character gets frozen until they find a cure for cancer.
  I'm freezing, I'm frozen, I'm icicle blue
  So-o-o cold!
• The song was referenced by name in Alice's later song "Cold Ethyl":
  If I live till 97
  You'll still be waiting in refrigerator heaven...
• Apollo 440's song "Liquid Cool" dealt entirely with using cryogenics, or "liquid cool", as a way of achieving immortality.
  Make me immortal yeah yeah
  I am immortal yeah
  I am nothing yeah yeah
  Becoming liquid cool
• The narrator of James Taylor's "The Frozen Man" was subjected to an accidental version of this when he fell overboard.
  My brothers and the others were lost at sea.
  I alone am returned to tell thee.
  Hidden in ice for a century
  To walk the world again.
  Lord have mercy on the frozen man.
• The heavy metal band GWAR spent thousands of years frozen in ice until their discovery by Sleazy P. Martini in 1984.
• In the filksong "Compound Interest" by Duane Elms and Bill Roper, the singer and his fellow astronauts not only put money away for the future like the Manticoran colonists above but arranged for the interest after 500 years to be applied to developing FTL — as their sole property — making them richer than filthy rich when they came out of freeze 500 years after that.
  Ten years from when we set the quest they found the hyperdrive,
  And man spread to a million worlds, and we own all but five; [italics added]
  For we control all commerce, any trade must be our trust,
  And any ship that moves must lease the hyperdrive from us!
  • Actually this song is a spoof of a much darker version, where the astronauts found themselves useless when they arrived at their destination because Time Marches On.
  Ten years we had been on our way when they found the hyperdrive,
  and man spread to a thousand stars while we were half alive,
  and still they could not stop our ship to save us from our fate,
  And so we have arrived here, but 900 years too late!
• "The Frozen Man" by James Taylor tells the story of William James Mc Phee, a sailor born in Liverpool in 1843 who was frozen in ice after a shipwreck and brought back to life in the 1990s. While Mc Phee ends up amazed with the progress of humanity, seeing the graves of both his wife and daughter makes him tell the doctors "don't leave nothing to work on" once he dies.
• The Filksong Cold Dreams by Julia Ecklar is about a Human Popsicle that will never awake, because the ship's drive system failed so it will never reach its destination.
• Queen's filk-song "'39" is about a group of colonists who set out on a spaceship to find a new Earth-type world, and return after a year of ship time to find that a hundred years have passed on Earth.
• Denis Leary, in the song "Asshole", claims that John Wayne didn't die, but was frozen until a cure for his cancer could be found.
• Twice in the music video for "Harmony" by Erasure.
• The Monkees’ 1987 music video for the single “Heart and Soul” features Davy, Micky, and Peter frozen in big blocks of ice in what is meant to be the year “1967.” Fast-forward 20 years via Exploding Calendar, and it's now 1987. A group of random hairdryers suddenly melts the ice away, freeing the threesome from their frozen state. The newly unfrozen Monkees (strangely 20 years older) then venture off and romp into the "totally 80’s" world, while still believing it is the 1960’s.
• Tom Smith's "Hyperspace Cryogenic Insomnia Blues" is about an astronaut on a spaceship whose crew is all in cryonic chambers and frozen for the duration of their flight. Only his isn't working properly, and he is trapped inside, conscious, until they reach their destination... ten years from now.
• The song "Staci Statis" by Zombina and the Skeletones is a love song about a woman who is cryonically frozen somewhere in space.

Other Sites

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-326 ("A Chinese Peasant"). After being biologically modified, SCP-326 was placed in cryonic suspension for more than 50 years before being released. As a result, even though she is biologically 65 to 70 years old, she is more than 120 years old chronologically.
  • SCP-2805 ("Disney on Ice"). You know the Walt Disney urban legend? It's true...and he can communicate with people about "the Florida Project" (Disneyworld).

Pinball

• Centigrade 37 is all about thawing out a Human Popsicle by raising her temperature to 37 degrees Centigrade (normal human body temperature).
• In Red & Ted's Road Show, Red and Ted find some frozen folks in Minneapolis and try to thaw them out.
• Stern Electronics' Flight 2000 depicts a fleet of Sleeper Starships flying through space, each with a single Human Popsicle within.

Pro Wrestling

• The original plan for WWE wrestler John Heidenreich's character was that he was a Nazi supersoldier who had been frozen since 1939. This idea was nixed in favor of making him a psychopath who wrote dreadful angsty poetry, talked to his "inner child" known as Little Johnny, tried to make friends with audience members, and supposedly kidnapped and anally violated announcer Michael Cole. Only in wrestling could the Nazi thing be more tasteful than the things they actually had him do.
• Another wrestling example is Wrestling Society X's Matt Classic (actually Colt Cabana in a mask), a wrestler who was supposedly in a coma (without aging!) for 40 years and uses old-fashioned, 1960s style moves such as the airplane spin, judo chop, and full body slam.

Puppet Shows

• The 1960s British kids' puppet show Space Patrol (known as Planet Patrol in the US) had spaceships with "freezer cabinets" because, realistically, journeying around the Solar System takes weeks or months.
• In the Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock episode "The Legend of Icy Joe", the eponymous Fraggle explorer from centuries ago is found alive and well when the new water source defrosts the ice cave she was exploring when she disappeared.

Radio

• Big Finish Doctor Who:
  • In Deimos, the ancient Martian catacombs contain Ice Warriors in suspended animation.
  • In Frozen Time, another group of Ice Warriors get trapped in a glacier for thousands of years, along with the Doctor himself. There's also a reference to another Silurian colony.
• Earthsearch
  • Challenger is a Sleeper Starship as relativity is never violated; interstellar travel is only possible due to suspended animation. However, the starship the protagonists use was also designed as a Generation Ship because every year as a Human Popsicle means they age a month.
  • The Underpeople (who live on the derelict sister ship of Challenger) are a Lady Land that keeps men in cryogenic suspension until they're needed for reproductive purposes.
• The Firesign Theatre did an interview with Mrs. Foster, a woman who was going to cryonically freeze her husband. It turns out he's not dead, not even sick — he's just fine, in fact. Mr. Foster (Call me Frosty!) joins in the conversation.
• One sketch on The Lenny Henry Show had Henry as a man who had frozen himself in 1970 and awakes fifty years later. Asking about the state of race relations, he's excited to learn that the US has had a black president and there's even a black member of The British Royal Family, then learns that Obama has been replaced by a ... less progressive figure, everyone hates Meghan, and "Black Lives Matter" is a slogan rather than something that goes without saying. He says he's going back in the freezer for another fifty years and hopes things will be sorted out by then. The cryogenics team decide they should probably make it a hundred.

Tabletop Games

• In Eclipse Phase "blank" morphs are stored on ice in "Body Banks". Cryonics was also used frequently in the early days of space travel before Egocasting became common.
• Played with in GURPS Transhuman Space, people who are frozen are dead, but sometimes the brain is intact enough to extract a Virtual Ghost. There is also nanostasis, which is much safer and routinely used for interplanetary travel.
• The Morrow Project. The members of the title organization had their temperatures lowered to the freezing point and were put in "freeze tubes" so they'd survive an expected nuclear war. The personnel of their main base were killed shortly after the war and the frozen team members remained in that state for 150 years until a malfunctioning computer finally sent the revival code.
• The limited release White Wolf game Orpheus is centered around a company that discovered a way to perfect the cryonic process... and discovered a lucrative sideline in the process.
• Princess: The Hopeful: Creatures of Darkness that get too far from a Tainted Place in the Dark World will be frozen solid by its bitter chill, only to reawaken when a new Taint opens and provides the Light to thaw them. Several of the sample antagonists are mentioned to be centuries or even millennia old, having spent significant chunks of their lives frozen.
• "Low berths" are common on ships in Traveller, there's a significant chance of accidents however.

