Jerry Seinfeld on Why He Made a Movie About Pop-Tarts

There is a real story about how Pop-Tarts were invented: In 1964, the breakfast food company Kellogg’s (which now operates as Kellanova) approached William Post to develop a breakfast toaster pastry, knowing that its competitor company Post — no relation to William — was working on a similar product called Country Squares. Unfrosted is not that story. Or rather, it’s bits of it — an absurdist mash-up of fact and fiction that centers on the concept of a Space Race to invent the Pop-Tart and draws, in part, on an old Jerry Seinfeld joke about the treats.

Set in 1963, the movie, out May 3 on Netflix, is the comedian’s feature directorial debut. Seinfeld also plays Pop-Tart inventor Bob Cabana (fictional) as he assembles, on Kellogg’s behalf, a team of breakfast food inventors that includes Melissa McCarthy as Donna Stankowski, a scientist who leaves her job at NASA to work with Kellogg’s (fictional); Adrian Martinez as Tom Carvel, founder of the Carvel brand (a real person, but a fictional role), and James Marsden as fitness figurehead Jack LaLanne (also real, but he wasn’t involved with inventing Pop-Tarts). On the opposing side, Amy Schumer plays Marjorie Post, who, in reality, ran the company but only until 1958.

In interviews with Eater, Seinfeld and Spike Feresten, a Seinfeld writer who was also one of Unfrosted’s writers and producers, discussed the comedic potential of cereal companies, playing with the truth, and why they chose not to make a straightforward origin story.

Eater: Why the Pop-Tart?

Spike Feresten: Well, that was Jerry. He thought it was very funny that there were these serious companies with men with serious dispositions talking about really dumb things like: What sort of prize do we put in the Corn Flakes? He knew before we did how funny the phrase Pop-Tart was and how silly the idea of making a movie about a Pop-Tart was — I mean, we were at a cocktail party and people were saying, What are you guys working on? We’re like, A movie about the Pop-Tart, and everybody would laugh in disbelief. Jerry would look over and go, Do you see what I’m talking about?

What made the Pop-Tart so funny that you wanted to make a whole movie about it?

Jerry Seinfeld: I sometimes can’t explain why something is funny. But I just know that that is a funny thing. It had to do with the name. It had to do with giving kids the power to make something with heat. Most kids when I was little never did anything like that — only adults handle things that had to do with heat — so it was an exciting new world to use a toaster. As a kid, you felt like you were cooking when you made Pop-Tarts.

I don’t think there’s anything as funny in the entire [1960s] — certainly in the food world — as the Pop-Tart. It was such a surprise when it came out. It had nothing to do with anything else. There’s different cookies. There’s different candies. There’s nothing really that surprising in the candy world. But in the breakfast world, this was a total shock when they made this.

What do you think makes the Pop-Tart so surprising as a food?

JS: The format — the box, the individual packets that you have to open because they have to be protected from gamma rays or some nuclear attack; the packets were lined with some metallic material. The whole thing just fit the ’60s, which was a silly decade as far as the futurism of so many things — instant breakfast and space travel. In the ’60s, people really believed in mankind and its ability to solve any problem very easily.

What spurred the decision to turn this joke into a movie? Was it something you’d been thinking about for a long time?

JS: I thought we were joking when we talked about making a Pop-Tart movie. I still think we were joking. It wasn’t serious. But then when we were locked down in COVID, [Spike] said, Let’s try and write the Pop-Tart movie, which I immediately thought was impossible. As soon as we started talking about it, it felt funny. [Writer] Andy Robin said, “It’s like The Right Stuff,” with these two companies competing to get to the moon first — the Pop-Tart moon.

What had made it seem impossible at first?

JS: I didn’t see how it was a story. But then we did have two rival companies in a little town in Michigan. It started to take shape as a cute setting. It’s about the world; you have to build a world. We thought, Wow, the way cereal dominated childhood in the ’60s. There was an appealing world to go into. The post-apocalyptic vibe is very popular right now. To make a movie, you have to live in that world for years. Some of these worlds, I don’t know how these people wake up and live in that all day, for month after month after month. I mean, I couldn’t. Our world — we loved it. Every day was so much fun.

There is obviously a real origin story of the Pop-Tart. Why take this very absurd, very fictionalized approach to these real companies?

SF: We never called Kellogg’s and said, Can we make this story? We never thought the true origin story of the Pop-Tart was so interesting that it deserved a movie. We just thought, This is a comedic premise of a company that’s silly, like many of the companies we talked about in the Seinfeld series: the Yankees or J. Peterman or Tyson chicken. It’s silly and funny on its own. Why don’t we craft a story based on that? Comedy was always the motivator.

We’re not the guys to make an origin movie. We don’t like watching them. We don’t really do that. Our absurd approach is how we approach all things we write about.

The movie plays with truth and fiction. Some characters, like Jack LaLanne and Thurl Ravenscroft, are real people, but others, like Bob Cabana [played by Seinfeld] and Edsel Kellogg III [played by Jim Gaffigan], aren’t. How did you decide what to pull from reality and where to change direction? Why Bob Cabana and not Bill Post?

SF: Well, that one in particular is because his last name was Post. We did have the character named Bill Post in a couple of drafts, and we liked the idea that Edsel Kellogg would be suspicious of someone named Post. But when we realized the movie was only going to be about 90 minutes, we thought that might be too much of a wrinkle, and it might confuse the audience.

As far as the rest of the characters, the guiding principle was always very simple and just like a Seinfeld episode: whatever is funniest. Whatever we think is going to make our audience laugh, that’s the direction we’re going to go. Would they hire Jack LaLanne? No, but he was one of the first people to actually encourage people to eat right and exercise so we thought, Let’s put him in because that’ll be a really fun character for someone to play.

The fella who was running Post, I’m sure he was a nice guy, but nobody knew who he was. It was yet another man in the 1960s executive world and we wanted women so we said, Well, Marjorie Post didn’t really run the day-to-day operations, but let’s just have her do that here. She’s very interesting. That was the guiding principle: There were no rules as far as it had to be the person or not be the person; it’s just whatever’s funniest.

How did that extend to the use of mascots and logos?

SF: Almost everything is identical to the way it was in the ’60s. Tony the Tiger is the 1960s Tony the Tiger, and so is the Cornelius [Rooster, of Corn Flakes]. Everything wrapped around the movie — the set design, the set decorating, the logos — is all hyper accurate, with a few exceptions. Jerry really wanted a real [world]: That lighter has to be from 1963; that briefcase has to be from 1963; these logos, these toys all have to be period correct. That part of it is very, very accurate.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.