Battle Creek cereal giants are focus of Jerry Seinfeld’s new Pop-Tarts movie 'Unfrosted'

Jerry Seinfeld grew up envisioning Battle Creek, Michigan as a place of magic and wonder.

“To me, it was the Emerald City from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” he says. “That’s how I pictured Battle Creek. Just cereal everywhere and everyone eating cereal. It just seemed like a kid paradise.”

But what really was mind-blowing to the New York kid who would conquer the worlds of standup comedy and television one day was Pop-Tarts, the revolutionary breakfast pastry that made its debut in 1964. They left such a lasting impression on Seinfeld’s young psyche that they are now the focus of his Netflix movie, “Unfrosted” which arrives May 3.

“You would think, oh, there were lots of weird things that they made in the ‘60s. Yeah, but there’s nothing like this thing,” says Seinfeld, who directed, co-wrote, produced, and stars in the fictional — or, rather, fantastical — Pop-Tarts origin story, during a Zoom interview.

A blue-sky invention

“I don’t know sometimes why something is funny, but I know that it is funny. And Pop Tarts are funny. It just makes no sense that this company making cereal would suddenly come out with a rectangle you put in a toaster. And when you’re a kid, it’s such a pure invention. It’s a real, what they call a blue-sky invention.”

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Merriam-Webster defines blue-sky in terms of projects or strategies as “characterized by unconstrained optimism or imagination.” It’s a synonym for visionary, which fits in well with the movie’s wacky narrative on the Pop-Tart’s journey from concept to coolest thing on grocery shelves.

In the screenplay written by Seinfeld, Spike Ferestein, Andy Robin, and Barry Marder, the efforts of cereal giants Kellogg’s and Post to create a new breakfast pastry are portrayed as a mini-version of the 1960s space race between America and Russia. The competition is so fierce that it comes to the attention of both John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) and Nikita Khruschev (Dean Norris).

With inspiration from the 1983 astronaut saga “The Right Stuff” and other works, “Unfrosted” turns the search for a perfect snack food into an absurdly comedic quest. Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, the Kellogg’s executive in charge of beating Post to the market, who works for Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan). Cabana brings in a NASA food innovator, Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), to be his right-hand woman and enlists "taste pilots" like Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Jack LaLanne (James Marsden) as advisers.

An all-star cast

Other characters include the disgruntled Shakespearean actor who plays Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant), a Snap, Crackle and Pop (Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day and Drew Tarver) who harbor Monkees-level show business ambitions, a menacing milkman (Christian Slater) from the mob-like dairy industry and domineering corporate heiress Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), who throws heavy objects at staffers.

There are as many verbal and visual gags in the movie as there are corn flakes in an average bowl. A few of the best gags are glimpsed in the trailer, like Ali Wentworth’s cameo as the grieving designated banana slicer at a funeral conducted with “full cereal honors.”

“Unfrosted” was made without any involvement from the Kellogg Company (which split last year into two companies both using the Kellogg’s brand name, WK Kellogg Co. and Kellanova, which handles Pop-Tarts.) But according to Seinfeld, “They seem to have accepted it, because we heard that they’re going to make some special Pop-Tart boxes with cast pictures on them. So I guess they’re OK with us. I guess that’s better than a letter from a legal firm.”

This is the first feature film that “Seinfeld” has directed and also the first where he has played the lead, if you don’t count his voice work in 2007’s animated “Bee Movie.” The timing couldn’t be better, given his high-profile guest spot in early April on the series conclusion of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” In the episode, Seinfeld attends Larry David’s trial for giving a bottle of water to a Georgia voter waiting in line on a hot day. In a buzzed-about scene, Seinfeld and David realize how they should have ended “Seinfeld,” the classic NBC sitcom they created together that still has fans debating its controversial finale.

Seinfeld agrees with those who feel the “Curb” ending doubled as an extra bookend for “Seinfeld,” which ended its run 26 years ago. “I felt like this is now part of the end of my series,” he says. “The end of ‘Curb’, that’s the new end of my series … As far as I’m concerned, if you haven’t seen that scene, you haven’t seen the whole ‘Seinfeld’ series.”

The “Unfrosted” saga stretches back to a Pop-Tarts joke by Seinfeld that was still a work in progress when it was chronicled by a 2012 New York Times video story on his creative process. “Yeah, but I never thought it was a movie or anything like that … It was never serious that that could be anything other than a standup joke,” clarifies Seinfeld.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and the entertainment industry was brought to a standstill, Seinfeld was prodded by Ferestein, a friend and writer for “Seinfeld,” to do a screenplay on a Pop-Tarts theme. With help from Robin and Marder, who wrote “Bee Movie” with Seinfeld and Ferestein,” they crafted a nostalgic parody using only the bare bones of the real-life story — the fact that Kellogg’s did rush to create what would become Pop-Tarts after Post announced it would be introducing something similar, called Country Squares.

Barbenheimer potential?

Seinfeld is happy to play along with questions like whether “Unfrosted” has Barbenheimer potential. ”Well, we’re opening on the same day as ‘The Fall Guy,’ so I thought we could do the ‘Falltart” or the ‘Popguy’ or something,” he quips.

When asked if he had to cut anything from the script that he liked, he shares a scene that he’s still not sure he should have dropped.

“When Melissa McCarthy and I are approaching the compound of El Sucre, the sugar drug lord who controls all the world’s sugar, we wanted, on the lawn, (there) to be various strange exotic animals and pets that these guys always seem to have,” he says. “We wanted a llama with a human head on it that would call out to me, ‘My name is Alan Hoffman. Please tell my wife I’m alive.’”

