Jerry Seinfeld Directs a Biopic of the Pop-Tart

“Unfrosted,” the first movie directed by Jerry Seinfeld (who also stars in it), is an agreeably flaked-out piece of surrealist vaudeville. It’s a comedy about the creation of the Pop-Tart, back in 1963. That makes it sound like part of the new wave of mass-market product biopics — movies like “Flamin’ Hot” (about the creation of Spicy Cheetos), “Blackberry” (about the invention of the smart phone), and the one I think of as the “Citizen Kane” of the genre, “The Founder,” with Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the man who changed the world by taking over and franchising McDonald’s. These films all speak to a time — ours — when consumer products haven’t just taken on a life of their own. They’ve become part of our identities.

“Unfrosted,” however, is not like those other films. While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the jumping-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.

As a kid growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I confess that I never understood Pop-Tarts. My family would buy them, and every so often I would put one in the toaster, wanting it to be a tasty treat. Such is the power of advertising that I always thought it was my fault that I found Pop-Tarts to be…just okay. Twinkies, by contrast, were junky but succulent. And even good old dry cereal, when you were in the mood for it, was pretty great — the delicate crunch of Rice Krispies, the sweet-milk-bath rapture of Sugar Frosted Flakes. To me, though, Pop-Tarts never lived up to their billing. They were bland when untoasted (though a lot of folks ate them that way). Once you toasted them, the hot fruit filling had a soothing tasty tang, but the rectangular pastry was still cardboard pie crust. It wasn’t awful, but it’s not like biting into it gave you a rush of joy. Prefab and a little dull, the Pop-Tart was a “product of the future” that seemed stuck in the past, like astronaut food.

I bring all this up because “Untoasted” treats the origin story of the Pop-Tart with such a derisive, backhand flippancy that it’s not at all clear what Jerry and his team of screenwriter-producers (the film was written by Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin) actually think of the Pop-Tart. Is the movie a goof because they’re making fun of what a mediocre product it was? Perhaps. Yet if the memory of Pop-Tarts actually strikes a chord of Proustian reverence in Jerry — if it’s his madeleine stuffed with fake-fruit chemicals — then why make such a misanthropic satire of it?

I suspect the answer is that Seinfeld knows the Pop-Tart was a rather bland leftover-’50s concoction, but that he has a primal attachment to it anyway. And maybe it doesn’t even matter, because “Unfrosted,” once you get onto its wavelength, passes 93 minutes in a pleasurably light and nutty way. On some level, Jerry was clearly drawn to the quaint capitalist energy of the film’s essential (true) story: that in the early ‘60s, the two reigning cereal companies in America, Kellogg’s and Post, were both based in Battle Creek, Michigan, a town of 50,000, yet they were fighting like rival European fiefdoms of the 14th century.

The movie is told from the point-of-view of Kellogg’s. Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, the company’s head of development (loosely based on William Post), and Jim Gaffigan is Edson Kellogg III, the head of the company, who’s still just a blowhard of an empty suit because all his success is inherited. Their rival company, Post, another family dynasty run by a descendent (Marjorie Post, played by Amy Schumer), are the also-ran losers. They’re Pepsi to Kellogg’s’ Coke, Burger King to their McDonald’s, Avis to their Hertz. At the Bowl and Cereal Awards, a Battle Creek event that’s like the Oscars of boxed breakfast food, Kellogg’s sweeps all the categories (like Easiest to Open Wax Bag). They’re on top. But Post is about to change the game, with a pastry product ripped off from Kellogg’s’ own research.

If “Unfrosted” actually were a movie like “Blackberry,” it might have had a terrific resonance. But Seinfeld stages it like a dramatized series of stand-up-comedy stunts. We first learn how insanely anachronistic the movie is going to be when Bob stumbles on two children who are climbing into Post dumpsters to taste discarded cans of fruit filling. “It’s garbage!” says Bob. “Is it?” says Cathy (Eleanor Sweeney). “Or is it some hot fruit lightning the Man doesn’t want you to have?” What 10-year-old girl in 1963 would use the phrase “the Man”? But that’s the film’s comic aesthetic. “Unfrosted” is a period piece, but it’s as Dada as a Mad satire crossed with a second-half-of-the-show “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

Here are a few of the casually insane things that happen. To create a pastry product that can beat Post’s, Kellogg’s puts Bob together with his old partner, Stan (Melissa McCarthy), who’s working for NASA, and the two assemble a team of inventors who are like a Mount Rushmore of cheesy ’60s brands: the exercise guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden, giddy enough to make you want to see him star in a LaLanne biopic); the bicycle visionary Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer); the ice-cream entrepreneur Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez); Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan); a Wernher von Braun-type mastermind named Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), who keeps making thinly veiled allusions to his Nazi past; and an IBM UNIVAC computer that spits out punch-cards that are always reading the room.  

The movie, in its totally kitsch way, frames itself as a thriller, as Bob takes a meeting with a South American sugar lord named El Sucre (Felix Solis). The union of milkmen is presented as a Mob faction (presided over by Peter Dinklage), who will kidnap and threaten because the Pop-Tart, if successful, would end their business: the daily pouring of milk onto America’s cereal. Bob, Stan and Edsel take a meeting in the Oval Office with JFK, played by Bill Burr as the testiest JFK imaginable. He agrees to intervene with the milk union, even as he readies himself for a meeting with the Doublemint Twins. There are jokes about naming a cereal Jackie O’s (even though Jackie is years from being Jackie O). And Jon Hamm pops up as his character from “Mad Men,” pitching a name for the Kellogg’s pastry product — Jelle Jolie — that’s out of the film noir of Don Draper’s dreams.

“Unfrosted” is brimming with Atomic Age ephemera. Like Sea-Monkeys. Bazooka bubblegum. X-Ray specs. G.I. Joe. The Slinky. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Wax lips. Silly Putty. The references, though, aren’t limited to kids’ stuff. Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) is shown, off camera, to be a babbling alcoholic loon. We see cereal-world versions of the Zapruder film and even the January 6 insurrection, with Hugh Grant, as the haughty British thespian who’s the voice of Tony the Tiger, leading a strike of the Kellogg’s mascots.

The acting is cartoon lite: agreeably broad sketch-comedy mugging, which is why Jerry (who is great at playing himself, but not really an actor) fits right in. Most of the jokes are LOL rather than guffaw-worthy. But I confess I chuckled at the sheer insanity of how the movie deals with the naming of the Pop-Tart. The genius name that Bob and his team have come up with is…the Trat-Pop. It will take Walter Cronkite puttering around with Silly Putty to set that right. “Unfrosted,” in its way, is a quintessential comedian’s movie. It thumbs its nose at everything without necessarily believing in anything. Yet it has an agreeable crunch.