Video Games

• Notch's cancelled game 0x10c begins with the player character awakening from stasis, billions of years too late.
• The whole plot of Akatsuki Blitzkampf is kickstarted when the titular Akatsuki, both The Protagonist and the Living MacGuffin, wakes up fifty years after a failed mission that took place in the Arctic Pole; in fact, his prologue depicts the exact moment when this happens. Now not only he's stuck in a world that he barely recognizes, but he's being chased around by lots of people who want his secrets, and he still wants to finish his mission. And he is NOT happy when he realizes the truth behind it. Moreso, it's strongly implied that Akatsuki only "survived" after having been experimented on prior to the whole mess.
• ANNO: Mutationem: At the end of the Mysterious Console DLC, Noni's backstory is explained that she died of chronic disease and her parents had her body put in cryostasis for preservation. After her parents were killed in a car accident years later, Noni's body was cremated as no one was able to continue the cryo usage.
• Arknights:
  • The Doctor is awakened from cryogenic sleep at the start of the game in a weakened state, and had to be retrieved by Rhodes Island while fighting off hostility in the form of the Reunion Movement.
  • During "Lone Trail", the Doctor and co. comes across a vast field of cryopods similar to the one the Doctor awakened from. Which turns out to be a mass graveyard, as energy reserve ran too low and the caretaker AI chose to scuttle them when there is no hope of reviving the Precursors within.
  • At the conclusion of "Lone Trail" Control is stranded in space without any means to return or be safely retrieved. She opts to go into cryogenic sleep in a specifically-engineered cryopod, knowing that she will most likely meet a slow end as the last of the station's energy runs out.
• BioForge: The surviving remnants of the Phyxx alien race are cryonically frozen within their base.
• In the Bloons Tower Defense 6 map, "Frozen Over", a monkey dressed in caveman garb can be seen frozen below the surface of the lake. It can be freed by having a Mortar Tower fire on it, after which it will appear near the track, hitting passing Bloons with its club.
• Bug has the Abominable Snowbug boss, first seen trapped in a large block of ice (presumably frozen during the ice age). He breaks out as soon as Bug walks a few steps.
• Leif from Bug Fables is able to do this to enemies. In the field, frozen enemies can be used as extra platforms for the party to jump across, while in battle, frozen enemies will not only be deprived a turn but will also get extra damage if subsequently hit by an attack (at the expense of immediately freeing them from the ice). Ultimax also gets frozen this way once Team Snakemouth realizes that the brainwashing that makes him loyal to the Wasp King is also making him suicidally aggressive, only getting thawed out in the Playable Epilogue.
• Civilization: Call to Power: Cryonic freezing chambers eventually become an option once you research the appropriate technologies. In addition to their normal benefit of boosting gold output, they also provide citizens of a Theocratic government a happiness boost as your televangelists claim they allow you to experience heaven and return. Derive from that what you will.
• The two main characters in Crystalis emerge from suspended animation.
• In Day of the Tentacle, the Chron-O-Johns are incapable of transporting organic matter, which means that a hamster from the present day gets the popsicle treatment to be used in the future. Restoring the hamster requires nothing more than a microwave and a sweater that's been forced to take The Slow Path by spending two hundred years in a tumble dryer. Although the microwave is of (presumably) more advanced tentacle manufacture and may operate differently. Laverne even lampshades this, pointing out that under normal circumstances, putting a hamster in the microwave leads to horrible consequences, and children who do that are taken away. Her monologue is also a reference to the game's predecessor, Maniac Mansion, where putting a hamster in the microwave causes it to explode. No cryonics involved in that game, though.
• Stasis is available in Dead Space 2, both in ice and time stop versions. There are frozen dead bodies of Unitologists and stasis beds to preserve critical patients. There is also the suggestion that Isaac has been in and out of stasis during the two years after the events of Dead Space.
• The spinoff of Demonheart, The Ice Demon, has this as Esmius's solution to getting around the May Fly December Romance. He offers to freeze his love interest with the intention of occasionally dethawing them for company.
• Descent 3 features an "emergency stasis" system in the intro video which appears to freeze the pilot.
• The Divide: Enemies Within have this happening to you in the backstory, where upon arrival on the alien world your mech gets suddenly attacked by the Creature, sustaining damage in the middle of winter. You fall unconscious as your robot freezes over as the Creature leaves you for the dead, and the following cutscene set in spring has you thawing out.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Kamal, a race of "snow demons" native to the yet-unseen in the series continent of Akavir, are said to freeze every winter and thaw out every spring. When they thaw out, they attack the Tang Mo, an Akaviri race of "monkey folk" who always successfully defend themselves. The one time the Kamal broke this Vicious Cycle was to attack Tamriel (the land where all of the ES games have taken place to date) and that attack failed as well.
  • This is said to be the fate of the Atmorans, natives of Nirn's northernmost continent of Atmora. In the 1st Era, many migrated from the slowly freezing-over Atmora to Skyrim in the north of Tamriel. After toppling the civilization of the Falmer (Snow Elves) and nearly driving them to extinction, the Atmorans settled and interbred with Tamriel's native race of men, the Nedes, making them the ancestors of the modern Nords. Expeditions to Atmora in the 2nd and 3rd Eras found it to be nothing more than a frozen wasteland with no signs of intelligent life. According to the Dunmeri Physical God Vivec in his Lessons of Vivec book series, he traveled there with Lord Nerevar and "found nothing but frozen bearded kings".
• The third version is used in Eternal Journey: New Atlantis. The game starts 20 Minutes into the Future when archaeologists discover the ruins of an Atlantean temple on the ocean floor. The protagonist is a female archaeologist who travels with her husband Michael, a deep-sea diver, to the site. Michael installs a pressure dome to allow her to study the temple without scuba-diving. However, after she recovers a strange locket, a beam of light shoots into the sky, breaking the dome and flooding the site. The protagonist suffers irreparable damage to her brain and is placed in cryo-stasis. She is found and revived two centuries later. Earth has become a Crapsack World due to increased solar activity, but an extensive system of alien ruins is found on Mars very similar to the Atlantean ruins. Naturally, by the time she arrives at the base, something horrible has happened, and she has to figure out what. In the end, the diver whose path she's following turns out to be Michael, who has suffered brain damage attempting to rescue her from under the water and was likewise frozen. They were revived independently from one another, and each thought the other one was long dead. They flee Mars in an alien starship that takes them to a habitable world. Presumably, this new world is humankind's salvation.
• Ever17 does this, involving an extremely elaborate plan to give the game a happy ending. The main character ends up waking up from cryonic storage to find he has two teenage children almost as old as him, the result of a brief fling he had just before he got frozen. He takes this surprisingly well considering (they are very cute kids). He's also in denial.
• EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: Zet in the distant past was an ancient Latour warrior who was caught in a cave-in and glacial coverage, and kept frozen for thousands of years until he awoke 50 years before the game's start. Miku's telling of her family history has it that her grandmother found her grandfather frozen, and this clues in Blackberry to the possibility that his origin is that of an ancient race. No human could survive being frozen, let alone for thousands of years, after all.
• In Faery: Legends of Avalon, the start of the game sees the player character (not actually a human, but near enough) woken from a long time asleep in a magic crystal. Oberon says that this was a choice, but the player character can't remember why he or she would have chosen it. In fact, the stasis was involuntary, being a means for Oberon to get rid of an increasingly troublesome subject.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2: The Sierra Army Depot has a cryo facility storing organs, disease samples... and a very much alive soldier who you can revive and have a quick chat with. Sadly, he dies a few moments later from cryostasis shock, but he does drop the very rare Red Ryder LE BB gun.
    • In the fan mod Restoration Project, the EPA facility has three people on ice, as well as enough of a special compound to revive one of them and recruit. (The other two can be revived as well, but will die quickly without the extra care.)
  • Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta has plenty of those, an original Samurai, a cowboy, 20th-century army medic & more — all frozen, and some don't defrost that well. RIP, Mr. Astronaut...
  • In Fallout 4, the player character was assigned to Vault 111 on the day the bombs fell, only to be stuffed along with the rest of the sheltering citizens into "depressurization pods" that cryonically froze them as part of the vault's secret project to study the long-term effects of such technology. Two hundred years later all the other pods have failed, leaving this Sole Survivor to wander the post-nuclear wasteland.
• Final Fantasy
  • In Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth's true body was discovered to be in stasis within a mako cocoon in a manner similar to cryonics.
  • Final Fantasy VIII features the sorceress Adel, who was frozen and put into space years before the game began.
  • Crystal stasis in Final Fantasy XIII functions like cryonics, complete with transforming into an ice-like statue. ...Wait, what? You mean that's not how it works in real life? Oh...
