When Jerry Seinfeld announced he was going to make a movie about the invention of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts, my first reaction was, “Well, that will be stupid.” But when it was released on Netflix, my friend Bill watched it and called with a rave review, saying he and his wife laughed all the way through. So Martha and I decided to give it a try, albeit with low expectations.
To our surprise, we both enjoyed it more than we thought we would. I’m not going to write a full review, but if I did, I’d compare it to Mike Myers’ first “Austin Powers” movie and probably give it a 6 out of 10.
One of the elements I particularly enjoyed about “Unfrosted” was the way Seinfeld stuffed it with Easter eggs and clever pop culture references like these:
-
- Hugh Grant plays Thurl Ravenscroft, who was really the voice of Tony The Tiger for fifty years and sang “You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch” in the original animated “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” (two facts I learned from my friend Mark Evanier’s 2005 obit for Ravenscroft).
- At one point, Ravenscroft gathers together all the breakfast food mascots and they go on strike. While picketing outside the Kellogg’s building, Ravenscroft wears a horned headdress a la the QAnon Shaman at the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Also among the picketers in that scene is a guy carrying a “Birds Aren’t Real” sign, a nice callback to a satirical conspiracy theory that went viral in 2018.
- Cedric The Entertainer plays Stu Smiley, the host of the fictional Bowl & Spoon Awards. In real life, Smiley was head of comedy programming at HBO, and later a producer of “Everybody Loves Raymond” and other shows.
- Max Greenfield plays Rick Ludwin, the number two person at Post (Kellogg’s rival). That’s the true-life moniker of a longtime executive at NBC who oversaw late night programming and at one point stuck his neck out to push for the network to do something with Seinfeld. When the pilot Seinfeld and Larry David made didn’t get much positive response in the building, Ludwin stayed fully behind the duo, insisting they would find their groove and the show would be big. Good call!
- Amy Schumer’s character, Marjorie Post, inherited the cereal company from her father, CW Post. When I was growing up, there was a college nearby named after him that was home to a non-commercial radio station (WCWP) where both Bill and I began our broadcast careers as board operators and Top 40 disc jockeys. Marjorie Post, by the way, became one of the wealthiest women in the world and built Mar-A-Lago, back when the mere mention of that name didn’t cause many of us to want to vomit.
- When Seinfeld’s character, a top Kellogg’s executive, hires a group of men to help develop Pop-Tarts, he announces them in a press conference staged like the one NASA held in 1959 to introduce the first American astronauts, the Mercury Seven (a scene portrayed in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 movie, “The Right Stuff”).
- There’s a short scene with Tony Hale as a very bad ventriloquist with a dummy named Danny, an homage to this bit Albert Brooks did decades ago on several 1970s TV variety shows…