I'd like to know the origin and precursor or derivative variants of the phrase "let's blow this popsicle stand". Reliable, conclusive, source-supported, authoritative and consistent information about that phrase would be valuable to me, although information that satisfies all those criteria in one go is not required.
The usual suspects yielded the usual unreliable, inconclusive, conflicting and uninformative dreck. For an example of the dreck, the notion that the popsicle was invented in 1924, a claim repeated at a number of the sources I checked, can easily be disproved.
I checked Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, The Dictionary of American Slang (2007) as reproduced at dictionary.com, Answers, the Straight Dope discussion forum, an ELL posting, an archived reddit Etymology post, and a Quora posting, as well as background sources (the OED, other dictionaries).
In hardcopy, I checked NTC's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (1989), by Richard A. Spears; The Pocket Dictionary of American Slang (1960), compiled by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner; The Random House Thesaurus of Slang (1988), by Esther Lewin and Albert E. Lewin. The last-mentioned work bore some fruit, in that 'pop' was listed as a synonym of 'popsicle', with no further explanation.
Many thanks to anybody who will complete or advance this research for me.
Best Answer
J.E. Lighter, The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) notes that expression also appears in the closely related forms "blow this pop stand" and "blow this popcorn stand." Lighter includes this entry under blow:
The earliest matches in a Google Books search for all three wordings are for "let's blow this pop stand." From Ann Arbor [Michigan] Huron High School, Full Circle (1969) [combined snippets]:
Also, from Esquire Fortnightly, volume 92 (1979):
And from Maureen Strange, Sparks (1981):
The earliest Google Books match for the "popcorn" variant is the National Lampoon article (February 1983) that Lighter mentions above.
The earliest Google Books match for the "Popsicle" wording is also from 1983— from David Bischoff, Wargames (1983) [combined snippets):
The next match is from a letter writer from Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) to columnist William Safire, in William Safire, Take My Word for It (1986):
The common theme here is that soda-pop stands, popcorn stands, and Popsicle stands are chump-change operations. Prior to this round of enterprises, according to Lighter, common phrases suggested blowing "this joint," "this burg," "this place," "town," and "this scene." Lighter's first match for "blow this joint" goes back to 1902 in Billy Burgundy's Letters:
Earlier still (and the first of Lighter's citations for blew in meaning 6(c) is this one from William Kountz, Billy Baxter's Letters (1899):
Conclusions
"Let's blow this pop/popcorn/Popsicle stand" is a relatively recent updating of an old slang expression from the turn of the twentieth century that blew "the bunch" or "the joint" instead of a stand.
Both Google Books (which finds a first match from 1969) and J.E. Lighter (with a match from 1974) identify "Let's blow this pop stand" as the earliest of the pop-related versions of the idiom. The Popsicle version shows up in 1980 (on the Mork & Mindy TV show, according to Lighter) and in 1983 (in David Bischoff's Wargames, according to Google Books).