Leave it to Jerry Seinfeld to come up with a movie that is based on one of his jokes about a breakfast pastry that has been a family favourite in the US and Canada for 60 years. That’s exactly what he did with UNFROSTED, the not-quite-true story of the invention of the Pop-Tart.

It’s 1963 and it’s an exciting time to be in America. The country is in a space race against the USSR and, with it, seemingly every week new products and new innovations are arriving at middle class households across the country. In Battle Creek, Michigan, cereal giants Kellogg’s and Post are engaged in their own war to come up with the newest breakfast food that the country’s growing Baby Boomer generation will gobble up. When Kellogg’s executive Bob Cabana (Seinfeld) hears from the unlikeliest of sources that rival Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) and her sidekick, Rick Ludwin (Max Greenfield), are close to launching a shelf-stable, fruit-filled breakfast pastry, Kellogg’s chief Edsel Kellogg (Jim Gaffigan) pushes Cabana to join forces with NASA scientist Donna “Stan” Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) to get Kellogg’s product onto supermarket shelves first. Stan assembles her team that includes soft ice cream inventor Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez), sea monkey and x-ray specs inventor Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), bicycle manufacturer Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer), TV fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden) and Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), but they fail to come up with anything that resembles an edible, toaster-ready, pastry pocket. Meanwhile, word gets out that the cereal companies are looking at launching products that don’t need milk and won’t require a mascot. This pushes both the milk syndicate and the actors who play the cereal mascots on TV to take drastic actions to keep their livelihoods afloat.

UNFROSTED is complete silliness but it’s all in good fun and it works… if you’re a Baby Boomer. Seinfeld and his co-writers don’t hold back bringing everything early-1960s into play here, from a Slinky and Silly Putty to Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson (both played to perfection by Kyle Dunnigan). The movie is getting mediocre reviews from readers of Rotten Tomatoes and I can certainly understand why. The jokes must fly over their Millennial and Gen-Z heads. Would they even know who Nikita Khrushchev and Andy Warhol were much less Jack LaLanne, not to mention the effect all of them had on American culture at that time?

Seinfeld, in his directorial debut, keeps the action moving along at a quick pace, peppering his story not just with brilliant cameos – and there many of them – but also with little-known facts. It’s amazing how much of this story is true. Post really did come out with their own pastry pocket first and they really did call it Country Squares, and while there wasn’t a Steve Schwinn, all the other characters who worked on Stan’s team (that part isn’t true) were real people. Even the actor Thurl Ravenscroft (played with relish by Hugh Grant), who voiced Tony the Tiger for more than five decades, was a real person. (Fun fact: Ravenscroft sang bass on Olivia Newton-John’s “Let Me Be There”.) Kudos to Seinfeld for getting clearances from all the companies that own the IP rights to all the characters and advertising mascots used here and kudos again for the genius casting. The huge slate of A- and B-listers no doubt reflects Seinfeld’s clout and respect in Hollywood.

UNFROSTED is streaming now on Netflix. For Baby Boomers, it’s a sugar-coated, vitamin and mineral-enriched blast from the past.

Thanks for reading but don’t be a lurker! If you liked what you just read, here are some suggestions:

Sign up to receive my movie reviews in your inbox automatically
Share this review on your Facebook page
Leave me a message telling me what you thought of my review or the film
Bookmark the site and visit often
Like my Howard For Film Facebook page
Watch my reviews on my YouTube page
Check out my Howard For Film magazine on Flipboard
Tell your friends about the site