• Flashback ends with the protagonist escaping the destruction of the alien base on a small spaceship. Since he has no idea where he is in relation to Earth, he puts himself in cryosleep until his ship is found. The sequel Fade to Black starts with him being found and woken up half a century later by the same aliens.
• The opening sequence in Freelancer shows five "Sleeper Ships" pounding their way through the Coalition blockade and heading towards the Sirius sector. Only four actually make it to Sirius, as far as everyone knows. The fifth ship actually makes it, however goes off course. Its inhabitants end up becoming the two main Pirate factions within the game.
• In the Half-Life series, stasis used as a plot device when long passage of time is needed, as the game follows the philosophy that everything the main character experiences must also be experienced by the player, and it wouldn't be too popular with either gamers or programmers if they had to go through several years of mundane experiences. So far, stasis has been used three times throughout the series: Once in the twenty-or-so years between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, once to depict the passage of a week in the middle of Half-Life 2, and a much shorter stay of less than a day between Half-Life 2 and Episode One. The "week" example was half stasis, half Time Travel.
• Halo makes extensive use of cryostasis pods to preserve people, both for space travel and to save the critically wounded. Spartan Linda-028 was preserved in stasis after sustaining a fatal wound in Halo: The Fall of Reach until she was revived in Halo: First Strike; the Master Chief awakens from cryo at the start of Halo: Combat Evolved, and enters cryo at the end of Halo 3 while awaiting rescue in the severed Forward Unto Dawn.
• Heroes of Might and Magic II does the magical counterpart to this in the canonical ending — petrification without the 'aware of the passage of time' issue. The intent was for it to be an indefinite long-term punishment ("for some future generation to take mercy upon"), though circumstances forces Archibald Ironfist to be restored to flesh about a decade later.
• Crew for new ships in Homeworld are awakened from the massive bays of frozen colonists onboard the mothership. How many there are in total depends on how many you save in the second mission, up to 600,000. The manual mentions that the technology was developed based on certain Kharakian creatures that are able to hibernate for long periods of time. Maybe we should study bears.
• In Horizon Zero Dawn, upon learning that Elisabet Sobeck was one of the Old Ones but also the most likely candidate to be Aloy's mother, Sylens theorizes that she may have survived using cryogenics, having learned about the concept thanks to his extensive study of the old ones civilization. He's wrong, as the old ones had not perfected cryogenics to that level before their fall. Aloy is a clone, and Elisabet is a thousand years dead.
• In Invisible Apartment, the Sleepers aren't technically frozen (it's some kind of liquid suspension), but it plays out much the same anyway, with people being put into stasis if their illness can't currently be treated but might be treatable in the future. However, it's revealed that the old ruling families are secretly using the same facilities as a kind of Cryo-Prison for people they'd rather be rid of. (One such person, though, actually got sent there on purpose, after getting a chip implanted that would allow enough consciousness to connect to a computer network. Since she's supposedly in a coma, nobody suspects her of being the mystery hacker.)
• Frosthaw Fortress, a winter-themed stage in Jitsu Squad, have areas containing mooks frozen in solid ice cubes for reasons unknown (maybe they're left in the cold). Slashing or kicking the cubes will free them, but the mooks will simply attack you in return.
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has Ventus, who gets frozen by one of the game's Big Bad's to the point that he cannot move. It is lampshaded when one of his mooks refers to Ventus as a Popsicle.
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning: When Spyro first arrives in Dante's Freezer, it's filled with the frozen corpses of warriors and war machines. Shortly after his arrival, the undead warriors break free of their prisons to attack him.
• Live A Live: Used in the space horror chapter as a Good Morning, Crono for the main characters. The cryo pods are used later on in the story to freeze the wounded crew members until they can get to an earth hospital. Unsurprisingly, things go Very Wrong.
• MapleStory: All of the Hero storylines (minus the Evan storyline) involve this; for the Mercedes storyline, the entire elven hometown is like this, due to its ruler being cursed. The Demon Slayer is also sealed but in rock, not ice.
• Mass Effect:
  • The Protheans use pods in order to survive the Reaper invasion. Alas, they forgot to stock up on batteries. At least one survived, as Mass Effect 3 has an optional Prothean party member first encountered in stasis.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Jack is being kept in cryo stasis onboard a prison ship when you find her. Thawing her out shows why they resorted to such extreme measures: as soon as she regains consciousness she rips free of her shackles and more or less tears the ship apart with her bare hands.
• Mega Man
  • In Mega Man 7: The Freeze Cracker can actually freeze Slash Man in place, as well as Mega Man himself.
  • Mega Man X
    • Since he is made of liquid metal, Toxic Seahorse from Mega Man X3 can still be frozen.
    • Avalanche Yeti from Mega Man X8 can freeze the player characters with his attacks. Burn Rooster from the same game can also get frozen by Avalanche Yeti's weapon.
  • Getting hit while standing on ice floors in the Mega Man Battle Network games would cause MegaMan.EXE to get frozen.
  • There's an ice-themed dungeon in Mega Man Star Force 3 where Mega Man walks across ice floors that freeze him if he lasts too long on them. He can summon Taurus Fire as an Assist Character to thaw Mega Man.
• Metroid Prime Trilogy
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: U-Mos is the only living Luminoth that Samus encounters on Aether, because the ones who did not die in war were sealed into stasis, either to wait until the Ing were annihilated or to die when the last of Aether's planetary energy was lost. They all emerge from stasis after Dark Aether is destroyed, bowing to Samus for saving their world.
  • Metroid Prime 3: Corruption: Samus' gunship includes a cryostasis pod built into the pilot's chair, presumably because of space restrictions on the amount of oxygen, food, water, etc. the ship can carry. The Federation also uses cold stasis to transport nasties like Metroids, Phazon, and the like, with predictable results.
• Metal Slug games have several levels set in tundra regions such as the Arctic, and occasionally players will suffer this fate after falling into ice-cold waters — they sink beneath the surface, re-emerged seconds later as a human ice block, cue players using another life.
• In Metal Slug Code J, a new weapon absent in the original is the Ice Shot, a weapon that fires freezing mists on enemies, where mooks will be encased within chunks of ice immediately before shattering.
• In Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove, four graduate students are missing in a weird blizzard, and when you find them, they've each been turned into one of these. It's an abbreviated form of the trope, though, since they're only in that condition for a few days at most.
• Millie And Molly: You can only control one of the two sisters at a time. When you're controlling one, the other will be frozen in a cube of ice (depending on which graphics style you view the game through). When they're frozen, the other sister can be used as a platform.
• In Mystery Trackers 3: Black Isle, a character spent a couple days or so in a frozen state after running afoul of the villain's mental abilities. A plain old heat lamp thawed him out just fine.
• The entire world gets popsicle'd during the grand finale of Ouendan 2. The bad ending has the eponymous cheerleaders encased in ice... and looking cheerful for the first and only time in the entire game... for some reason.
• In The Outer Worlds you are a passenger on a Colony Ship who was only supposed to be frozen for ten years but your ship was lost for seventy years until Dr. Phineas Welles busted you out. A lot of attention is paid to the idea that a human can only survive being frozen for a decade and Dr. Welles had to invent a way to thaw you out without you turning into a pile of goo.
• Raz in Over Blood wakes up from being one at the start of the game... why he was there is the mystery.
• One of the tasks for the player in Overload is to locate the cryogenic tubes containing the human survivors of the facility. The survivors all have names and have to be touched to teleport them away. Only by saving all of the survivors may one get the good ending.
• Mei in Overwatch was an Overwatch scientist who was studying climate change in Antarctica until a storm cut off the power at her station, damaging their communications systems and leaving them stranded. She and the other scientists cryonically froze themselves in order to avoid dying of starvation, but they weren't found until 10 years later, and she was the only member of the team whose cryo pod hadn't failed in the intervening decade.
• In Phantasy Star Online 2, the Player Character and Matoi are put into cryo-sleep so they can be purged of the Falspawn photons they've built up. They wake up two years later to a very changed ARKS.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Some levels of Frostbite Caves and its Endless Zone Icebound Battleground have frozen zombies that are gradually released as the level progresses.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 Ghetsis tries to perform a Type 1 to the player so that they will be forced to watch Ghetsis Take Over the World. The player is saved at the last minute by N pulling a Big Damn Heroes. Still, this is one of the darkest and most ruthless things ever pulled in a Pokémon game, barring the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers story.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon takes this trope to more disturbing heights with Type 2. When people first meet Lusamine, she talks about how she wants to protect Pokémon "worthy of her love"; clearly, nobody thought she meant cryonically preserving them in a bunker in the underbelly of Aether Paradise, which you see when you come to rescue Lillie later on in the story. It's the sheer volume of cryo cells in the bunker that make this whole thing disturbing, particularly as she's keeping them on display for her to admire whenever she pleases. Optional exposition also reveals that the three failed specimens of the Beast Killer project, Type: Null, were cryonically frozen after the project was deemed a failure, with intention to leave them there for eternity. Given that Gladion is raising one throughout the game, and another is given to the player after the credits roll, it's clear the Aether Foundation has the means to safely extract Pokémon from stasis.
