[COLUMN] Who is Unfrosted For? | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

In many cases, “who is this for?” is a facile criticism.

It is often a cheap way to dismiss a particular work that doesn’t appeal to the person asking the question. The unspoken assumption hanging over the rhetorical question is that just because this piece of media doesn’t resonate with the reviewer, it is impossible to imagine it appealing to anybody else. As such, “who is this for?” is a loaded question. It can seem flippant and dismissive, a way to write off something with which the author does not wish to meaningfully engage.

However, there are also times when this is the only reasonable response to a particular object. Watching Unfrosted, Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy history of the Kellogg’s Pop-Tart, there is only one sane response: who is this for? What is the intended audience of Seinfeld’s hour-and-a-half passion project that assembled some of the finest comedic talent working today to construct a mocking “buy-o-pic” about a classic breakfast brand?

The opening scenes of Unfrosted offer one possible answer. The entire movie is framed as a story that Kellogg’s executive Bob Cabana (Jerry Seinfeld) tells George (Isaac Bae), a young boy who has run away from home. Cabana constructs an elaborate and winding narrative that is largely fantastical, a sort of “tall tale”, as a way of stalling George long enough for his parents (Mark Kwak and Susan Elle) to recover their errant son.

As such, it would make sense to assume that Unfrosted is a children’s movie. This makes a certain amount of sense. Thanks to Clayton Hartley, the movie’s production design has a decidedly cartoonish aesthetic. The characters are larger than life. The science and history makes no sense. There’s a strong emphasis on cereal mascots like Snap (Kyle Mooney), Crackle (Mikey Day), Pop (Drew Tarver), and Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant).

A significant portion of Unfrosted features Cabana talking directly to children. The entire movie is narrated to George, but there are also the dumpster-diving duo Cathy (Eleanor Sweeney) and Butchie (Bailey Sheetz). A lot of the humor and logic is that of a children’s film, such as the machinations of a sinister cabal of milkmen led by Harry Friendly (Peter Dinklage), which culminates in a punchline that sees Cabana marched through a parade of flatulent cows.

Even the subject matter makes sense for the audience. Modern kids are too young to engage with the nostalgia of AIR or Tetris. Those are products that older viewers will recognize, sometimes from their own youth. In contrast, while Unfrosted is set in a make-believe version of the 1960s, most kids will be familiar with Pop-Tarts. As Florence Fabricant noted, Pop-Tarts were “a hit because of their appeal to children.” Households with children between 6 and 17 remain the biggest buyers of Pop-Tarts.

This tone fits within the larger context of Seinfeld’s later career. Allowing for his stand-up tours and his web series, Seinfeld’s theatrical output has largely represented an effort to rebrand the comedian as a kid-friendly star akin to late-career Eddie Murphy. Outside of playing fictionalized versions of himself, Seinfeld’s last feature film appearance was in the DreamWorks animated film Bee Movie, in which he played a talking bee named Barry B. Benson.

This is a pragmatic choice. Seinfeld was one of the defining comedians of the 1990s. His sitcom, Seinfeld, remains one the decade’s core texts. However, Seinfeld is aging. He is now 70 years old. While reruns of Seinfeld and his stand-up tours appeal to older fans, it makes sense to court a younger audience. Indeed, treating Seinfeld as a brand unto himself, projects like Bee Movie and Unfrosted serve as potential gateways to his other work, like Seinfeld, which is streaming on Netflix.

Seinfeld didn’t stumble into Bee Movie by accident. Apparently, the film originated with Seinfeld jokingly pitching the concept to director Steven Spielberg over dinner. Indeed, Seinfeld retains a screenplay credit on Bee Movie. While Seinfeld joked that he “didn’t want to do” Bee Movie, he also acknowledges authorship. “I kind like of like to play the captain of the ship and I decide what comes in and what comes out,” he explained in press. “Like, I’m in charge of the gate of what gets in.”

Bee Movie is very obviously aimed at children. It was an animated talking animal movie with a PG rating. As critic A.O. Scott noted, Bee Movie adhered to DreamWorks’ post-Shrek playbook, seeking “to charm the children with cute creatures and slapstick action while jabbing at the grown-ups with soft, pseudosophisticated pop-cultural satire.” It is very obviously a product of the mid-2000s, an animated film with just a hint of an edge to it.

