Jerry Seinfield's Netflix movie 'Unfrosted,' Pop-Tarts origin story, drops trailer
Jerry Seinfeld, from left, as Bob Cabana, Adrian Martinez as Tom Carvel, Jack McBrayer as Steve Schwinn, Thomas Lennon as Harold Von Braunhut, Bobby Moynihan as Chef Boyardee and James Marsden as Jack LaLanne in Netflix's "Unfrosted." Credit: Netflix / John P. Johnson
With a burst of satirical surrealism, the newly released trailer for “Unfrosted,” Massapequa-raised Jerry Seinfeld’s directing debut, conjures a Cold War equivalent between Kellogg’s and Post in the shelf-space race for the ultimate mass-market toaster pastry. In roughly 2¼ minutes of a pastel and pillbox-hat 1963, it offers cereal executives with the zeal of NASA engineers, the apparent living embodiment of the Quaker Oats mascot, and a woman who screams, “Isn’t this a cereal company? Why did my husband explode?!”
Likening the creation of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts and Post’s less-iconic Country Squares — now produced by a different company and called Toast’em Pop Ups — to the race to the moon, the trailer announces the film’s tone in its opening seconds, with a Cape Canaveralesque countdown to a Pop-Tart launching from a toaster.
Kellogg’s executives Bob Cabana (Seinfeld) and Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) learn from a TV newscast that, “The Post cereal company has reportedly invented a shelf-stable fruit-pastry breakfast product.” To the soundtrack of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” Cabana barges into the office of fictional company head Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) to announce, “It’s Post. They did it.”
Inspired silliness follows, treating the pastry war with the seriousness of nuclear secrets. “How do you think Post did it?” Stankowski asks Cabana. “I wonder if they used xanthan gum” — to which Seinfeld’s character bitterly spits out, “Xanthan!” the way his sitcom character would seethe, “Newman!” A news conference introduces the new pastry’s “taste pilots,” including Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan). And no less a personage than President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) implores the Kellogg’s executive, “You have to win. Are you making any progress?”
Rockville Centre-raised Amy Schumer plays a stylized version of real-life Post heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, whose father, Charles William Post, was the namesake for C.W. Post College in Brookville, now known as LIU Post. “How did it get this far?” she asks Edsel Kellogg, who replies with deadpan fatalism, “It’s breakfast. Things happen.”
And ultimately, for all its fancifulness, the underlying theme emerges. As Cabana puts it, “We’re talking about happy childhoods for millions of American kids.”
Premiering on Netflix on May 3, the film, also cowritten and coproduced by Seinfeld, additionally stars Fred Armisen, Sarah Cooper, Andy Daly, Hugh Grant, Max Greenfield, Thomas Lennon, James Marsden, Jack McBrayer, Adrian Martinez and Christian Slater.