• Portal: Presumably, Aperture Science test subjects in Relaxation Vault pods. Portal 2 confirms this to be the case for the Extended Relaxation Center beds, as well as the Human Vault deep underground that is the goal of the multiplayer campaign.
• Project Eden has a character frozen in time for 15 years. He manages to get though the situation (his release) with apparently minimum confusion and headaches despite the fact that one of his daughters is now an adult (and part of a futuristic police force) and the other daughter has gone mad and started making monstrous freaks and selling drugs.
• Rage (2011) has you and several other enter stasis inside 'arks' to survive an asteroid impact. Unsurprisingly, the others in your ark don't make it.
• RimWorld
  • The game's setting doesn't have Faster-Than-Light Travel, only Sleeper Starships, which is why the first three shipwrecked members of your Robinsonade are woozy and vomiting from "cryptosleep sickness." If you want to escape the rimworld by building your own spaceship, you'll have to research and construct enough ship cryptosleep caskets to preserve your colonists while a shipboard AI pilots them to a new home.
  • Alternatively, you can build standard cryptosleep caskets in your colony, which have situational uses like putting a wounded or sick colonist on ice until you have the resources to properly tend to them, or to have fewer mouths to feed during a famine or environmental crisis like a volcanic winter or rain of toxic fallout. Just be aware that someone will have to remain awake to eventually take the sleepers out of their caskets.
  • You can also find ancient cryptosleep caskets in ruins scattered across the planet, relics from a fallen civilization. Opening them might release centuries-old survivors who stagger around in a confused daze before wandering off the map, hostile druggies who Wake Up Fighting, badly-thawed ex-popsicles who might join your colony if you care for them, corpses who suffered Cryonics Failure, or swarms of Big Creepy-Crawlies.
• In Romancing SaGa, this is how the Heroes encounter Freilei, the guardian of the Obsidian Sword
• In Secret Files: Tunguska, the bad guys tried to get rid of Nina by this way. Then they receive it themselves.
• Seedship: The colonists are all in cryo until the very end of the game.
• In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the Human colonies in Planet come from a big spaceship, the U.N.S. Unity, sent by the United Nations to build a colony in another planet, filled with thousands of cryonically frozen people.
• In The Silent Age that's what happens to all the time-travellers who got infected and is how Joe eventually gets to 2012, spending 40 years frozen.
• Played straight with Jean Bison in Sly 2: Band of Thieves. In the epilogue, he ends up frozen once again while saving some baby penguins.
• Snowball, the 1983 text adventure game from Level 9 Computing, starts with the POV character thawing out.
• Space Quest
  • In a late part of the game Space Quest 5, Roger Wilco is forced to freeze his love interest to protect her from a mutagen that is slowly turning everyone in the story into melty-faced mutants. Being a Sierra adventure game, there's plenty of ways to screw up the freezing process, which kills her and Roger via temporal paradox. (His future son, born by her, saved his life in the previous game.)
  • Space Quest 2 ends with Roger putting into cryo sleep when his escape pod's life support is almost depleted leaving the pod floating in space until Space Quest 3 begins.
• Judd from Splatoon was a pet cat who was frozen for thousands of years by his owner, a scientist known only as "the Professor", to save him from death due to the world finally ending due to severe climate change. After being given an immortality serum, of course. Judd is now one of only a few mammals known to be alive in the current time, with one of the others being his literal clone.
• StarCraft:
  • The four prison/colony ships carrying the Terran colonizers for the Koprulu Sector held them in cryo until landing. The briefing of the first Terran mission in Brood War implies that the UED also kept their personnel in cryo during their travel to the Sector.
  • The ability Stasis used by Arbiters is of the Time Stop variant.
  • Starcraft II Legacy Of The Void has the Spear of Adun arkship carrying entire armies of Protoss warriors in stasis.
• As in the films, Star Wars: The Old Republic has carbonite freezing as a favored tactic of bounty hunters wishing to capture their targets alive. Oddly enough, the game is set long before the timeline of the films, yet the freezing process is commonplace (although somewhat unreliable) and can be done with a special grenade.
• In Street Fighter III, Remy's ending shows him checking on his deceased older sister, who is encased in ice.
• SunDog: Frozen Legacy: The cryogens that you need to retrieve are frozen members of the religious group that is creating the Banville colony.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Paper Mario 64: As Mario and his team face off with the game's seventh boss, the Crystal King, he intends to make good on this threat if he defeats them:
    Crystal King: "First I shall defeat you, and then I will present to King Bowser an iced Mario gift!"
  • In a Side Quest of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, the Mario brothers discover in Bowser's castle beings frozen in ice. Unfreezing them reveals the beings to be remnants of the Shroob invasion force of the previous game.
• Noriko and Gunbuster are thawed out of a block of ice Third Super Robot Wars Z: Jigoku-hen. It's suggested that she's a survivor of the previous civilization (of fire; The current civilization is that of the sun) which was destroyed 12000 years ago. Kazumi is missing but probably somewhere in this world too. Her last memories are of detonating the BM3, and when she looks at a photo of Kazumi, it's of her with short hair.
• The player character in Infocom's Suspended is one of these. Unlike most examples, he is still partially conscious (his mind is used to control most of society's required tech), and is totally woken up (but still frozen) when a major crisis occurs.
• Nina and Anna Williams from the Tekken series were frozen for the twenty years between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3. Nina's resulting amnesia has since been a consistent part of her character, but neither woman is portrayed as ever having any trouble adjusting to having missed the past twenty years. Indeed, the real point was presumably to preserve these two characters in their early twenties while introducing adult children of characters from the previous games. Not to mention this would keep them young and sexy. There are no female fighters on any roster that are over the age of 25 physically. Yet we have an old man who is over 100 and still fighting.
• Timelapse: At the end of the game, Atlantis turns out to have these, which their alien occupants used to wait out the time until their Guardian robot would be able to launch the Drop Ship the city is built on. It's implied that the Ancient Egyptians tried to copy their stasis methods via mummification, but failed and decimated their resources as a result. Getting rid of the Guardian when it goes after you involves freezing it in one of the stasis chambers as well.
• In Virtue's Last Reward, this happens to Clover, Alice, and Phi, who were put into cryonic stasis for 45 years so that they could participate in the third Nonary Game in 2074. This also happens to the real K in Phi's ending — since Sigma and Phi were able to go back into the past and save Akane, she put K into a stasis pod so that she could use his armor to play the Nonary Game while pretending to be him.
• Warframe:
  • In the old prologue, the Tenno is rudely awakened from a cryopod by invading Grineer. The new prologue saw the Tenno kneeling in an abandoned temple instead.
  • Cryopods are also the standard target in Defense missions, though some have something different.
  • "The Second Dream" reveals that the actual Tenno are children, having been placed in cryopods to help suppress their uncontrollable Void powers.
• Cryostasis is used extensively in WildStar, primarily to preserve precious resources by freezing non-essential personnel. Admiral Serrick Brightland, patriarch of the Exiles faction, is also on ice till they can find a way to heal his grievous injuries.
• X-COM: Terror from the Deep gives us alien popsicles. Most of the aliens were kept in cryonic sleep chambers for thousands of years. You can even find some of these in Alien Colonies and Artifact Sites.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X:
  • The entire human race is this, having been frozen ever since they boarded the White Whale to escape Earth's destruction. Their bodies are waiting in the Lifehold Core, controlling artificial bodies called mimeosomes from a distance. This is why retrieving the Lifehold Core before the Ganglion is so imperative: if the Ganglion finds and destroys the Core first, the human race will die out.
  • It's eventually mostly subverted: this was the story the people in New Los Angeles were led to believe. In truth, the humans' consciousnesses and memories were uploaded to a huge database inside the Core. The humans' original bodies were destroyed alongside Earth, and the Core only houses the aforementioned database, as well as protoplasm and DNA banks to recreate new flesh-and-blood bodies for the humans to go back to after Mira is made safe. Only one body was actually frozen like they told the people in New LA: Elma's real body.
• XenoGears: Near the end of Disc 1, the council of Shevat demands Fei to be placed in carbon freezing after his Superpowered Evil Side, Id, decimated Solaris in its entirety. Elly manages to convince Fei to escape with her before that could happen. However, in Disc 2, after Fei's Heroic BSoD left him comatose, he ended up getting frozen, which didn't last long until Id took over his body and broke out by force.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends has Cro-Marmot who, despite being encased in a block of ice, is still capable of movement and interaction with others.

