From Pop-Tarts to Jackie O’s and beyond [Media Notes 119 E]

One of the problems I’ve been having with Unfrosted is that it’s unfocused. As I mentioned in my original review, Seinfeld’s a miniaturist. His core artistic discipline is stand-up comedy, a discipline based on two-, three-, and five-, maybe six-minute bits. The Seinfeld Show was a half-hour sitcom, which means it had roughly twenty-two-and-a-half-minutes of show interrupted by commercial announcements. Those didn’t involve much of a plot. Similarly, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee consisted of a conversation between Seinfeld and some comedian, which each show being ten to twenty minutes long – edited, I believe, from four or five hours of footage.

Unfrosted is a feature-length movie that runs an hour and twenty-five minutes, twenty-eight if you count the final song. While movies are constructed of shorter scenes, they have to have a set of events the builds and resolves over the course of the whole movie. Unfrosted doesn’t do that. Oh, we’ve got lots going on: Kellogg’s vs. Post, Big Milk vs. Big Cereal, Cuban sugar vs. Puerto-Rican sugar, Russia vs. America, mascots vs. Kellogg’s, and all the while NASA’s shooting for the moon. And somehow Pop-Tarts is supposed to hold all that together. It does that nominally, but not emotionally. There were two or three places in the movie where I felt like it should end. But it didn’t, too soon.

There’s a gag about Jackie O that illustrates one aspects of this diffuseness. The gag plays on the fact that there’s a very popular cereal called “Cheerios.” That presents the opportunity for a pun. But in order to get that pun into the movie we’ve got to get Jackie O into the movie. How do we do that? Jackie O is Jacqueline Onassis, formerly Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John F. Kennedy, who was in office between Jan, 1961 and Nov. 1963, when he was assassinated. Since Pop-Tarts were introduced about a year later, Kennedy died too early to play a role in this story. But that’s OK, since Unfrosted doesn’t pretend to be historically accurate about anything beyond costumes, cars, furniture, and the general physical setting.

Still, we need a pretext. What’s available. Ah, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, two years before. OK. The time frame’s close enough. But how do we make a connection between Pop-Tarts and the Cuban Missile Crisis? I can tell you easily enough. But I’m making some kind of point here, so I’m not going to do that, but if you really want to know, you can find out in the plot summary in the Wikipedia entry for the movie.

As a result of this turn of events, the top brass of Kellogg’s are summoned to the oval office at about 52 minutes into the film. President Kennedy enters the oval office: “Have you fellas ever considered calling a cereal Jackie O’s? Just a pitch but I think she’d get a big kick out of it.” There’s another second or two of chitchat and they get down to business. It seems that Post is now working with the Russians to secure a supply of sugar from Cuba. Kennedy: “The idea of our American children waking up in the morning to a commie breakfast pastry really burns my britches.” There’s more chit chat, this time a bit more serious, and Kennedy agrees to help with the situation: “I will instruct my brother Bobby to tighten the screws on those cow huggers.” If you’re wondering how THAT got in there, consult the Wikipedia entry. Out Kellogg’s honchos leave the meeting as the Doublemint Twins enter the oval office for some “executive privilege.” The scene ends at about 54 minutes.

The movie then moves back to other business. We’ve got a two-minute scene in a darkened bar between the Thurl Ravenscroft, the disgruntled actor who plays Tony the Tiger, and a representative of the milk mob. Then we have a minute with Walter Cronkite that’s split between on-air time and off. And now we have two major scenes on the main plot-line. First Kellogg’s conducts a test of their new pastry that is a parody of a rocket launch. The pastry is good, but the “taste pilot” died in a freak accident. Given the general NASA motif I assume this is a reference to the death of three astronauts when the crew cabin of Apollo 1 broke out in flames on the launchpad in 1967. That takes a two and a half minutes or so. Then we segue the funeral for the deceased. That runs for roughly three minutes.

We’re now eight or nine minutes beyond the end to the oval office scene where Kennedy make the Jackie O’s suggestion. That’s not much time at all, but it seems longer than it is because our minds have had to move through four distinctly different settings: a darked bar, a TV program, a pastry launch, and a funeral. That’s a lot of information packed into a short time.

And now we’re on the street in Battle Creek (at roughly 1:03:00). Our three Kellogg’s honchos, Edsel Kellogg (President), Bob Cabana (Head of Development?), and Donna “Stan” Stankowski (Chief Scientist?), are driving along when then see a crowd gathered in front of the local TV store where everyone is watching the news. The pull over and join the crowd President Kennedy is talking to the nation about a Russian ship near Cuba: “We believe it’s illegal Cuban sugar meant to destabilize a balanced breakfast.”

Kellogg: “I tell you the wife’s a knockout.”
Cabana: “Yeah”
Stankowski: “I got the boys working on the Jackie O thing.”
Kellogg: “Her last name’s ‘Kennedy.’ What does that even mean?”
Stankowski: “No, the shape of the cereal’s an O. Cheerios, Oreos, Jackie-O’s.”
Woman in the crowd: “Shussh! He’s talking about nuclear war, you idiots.”

And there you have it. Ten minutes after the seed was planted in the oval office, the Jackie O gag is brought to fruition. And they had to have lines in the script that told us what the joke was about.

But to what point? What does that gag have to do with Pop-Tarts? Well, Cheerios is a cereal, Jackie-0’s would be a cereal. And Pop-Tarts is being positioned as a cereal substitute. That’s the connection.

I wonder just how, in the process of developing the script, that gag got created. Perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis bit came first, as a way of amplifying the rivalry between Kellogg’s and Post, and the Jackie O bit was tacked on because, why not? It’s such a little thing. But I could almost imagine that it went the other way. One of the writers, Seinfeld or one of his partners (Spike Feresten, Barry Marder, and Andy Robin) came up with the idea of a cereal connection between “Jackie O”, Cheerios, and Pop-Tarts, and the whole Cuban sugar connection was then worked into the plot so the Jackie O gag can be used. It really doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that Unfrosted is full of gags and references that are locally funny and clever, but that don’t build a compelling overall story-arc. Perhaps the largest such intrusion is the climactic scene where the mascots go on a rampage against the Kellogg’s building while the brass are inside overseeing the certification of Pop-Tarts. Tony the Tiger leads the charge and he’s costumed with Viking horns like the so-called QAnon shaman. Many of the shots in the scene parody shots from video footage of the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Why? That event is six decades after the launching of Pop-Tarts and has absolutely nothing to do with it. Let the mascots attack the Kellogg’s building, but why distract the audience by forcing us to recall the various video shots they saw? “I saw that, and that one, I recognize that shot...” And so forth. If it’s intended to be a parody of January 6, well, it doesn’t play that way. Nor does it somehow inform or amplify the underlying story of corporate competition. Rather, it’s just management vs. labor that’s been tacked onto that story. To what end?

The Marx Brothers didn’t have me asking such questions of Duck Soup. If you want movies from the 1960s, what about Dr. Strangelove (1964) or Putney Swope (1969)? True, they’ve very different from Unfrosted. But both are comedies, though Strangelove is rather grim. And they are tightly focused. And gags? What about Slim Pickens waving his cowboy hat and riding the bomb? And if you want a comedy that makes effective use of children, how about Galaxy Quest from 1999? If Unfrosted has just turned the Butchie&Cathy line up to eleven, bringing them more closely into the action like the (somewhat older) kids in Galaxy Quest, that might have helped bring more coherence to Unfrosted. 

More later.