Among the lifelong obsessions that comedian Jerry Seinfeld admits to is one that might come as a surprise to many people: Pop-Tarts. “When I was a kid, and they invented the Pop-Tart,” Seinfeld once mused to The New York Times, “the back of my head blew right off.” Classic Seinfeld, right from the get-go. His entire head didn’t blow off, you see; it was a specific part of his head. And the payoff comes in the form of a deadpan punchline (“It has the same shape and nutritional value as the box it comes in, and they can’t go stale, because they were never fresh”).
Somewhere along the line, though, Seinfeld decided that wasn’t enough. He wanted to elevate that joke about this particular brand of junk food he loved as a child and turn it into something more than a punchline in a comedy routine. That “thing” became Unfrosted, a star-studded Netflix movie that delivers a zany Pop-Tart origin story and represents Seinfeld’s directorial debut. The movie, which hits the streaming giant on May 3, just released its first trailer which you can check out below.
At this point, I have to confess: I’m on the fence about whether Unfrosted will actually amount to comedy gold or will, instead, give viewers the film equivalent of empty calories. One reason is because this thing looks jam-packed with humor of the dad joke variety, when I’d have preferred the whole thing to be frosted, instead, with Larry David’s style of biting cynicism.
That said, hope springs eternal. Seinfeld didn’t spin this idea up overnight. In April of 2018, in fact, he tweeted that the idea for what would become Unfrosted had been knocking around his head for years. “At one point,” he tweeted, “I was thinking about an invention of the Pop Tart movie. Imagine the drunk on sugar-power Kellogg’s cereal culture of the mid-60s in Battle Creek, MI. That’s a vibe I could work with.”
Unfrosted is set in Michigan in 1963, the year before the first Pop-Tarts showed up on grocery store shelves. Seinfeld directs, co-writes, and stars in the movie — which, as Netflix explains it, tells the story of the cutthroat and breakneck race to invent the Pop-Tart. “This really did happen in Battle Creek, Michigan, where Kellogg’s and Post were located, and they did compete to come up with this product,” Seinfeld said in a Netflix promotional interview. “But the rest of it is complete lunacy.”
The cast includes (deep breath):
- Melissa McCarthy
- Jim Gaffigan
- Amy Schumer
- Hugh Grant
- Max Greenfield
- Christian Slater
- Bill Burr
- Daniel Levy
- James Marsden
- Jack McBrayer
- Thomas Lennon
- Bobby Moynihan
- Fred Armisen
“It’s a huge cast. I don’t know how it got so big,” Seinfeld said. “I remember that we had nobody for a long time. And then Hugh Grant called and said he heard about the movie, and he wanted to be Tony the Tiger. Then, the next thing I knew, everybody was in it, and it was incredible.”