Webcomics

• In Commander Kitty, Zenith Central keeps "templates" in storage like this, converting them to transporterizer patterns when necessary to save room.
• In El Goonish Shive, Abraham does this to himself, magically encasing himself in stone to be awakened whenever anyone touches the Dewitchery Diamond.
• Freefall:
  • Almost all space travel beyond one's current star system is done in "cold sleep" because the D.A.V.E.^*(Dangerous And Very Expensive) FTL drive reverses Time Dilation: trips last weeks in real time, but decades for the passengers. It's reasonably safe, but the Day of the Dead celebration on the planet Jean is dedicated to the small fraction of colonists who didn't survive the journey.
  • When Winston joins Florence and Sam on a short (i.e.: a few weeks) trip to the asteroid belt, he opts to spend it in a less extreme form of hibernation due to a paralyzing phobia of space travel.
• Tanka Talon from Furry Fight Chronicles makes her debut in Chapter 11 by being frozen in a block of ice. Her entrance to her fight with Snuggly has her burst out of her prison through sheer brute strength.
• Elie and the Mute tribe in Gifts of Wandering Ice. They had spent hundreds of years in cryo and were revived in the post-ice age era.
• Don't count on coming through unharmed. Karate Bears smash them.
• For fun in this strip of Loserz.
• In Madness In A Box, there's Gertie — originally the daughter of a pirate, and now being cared for by a psychiatrist. She's reckless, rowdy, and terrified of modern technology. Especially noisy technology, like vacuum cleaners and washing machines.
• In Schlock Mercenary, the (real) Gav Bleuel put himself into suspended animation in the 21st century and is later awoken (after being found in a disused storage locker) in the 31st, where he is accidentally duplicated nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
  • There's also medical cryokits. Most of the time, fatal, or nearly fatal injuries can be healed or reversed as long as at least the head is intact and the 'victim' is near a hospital or equivalent. But if you're some distance away, or can't spend time "in the field" (possibly because of everyone else being under fire)? Collect what you can and preserve it in the cryokit until you can make time.^note Thus, making it roughly similar to the cryo-suspension below in 'Real Life' without necessarily requiring being clinically dead, or the long time scale (since the medical breakthrough is already available).
• S.S.D.D. had Norman Gates faking his death and being frozen for some 400 years as part of a centuries-long plan involving time travel (not his plan of course). Also used for cheap interplanetary travel, referred to as little more than pressurized freezers that someone without cybernetic upgrades shouldn't be able to survive.
  • Tessa was once put in a walk-in freezer after some guys mistook her for a corpse, thanks to the same implants that enabled her to survive.

Web Original

• Bianca Holloway in The Gungan Council was frozen for thousands of years before Darth Apparatus revived her.
• In the illustrated story Ice Gift Elie and Rikter find a man in a melting iceberg. He wakes up after defrosting.
• In the first Rooster Teeth Short, Burnie, and Geoff attempt to send Shannon to the future via this method. In the last episode, Shannon returned and convinced them, as well as Matt and Joel, to travel to the future via the same method to help save the human race by adding to the gene pool. Although it actually turns out Shannon's planning to send them to Antarctica instead for revenge.
• Averted with Caveman of The Time... Guys, who is in the modern era because he befriended Dr. Chronos on the latter's first time... adventure. When Doc needed an intern, Caveman was his first choice for the job.

