You can make a movie about anything these days—multiverses, murder podcasts, gritty biopics about people who made sneakers—and somehow nobody thought to tackle the invention of the Pop-Tart until Jerry Seinfeld did. Unfrosted, now streaming on Netflix, is a comedy that looks at Battle Creek, Michigan, 1963, when Kellogg and Post allegedly went to war over the first toastable pastry. It’s part Airplane!, part Anchorman, and all the way stupid—in the best way.
For Seinfeld’s longtime collaborator Spike Feresten, who co-wrote the film, it really did start as a dumb joke. “We were having coffee, and I asked Jerry, ‘Time machine, Jerry Seinfeld—where do you go?’” he recalls. “He didn’t say the dinosaurs. He didn’t say the moon landing. He goes, ‘1963. The invention of the Pop-Tart.’ I thought he was kidding. He was dead serious.”
The fascination with Battle Creek wasn’t a gag to Seinfeld. “It was a company town,” Feresten explains. “They took horse feed grains, made them fun for kids with cartoon characters, and then invented the Pop-Tart. Jerry thought that was the pinnacle of American innovation.” From there, it became a long-running bit. “We’d imagine these serious men in suits completely losing their minds because Post invented a toastable breakfast square. George Clooney as the Kellogg’s guy trying to go on vacation, and someone runs in yelling, ‘Post just invented the toastable breakfast, kids get out of the pool!’ We’d laugh, and then another year would go by. The pandemic finally hit, and we said, screw it, let’s actually write this thing.”
Feresten admits he had one big concern: Jerry Seinfeld playing someone who isn’t Jerry Seinfeld. “It threw me,” he says. “Comedians trying to ‘act’ can be painful. So I told him, ‘This new character Bob Cabana? He’s Jerry Seinfeld. You’ll say Seinfeld jokes. The audience will know exactly what they’re getting.’ That’s why right out of the gate you hear riffs that could’ve come from the stand-up routine. We left the breadcrumbs.”
The breadcrumbs, in this case, lead through an absurdist world where Hugh Grant plays a bitter Shakespearean actor stuck voicing Tony the Tiger, and Walter Cronkite is addicted to Silly Putty. “We read about Thurl Ravenscroft, the actual Tony voice, and figured he must’ve hated that job,” Feresten says. “This classically trained guy doing ‘they’re grrreat!’ to pay the bills. Turns out, he did go to Kellogg’s brass and say, ‘We deserve more money.’ They told him, ‘We’ll replace you in 10 seconds.’ So yeah, some of it we made up, but some of it was weirdly true.”
Accuracy mattered—sort of. “Jerry was strict about 1963 being a character in the movie,” Feresten says. “Every label, every Schwinn bike, every lighter had to be period-correct. Except for a few things, like Einstein references we let slip. But when you see Walter Cronkite pulling out toy after toy, that’s Kyle Dunnigan just riffing with props. Jerry literally said, ‘Keep rolling, just talk about your home life with a new gadget every time.’”
It’s the kind of old-school comedy that barely exists anymore. “Think about it,” Feresten says. “People talk about Succession like it’s a comedy. I love that show, but it’s not where I go to laugh. Meanwhile, Hollywood was giving us movies about women peeing in jars in vans. During a pandemic. We thought: this is broken. People don’t need more despair; they need big, dumb fun. And who better than us to make something big and dumb?”
That dumbness taps into something very specific—nostalgia for breakfast itself. “Breakfast was ridiculous,” Feresten laughs. “It was just sugar compacted with marshmallows and cartoon characters. We know that now as adults, but the magic was real. The toys were real. That’s why it works. Everyone has a memory of pouring cereal and digging for the toy. The toys are gone now, which is a crime. But the nostalgia still sticks.”
It helps that the cast is loaded with comedy killers: Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Amy Schumer, Bill Burr, Sarah Cooper, Christian Slater, Max Greenfield, even Hugh Grant letting his inner diva run wild. “Netflix was the right home for it,” Feresten says. “They treat comedy like movie stars. Ted Sarandos throws a party, and it’s comedians treated like Clooney. I shook his hand and said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ He goes, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Usually this is actors, not comics.’ That’s when I knew we were in the right place.”
And yes, they had to settle the eternal question: toasted or untoasted? “I go both ways,” Feresten admits. “Frosted blueberry is my move. Sometimes toasted, sometimes not. Depends what I’m watching. Jerry? He still says Pop-Tarts suck toasted.”
It’s not the first time Feresten has leaned into the absurd. He was a writer on Seinfeld (his resume includes the infamous “Soup Nazi” episode) and also worked on Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which just turned 30. “Here’s what both projects had in common,” he says. “The companies let us do whatever we wanted. They trusted the creative people. That’s why the magic happens.”
Three decades later, the idea that the most hyped comedy of the year is about Pop-Tarts says everything about how desperate the culture is for laughs. And yet, with Seinfeld and Feresten in charge, the joke lands. “We wanted fun, we wanted hope, we wanted stupid,” Feresten says. “Turns out, breakfast cereal was the perfect way to do it.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