Explains Seinfeld, “It just seemed to be too big of a crack in science fiction/reality that we couldn’t quite include it. But I loved that joke. That’s my only slight regret.”

He adds, however, that the movie does have a ravioli that comes to life. “Somehow I figured that’s OK. That could happen,” he says.

More:Jerry Seinfeld's Pop-Tarts movie, a comedic story set in Battle Creek, debuts trailer

It’s all good fun, but it’s also clear that Seinfeld took the assignment of directing his first movie seriously, just as he did the making of “Seinfeld” and continues to do with his standup act, which nowadays fills large theaters.

For him, having control of certain aspects of a production is vital.

“I have to be able to say, ‘We’re not doing that line, we’re doing this line.’ The only thing that worked in my career was when I completely controlled the material. Or when we did the series, Larry (David) and I, we were very much in sync 99% of the time and no one could alter our material, ever,” he explains. “I feel like that’s my best chance of making something work, is if I go with my instinct on the material. Other things, (like) casting, I was much more open to debate on other things. But not the script. Not the script.”

Speaking of casting, the lineup of funny performers who appear in “Unfrosted” is an all-star team with a deep bench. Along with the aforementioned actors, the movie co-stars Peter Dinklage, Dan Levy, Cedric the Entertainer, Sebastian Maniscalco, Fred Armisen, Sarah Cooper, Tony Hale, Thomas Lennon, and Jack MacBrayer, among others.

Seinfeld says he was OK with using elements of improvisation in certain scenes, noting that comedians always come up with ideas. “Bill Burr did a lot of improv,” he says of Burr’s JFK scenes. “Kyle Dunnigan, most of that scene of Walter Cronkite and his domestic troubles, was improv’d by Kyle.” In fact, Dunnigan juggles two roles: he plays the slightly embittered Cronkite and, in an impressively accurate homage, a Kennedy-era Johnny Carson.

Asked if anyone in the cast was particularly anarchic, Seinfeld replies, “They’re all anarchic … But that’s why they’re good. They have confidence, they have ego. They’re all brilliant. But I don’t have a problem with that. They bring so much talent, their performing talent. It was just something to deal with and nobody was difficult. You know, everybody argues. I’ve never done anything that wasn’t comedy, but there’s always lots of comedy arguments.”

'There's no money in wit'

One of the key cast members was Grant, who provides an exquisitely pompous take on Tony the Tiger. Calling Grant “100% delightful,” Seinfeld says, “We would have dinners together. We would laugh. Some people when they argue, they’re not fun to argue with. Hugh is so much fun to argue with, because he’s so funny and clever. And neither of us really care. We’re just arguing for the fun of arguing.”

To illustrate, he recalls, “I would say to him, just to provoke him, ‘You Brits, you don’t know anything about comedy. You’re just witty people. Americans have to be funny. Brits can get by with witty. We don’t make any money with wit here. There’s no money in wit! We get big laughs till we’re out on our ass.”

Grant’s character, Thurl Ravenscroft, has the name as the actual voice actor for Tony the Tiger, one of the tiny sprinkles of factual details in the movie, Seinfeld says: “With a name like that, this guy had to have higher ambitions than just being a tiger for a cereal company. And so we came up with, what if he was a frustrated Shakespearean actor?”

While Schumer’s Marjorie Post is named after the real cereal heiress (and be sure to stay until the end to find out her connection to current events), there was no actual Edsel Kellogg III.

“Edsel, I thought, was the prototypical screwup son of an industrial mogul, which was perfect for this character,” says Seinfeld of the first name that is a nod to the Ford dynasty and its punchline car model. “That’s what Jim Gaffigan was playing.”

In recent months, Pop-Tarts have been part of the news in ways that were unconnected to “Unfrosted.” At the college football Pop-Tarts Bowl in Orlando in December, there was a viral moment when the human Pop-Tart mascot was lowered into a giant toaster and a large edible counterpart came out that was consumed by the winning Kansas State Wildcats team.   

Then in February, William Post, who helped invent Pop-Tarts, died in Grand Rapids at age 96. Seinfeld says he would have named his character after William Post, if it wouldn’t have been so confusing (the real-life Post coincidentally shared his last name with Post).

Seinfeld says he got used to Pop-Tarts popping up unexpectedly during the project. “From the day we started making this movie, these things have been happening,” he says. “I believe in comedy gods, like Greek gods, that play with the humans to amuse themselves. And I think the comedy gods were telling me, ‘Keep going! Keep doing this!’”

Why do Pop-Tarts endure in a culture that embraces and disposes of trends with such digital-driven abandon? Seinfeld’s short answer is because they’re so weird and funny.

 “There wasn’t something we had before that that was like that. I mean, there was toast. I never ate toast when I was a kid. What do I want toast (for) when I could have Frosted Flakes? This product hit me. Even if you went through the toy world, Silly Putty, the Super Ball, the Slinky, there were those things that really jumped out like, wow, that’s a really cool, different thing. But in the food world, there’s nothing like the Pop-Tart.”

In fact, he is so confident of Pop-Tarts’ uniqueness that you can forget about sequels.

“If you told me, ‘Can you make a couple more movies about ‘60s interesting food things?’ I would tell you, ‘No, no, there’s nothing as good as this,’” Seinfeld insists. “It’s just a funny object.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

'Unfrosted'

Arrives May 3 on Netflix

Rated PG-13 for some suggestive references and language.