Western Animation

• While there aren't any humans in The 9th Life of Sherman Phelps (it's set in a World of Funny Animals), in the episode "Serenity Now", Ronald (and by extension, the ghost who's possessing him) ends up frozen solid from waiting for too long in the frozen meat truck while Sherman tries to return someone's glove.
• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: Longshot's Cryocrypt. A bit of an audience sucker punch in that two of the Rangers have family who are locked away in it. "Lord of the Sands" also mentions that early human colonies used Sleeper Ships.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
  • Master Shake proposes that he and his teammates freeze themselves in cryochambers for nine years under the assumption that crime will be so rampant in the future that they will have a much easier time finding work as detectives. Only Shake winds up going through with the plan and he finds that the opposite has happened.
  • In another, Carl has been infected by a virus that's slowly turning him into a clown. When Frylock can't come up with a cure, he freezes Carl solid and decides to just wait for medical science to advance to the point where he will be curable. A flash-forward into the future then shows Frylock and Shake as senile senior citizens who've completely forgotten about Carl and have been using his still-frozen body as a coat rack. At least until it tips over and breaks.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Aang gets frozen into an iceberg for a hundred years, when he entered the Avatar State to save himself. Word of God says he survived because of the Avatar Spirit. A lampshade is hung on this when he comes out of the iceberg:
    Sokka: How are you not frozen?!
  • Ruthlessly parodied on Avatar: The Abridged Series, where Aang's instructor specifically tells him not to do this if he ever gets caught in a storm.
    Aang: I'll freeze myself inside a block of ice! Yeah, best plan ever!
  • Unfortunately, it turns out this did a number on his lifespan, and he ends up passing away in his mid-sixties. Korra became Aang's successor.
• Bump in the Night used this trope not with ice but with fear. In one episode, Bumpy and Squishy wanted Molly to play Hide & Go Freak with them, and they managed to scare her so much that she went stiff. She was faking it.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: "Haunted Moon" had Team Lightyear investigate a ghost sighting that was actually the astral projection of a man named Cooley who was frozen for 50 years.
• Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels: Captain Caveman was frozen in a block of ice in the Stone Age, and found/thawed in the present by the Teen Angels.
• Clone High: The season 1 finale ends with all the clones being frozen in the school's freezer, which ended up being the perfect setup for what would be a 20 year gap between seasons - the season 1 finale aired in 2003, and the story was not continued until the season 2 premiere in 2023. Because of the ending of season 1 though, this allowed the writers to keep the show in the current year while still not having to age the main cast up (aside from Principal Scudworth), by simply saying that the clones had been frozen for 20 years.
• Code Lyoko: Aelita is an interesting case. While she was never technically frozen so to speak, the supercomputer being shut down with her still on Lyoko prevented her from aging for 9 years and she spent that time unable to do anything until Jeremie found her.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In "Operation: C.A.K.E.D.-F.I.V.E.", a Kids Next Door operative from the 1800s, the aptly titled Numbuh 19th Century, is thawed out after having been frozen in an ice cream explosion for over a hundred years. He is understandably confused by the modern-day world and outright repulsed that the KND is allowing girls to join.
• Cro: The stories are told by a former Mammoth popsicle, who is somehow able to not only talk but talk perfect late-20th-century American English.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman: The Animated Series: Mr. Freeze himself was not cryonically-preserved, but his condition and powers resulted from an 'accident' while cryonically preserving his wife.
  • Superman: The Animated Series: Supergirl, aka Kara In-Ze, and the rest of her family entered cryonic stasis in an attempt to weather the devastation of their planet wrought by the nearby Krypton's destruction. Sadly, when Superman found them, Kara's pod was the only one still working. The other pods were damaged and had long ceased functioning, their occupants long dead.
  • Justice League Unlimited: Avoided in an episode where the ship and body of The Viking Prince, frozen in a glacier for a thousand years, were the MacGuffin... but it was the genetic material of the dead body they were interested in, with the possibility of the Prince's survival never even being raised.
  • Justice League also gave us the Hitlercicle. Yes, we're serious.◊
• Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop: "For Better or For Curse" had Dr. Zitbag discover and thaw out a frozen medieval ancestor of his.
• Duck Dodgers' title hero, according to the theme song and certain episodes, was one of these. The members of Megadeth were apparently frozen as well.
• DuckTales (1987): One episode was about a large, carnivorous prehistoric walrus being freed by accident from its icy prison by Webby's tuning fork and later threatening a nearby colony of penguins. The walrus was re-frozen by Instant Ice: Just Add Cold!.
• DuckTales (2017): A flashback in "The Golden Lagoon of White Agony Plains!" reveals that Scrooge McDuck and his partner Goldie O'Gilt were frozen in ice for five years. In the second season episode "Timephoon!" Webby implies that Scrooge may have been frozen in ice a second time. He also was stuck in a demon dimension for some time. All this incidents are used to explain how Scrooge is Really 700 Years Old and could have become rich during the gold rush at Klondyke but still live in the modern day.
• Elena of Avalor: In the backstory, when Shuriki invaded Avalor and killed the king and queen, Alacazar used magic to seal Isabel, Abuelo, and Abuela into an indestructible magical painting until Shuriki could be defeated. Elena was supposed to join them, but as the spell needed time to perform, she ran off to stall Shuriki and ended up getting sealed away in her amulet. Unfortunately for Elena, she did not experience this trope and was perfectly aware of her surroundings. On the other hand, Isabel, Abuelo, and Abuela are eventually released and they're no worse for wear. She was freed 41 years later by Princess Sofia, and with Matteo, they free the family from the painting as well. Unfortunately, because Elena did not age in the amulet, this means she's not old enough to be Queen and has to rule as Crown Princess until she's ready.
• Family Guy: On a trip to the future, Stewie finds out that they unfroze Walt Disney... only to have him freeze himself again after learning the Jews are still around.
  • Stewie also once did it to himself in order to get back from the 16th century after a time travel mishap.
• Futurama: Fry is thrust into the year 3000 when he falls into a cryonic pod. We later find that his girlfriend, Pauly Shore, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and That Guy had all undertaken the same process (the last of which was frozen to survive terminal boneitis — his only regret is failing to get it cured while he had the chance.).
  • Of course, we later learn it wasn't an accident that Fry was frozen. The Nibblonians would need Fry in the 31st century in order to defeat the Brain Spawn, but without freezing him Fry would be dead long before he was needed.
  • When Fry temporarily has a job at the cryonics lab, he uses the pods to take naps and store snacks.
• Gargoyles: Goliath and the other survivors of Clan Wyvern were placed into stone sleep "until the castle rises above the clouds" and reviving atop the tallest skyscraper in the world about 1000 years later.
• The Godzilla Power Hour: The Calico finds a World War I German sub frozen in ice. They have Godzilla thaw it out with his flame breath so they can study it. They are understandably surprised when the crew wakes up, thinking the war is still going on, and attacks them.
• Gravity Falls:
  • "Irrational Treasure" has Quentin Trembley, the 8th-and-1/2 President of the United States, who tried to preserve himself in peanut brittle for 150 years — and it worked, too.
  • That same episode has a Freeze-Frame Bonus stating that a "gigantic, time-devouring baby from another dimension" is frozen in a glacier in Antarctica. Then it states that glaciers never melt, so there's nothing to worry about. The very next episode, "The Time Traveler's Pig", shows that global warming has freed Time Baby, who then proceeds to take over the universe. Rather than being horrific, the revelation is Played for Laughs, since the event doesn't happen for at least several centuries, and thus has no effect on the main characters.
    Mabel: This future's neat.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In "Modern Primitives", Billy finds Fred Flintstone frozen in his backyard. Afraid of the modern world, Fred goes on a rampage and ends up freezing himself when he crashes a car into a tanker of sherbet. When unfrozen again in an After the End version of Earth, he finds that Billy accidentally got himself frozen after he tried to eat the sherbet one night.
• Harley Quinn (2019): In the opening of Season 2, Harley is captured by the Injustice League and spends two months encased in ice. Her iceblock is used as a trophy by Penguin.
• How to Train Your Dragon franchise:
  • In an episode of Dragons: Riders of Berk a very dangerous dragon known as the Skrill is unfrozen. More a case of Dragon Popsicle though. The in-universe explanation for the dragon surviving is that it can produce its own internal body heat.
  • Played Straight in The Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon short, or that's what Gobber wants us to believe, as he tells the story of how he faces the eponymous Boneknapper Dragon after finding a group of frozen (and still alive) vikings. Although this is more likely a case of Unreliable Narrator as the franchise is somewhat biologically realistic (for a cartoon) and Gobbler is clearly The Münchausen.
• Inspector Gadget: It is revealed that this is what became of Inspector Gadget's archenemy Dr. Claw in the premiere episode of the 2015 cartoon. The episode begins with him thawing out of the iceberg he had been trapped in.
• The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour: In the third Power Hour, A.J. hated so much the idea of being Surrounded by Idiots (it came to the point he got an award declaring him "only genius in town" and said award described Dimmsdale as "City of Idiots") he froze himself. He was thawed out soon after by Chester but spent a good deal of the episode thinking he was in a distant future and his brain was making him hallucinate about the time he left behind. So much for the only genius in town.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: This is the eventual fate of every member of the Heinous family, who are overthrown by their sons and stored in cryogenic chambers below Miseryville. As Lucius VI put it, "Every time there's an argument, someone gets frozen."