That said, there’s undeniably something weird about Bee Movie. In particular, there’s a somewhat charged relationship between the movie’s protagonist and a human woman named Vanessa Bloome (Renée Zellweger). The dynamic between the pair has become Bee Movie’s cultural legacy. It is too much to describe their relationship as charged, but there’s undeniably a subtext stirring beneath the movie’s surface, perhaps best demonstrated by a dream sequence set to The Archies’ Sugar Sugar.

“I apologize for what seems to be a certain uncomfortable subtle sexual aspect of ‘The Bee Movie,’ which really was not intentional,” Seinfeld acknowledged years later. “But after it came out, I realized, ‘This is really not appropriate for children.’ Because the bee seems to have a thing for the girl. We don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.” To put it frankly, Bee Movie has a very strange energy for a children’s film, and that carries over into Unfrosted.

There are moments in Unfrosted at odds with the film’s target audience. Netflix has foregrounded one such sequence in publicity: cameos from Jon Hamm and John Slattery reprising their roles from the prestige television series Mad Man. This isn’t an allusion so much as a direct crossover. Netflix’s publicity identified Hamm’s character as “Don Draper” and the movie itself refers to Slattery’s character as “Roger.” Netflix’s social media sells it as an “unbelievable Mad Men reunion.”

It is an incredibly weird scene for a number of reasons. Setting aside the intertextuality of it all, it doesn’t feature any jokes. There’s nothing in that scene that works as a punchline, whether at the expense of Mad Men or Unfrosted. There is some reference to Roger noticing “dead trees” on his journey to the office and Don’s efforts to sexualize the breakfast treat, but the film doesn’t commit to either. It’s not a sequence intended to be especially funny.

Instead, the scene is built around nostalgia. It’s the thrill of seeing Hamm and Slattery reprise their roles. This is obvious from the way that Hamm is framed, introduced with his back to the camera as if building to the reveal of his face. However, this emphasis on recognition belies the film’s intended audience. Do kids know or care about Mad Men, a prestige period piece that ended almost a decade ago? “Gangster milkmen” is a joke that kids will get, but adulterous cult television stars?

The same thing happens later on, with jokes involving John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) and Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris). It’s possible that children might recognize John F. Kennedy, one of the most iconic and beloved American Presidents. Indeed, both scenes play on the universal concept of watching actors make funny noises. Burr’s exaggerated Boston accent might be amusing to children, just like Norris’ stony-faced gibberish that stands in for Russian.

However, there’s a broader question of whether kids know or care about the historical context of these jokes, which are taken for granted: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race. Ironically, given Seinfeld’s acknowledgment of the inappropriate sexual subtext of Bee Movie, both scenes end with explicitly sexual punchlines. Kennedy sleeps with (and impregnates) the Doublemint Twins (Lauren and Nicole Peters) while Khrushchev propositions Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer).

There are multiple sequences like this, including jokes about how Jack Lalanne (James Marsden) is "freeballing" it or how Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon) is a former Nazi. These are very broad and cartoonish jokes that the movie keeps coming back to, and they are structured in a way that feels like they are aimed at an extremely young audience, but – like the Mad Men cameos – the actual content of the jokes doesn’t feel like something that will appeal to that specific audience.

Of course, in practical terms, it’s quite clear who was the audience for these jokes. Seinfeld is very much the authorial voice of Unfrosted, and it’s not hard to imagine these jokes as Seinfeldian riffs. The entire Mad Men scene might be more enjoyable as part of Seinfeld’s stand-up set, with the comedian rhetorically asking, “What is the deal with Mad Men?” Many of the film’s ideas fit within that framework. “You ever notice how milkmen all drive the same cars and dress the same way?”

The tension arises from the film’s desire to take as many of these concepts as possible and boil them down into a movie that is very squarely aimed at children. Some of those jokes are universal enough to make the transition relatively cleanly. Christian Slater as a menacing milkman warning Cabana that, without milk, bones are more likely to break, is a fun juxtaposition of a variety of elements that shouldn’t fit together – but do. However, not all the jokes make sense reworked in that way.

Reflecting on Unfrosted, processing the film’s competing impulses and sensibilities, it’s very clear that the movie is for Jerry Seinfeld. However, whether the film accomplishes what he’s clearly trying to do with it is another question entirely.