• Josie and the Pussycats: The Scorpion captures Alexander, Melody, and Alexandra, and traps them in transparent tubes that he fills with "freeze gas." The three are frozen in place in those tubes until Alan, Josie, and Valerie sneak into the control room and open the tubes. The three prisoners topple forward and shatter the ice around them upon impact. Somehow, they're none the worse for this ordeal.
• M.A.S.K.: "Secret of the Andes" involved a frozen Incan priest being discovered and thawed out by Matt Trakker and his son Scott.
• Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures: "The Ice Goose Cometh" has old Terrytoons character Gandy Goose thawing from a glacier and suffering future shock. At the end, the same thing happens with fellow Terrytoon star Deputy Dawg.
• Miles from Tomorrowland: Phoebe, Loretta, Leo, and a couple of alien citizens are frozen solid by Gadfly Garnett in the episode "Frozen Food". Miles and Merc are fortunately spared, however, and help to reverse the freezing process.
• Moral Orel episode "Geniusis" had this trope with a "Missing Link" character, who goes on to discourage the theory of evolution.
• Oggy and the Cockroaches: Not exactly with ice, but in one episode, Oggy discovers a gun that can freeze people, which he uses on the cockroaches. When the cockroaches were thawed out, they find themselves in the future, where Oggy and Jack became elderly. Later, at the end, they use it on Oggy and Jack, who then woke up even further into the future, where the cockroaches were old too.
• Pinky and the Brain: The short "Puppet Rules" has the duo freezing themselves for forty years as part of their plan to Take Over the World.
  Brain: It's the '90s, Pinky. Do you realize what this means?
  Pinky: Uh, we missed the disco years?
• The PJs: When Thurgood runs out of his sexual potency pills, he comes up with a convoluted scheme to cryogenically freeze himself, wake up in the future where he can obtain a bionic penis to eliminate the need for the pills, and return to the present, but is unable to carry it out.
• Robotix: The inhabitants of the planet Skalorr froze themselves underground to survive a catastrophe. Afterward, their central computer determined the world had been rendered uninhabitable. Rather than leave them all frozen forever, it transferred the minds of a few of them into the titular giant robots. They weren't expecting this and were not pleased when they woke up in their new bodies.
• Rocky Kwaterner: The main character, Rocky, is a Cro-Magnon boy who was frozen in ice for 35000 years and thawed out in the 21th century, where he is adopted by a new family and has to learn to adapt to this new time he finds himself in.
• Sgt. Savage and his Screaming Eagles has the title character, who was experimented on by the Nazis and then cryogenically frozen until found by the G.I. Joe team.
• Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century narrowly avoids it: Lestrade is convinced that Moriarty somehow survived his "death" at Reichenbach Falls as a Human Popsicle, but Holmes eventually finds a very dead Moriarty still entombed in the ice — but a tiny drill-hole into the ice prompts Holmes to deduce that their adversary is actually a clone of Moriarty. Of course, Holmes's insistence that the new Moriarty could not have been the same man, reanimated, is a bit odd in light of the fact that Holmes himself was transported to the world of the future when his own well-preserved corpse, which had been packed in honey (a reference to Holmes's retirement as a beekeeper) after his eventual death, was reanimated and rejuvenated by a bunch of Applied Phlebotinum. Probably because he was there, to make very, very sure Moriarty was Deader than Dead, not Only Mostly Dead. (And did the deed himself.)
• The Simpsons paradoxically references the trope several times.
  • In "Radio Bart", Bart uses a walkie-talkie to imitate a child trapped in the bottom of a well. When nobody can offer a solution to rescue the boy, Prof. Frink suggests that the town use cryonics to freeze him so he can be rescued in the future. Poking fun at the trope while combining it with patented Simpsons Bystander Syndrome humor.
  • In "Lisa the Simpson", Jasper Beardley tries to cryonically freeze himself to see the future in the Kwik-E-Mart's freezer section. He woke up after just a couple days, but still thought it was the future when he saw the store was selling Moon Pies. (Well... technically he's right.)
  • "Lisa's Wedding" took place twenty years in the future, and revealed that Mr. Burns had been frozen by Smithers, and he would only be thawed "the second they discover a cure for... seventeen stab wounds in the back."
    Smithers: How are we doing, boys?
    Professor Frink: Well, we're up to fifteen!
  • Mr. Burns' lost teddy bear also ends up frozen in the Arctic for some 40 years.
  • Another future episode when Homer puts Grampa in a cryonics facility to prevent a disease from killing him. The cure was discovered, but he kept him frozen because it's cheaper than a nursing home and Grampa has constantly been rude to him.
• South Park
  • Parodied in "Prehistoric Ice Man", in which a man is discovered frozen in ice, is successfully thawed... and turns out to be from the unthinkably ancient year of 1996. The episode was first broadcast in 1998. Further parody and Rule of Funny is invoked when the man returns home... only to find that his wife moved on and found a new husband which she has a biological child with that's 13 years old.
  • Later, in "Go God Go", Cartman tries to freeze himself in the snow on a mountaintop to avoid having to wait the last three weeks for a new video game console. An avalanche covers him and he isn't found and unfrozen for 500 years, awakening in a Buck Rogers parody. He is eventually sent back in time, but several weeks before the episode starts, forcing him to have to wait even longer for the video game console.
• Spider-Man (1967) played with this trope in the episode "Cold Storage", where a pair of crooks incapacitated Spidey by locking him in a freezer. Before being thawed out 24 hours later, Spider-Man dreams of waking up eons later in a desolate future inhabited by men who have reverted to acting like primitive hominids.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • "SB-129" has Squidward being locked in the Krusty Krab freezer and not let out for 2000 years; he ended up in a parody of the Shiny Future (literally everything was chrome) filled with SpongeBob clones, and ended up in a fetal position screaming "Future!" Lucky for him, by this point in time people have perfected time travel, and Future-SpongeBob directs him to a time machine that will take him back to his own time — but not before accidentally leading him into the can opener.
  • In "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III", while looking after the Mermalair, SpongeBob and Patrick find Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy's enemy Man Ray preserved in frozen tartar sauce until Patrick frees him because SpongeBob said he had so many questions to ask him.
  • Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy themselves appear cryogenically preserved in the retirement home in "Man Ray Returns".
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Eclipsa Butterfly spent generations imprisoned in crystal, only being freed briefly in "Moon the Undaunted", where a young Queen Moon questioned her about a spell that could kill an immortal. She's unfrozen for good after Toffee is defeated, though the other Mewmans remain deeply suspicious of her.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "The Citadel": Infiltrating the titular Separatist prison, Anakin comes up with the idea of freezing the entire strike team in carbonite to bypass the Citadel's lifeform scanners. ARC trooper Fives had some... reservations about it:
    "Are we sure this thing is safe? I don't wanna end up a wall decoration."
  • "A Distant Echo": The believed-dead ARC trooper Echo is released from a stasis chamber after Rex and Bad Batch member Tech get to him. Unlike most examples of this trope, however, he wasn't completely unconscious: since the Techno Union was using him as a Wetware CPU against the Republic, he was kept just conscious enough that they could mine his brain for information, while constantly reliving the last moments before his "death" over and over.
• Steven Universe: In "Rose's Room", the secret ending of Steven's video game involves the hero finding someone in a cryotube, who turns out to be his father.
• ThunderCats (1985): The ThunderCats used a hibernation system to make the long trip to Third Earth. Though we are told that this slowed but did not stop their aging, Lion-O's capsule malfunctioned and didn't inhibit his aging, making him a child in an adult body.
• Transformers: Skyfire in the cartoon version of The Transformers got the "frozen in ice" version, while all the Transformers aboard Ark and Nemesis were the "suspended animation" variety and survived thanks to their millennia-long lifespans. The Ark and Nemesis crews were knocked into a coma-like stasis lock after both ships crashed... and didn't awaken until the volcano the Autobot ship crashed into erupted and jarred the ship's computer active, four million years later. This is also an example of the trope working in reverse, as the crash happened shortly before Earth's post-dinosaur Ice Age.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender has a non-human variant. Allura and Coran are both ten thousand years old due to spending most of that time in cryogenic sleep. It is because of this that they both survived the mass genocide of their people, the Alteans, when Zarkon destroyed Altea.
• The What's New, Scooby-Doo? episode "Uncle Scooby and Antarctica" had a scientist named Dr. Zola attempt to freeze himself so he could share his knowledge in the future.
• Xiaolin Showdown: Omi uses the "Orb of Tornami" with his particular ice incantation to freeze himself into the future twice. This makes him, technically speaking, the oldest character to appear in the series, and also the youngest-looking. In a show where the most powerful goodies and baddies never age, that's an achievement.
• Young Justice (2010): Arsenal is thawed out in Season 2, after having spent eight years in cryonic stasis thanks to Lex Luthor.
  Arsenal: So, let me get this straight. While I was on ice you found another Roy Harper, the side-kicks formed their own team, aliens invaded the Earth, and Ollie grew that dopey goatee?
• Yvon of the Yukon's premise is that the titular French explorer was frozen for 300 years before being thawed out in the present.

Real Life

• NASA is doing serious research to place most of the crew of a Mars mission in what amounts to a medically induced coma for varying periods of time. This also has the advantage that the crew understands what is happening and doesn't suffer undue psychological stress from reorientation on revival.
• Cells Alive System: Experimental technology that uses an oscillatory magnetic field to prevent crystallization of the cell membranes, it however is still being tested.
• The common wood frog has freeze tolerance: it survives freezing temperatures with ice nucleators regulating ice formation as well as massive amounts of glucose as a natural anti-freeze. Though the frog is frozen, the glucose helps prevent "freezer burn" — cellular damage caused by ice — that would essentially kill anything. When warm weather returns, it is dependent on a chemical reaction that should restart its heart, thus recirculating fluids and returning the frog to life.
• The Siberian salamander, that can stay frozen for years, and then simply walk it off.
• Tardigrades, small invertebrates approximately one millimeter in length, can enter a dehydrated state and survive without food or water for over ten years. As for the "frozen" half of being a popsicle, they can be chilled to 1 Kelvin (that is, one degree above absolute zero) for a few minutes and survive. And this doesn't even touch on their other abilities, such as surviving being put in the vacuum of space and directly exposed to the Sun.
• The well-funded work in cryobiology is mostly in preservation of organs for transplant. Recent successful transplant of a frozen pig's liver means that some major breakthrough apparently has been achieved.
• Related: a number of ocean fish that live in the Antarctic region have a natural antifreeze in their cells. The fish themselves remain conscious (at least, as conscious as normal fish), but the antifreeze they use is both the subject of actual research for coldsleep and a frequent explanation for it in science fiction.
• Cryonic suspension is a service you can buy right now! The catch: Nobody yet knows how to freeze and thaw a person without killing them, so you have to be clinically dead before it can be done to you and hope that the technology necessary to revive you will someday exist in the future, in addition to curing whatever ailment killed you in the first place. The logic behind being frozen despite these nigh-impossible odds is that you'd be as good as dead anyway; even the tiniest chance of being successfully thawed out in the future is more than what you'd get if you're buried or cremated. Is being Only Mostly Dead for possibly centuries worth it? Your call.
• Minus the coming-back-to-life part, nature has created some very well-preserved mummies of early humans and hominids this way. Not the least of which is Ötzi the Iceman, who was frozen in the Alps over five thousand years ago. There are also the Children of Llullaillaco, Inca human sacrifices preserved high in the Andes.
• The Alpine Weta from New Zealand, anybody (Where do you think Weta Digital got their name?)? Freezes into a block of ice, comes the spring...
• A famously bizarre Urban Legend states that Walt Disney was frozen and placed under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Besides Pirates of the Caribbean, it can be the castle and Matterhorn which are popular locations people claim he's in. He was actually cremated (which, if you think about it, is the opposite of this trope).
• Baseball legend Ted Williams' body was preserved with cryonics at the insistence of his family (and against his own wishes to be cremated), in the hope that advancements in medical science can one day enable them all to be reunited. Mr. Williams' head was also frozen separately from his body, meaning medical science now has twice as much work to do if a Williams family reunion is ever going to happen.
• While you can't exactly go on forever, if you do happen to find yourself drowning in ice-cold water, the temperature allows your brain to be deprived of oxygen longer. There have been cases of victims being underwater for almost a half hour and revived. There's a saying to this effect, namely that nobody is dead until they're warm and dead.
  • Similarly there's been multiple cases of people who've been found outside when the temperature is well below zero and were seemingly dead; cold, stiff, blue, not breathing, no detectable pulse, etc, but "came back to life" after being warmed up and resuscitated.
  • This happened to Jean Hilliard of North Dakota. She was frozen stiff, with a body temperature below 80 F, but was as good as new when she thawed out.
• The world's largest virus, Pithovirus sibericum, was found in a 34,000-year-old ice core harvested from permafrost in Siberia. Thankfully, it only infects amoebae.
• In the documentary "The Natural History of the Chicken", a rural Maine woman recalls having one of her yard chickens caught in bad weather and frozen solid. She brought it in, waiting for it to thaw so she could fit it into a shoebox to bury, and found it coming back to life.
• Various woody plants from cold environments can survive being frozen. Some can even survive being immersed in liquid helium (just a few degrees above absolute zero) in the laboratory.

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