The following post contains spoilers for Unfrosted. You might think what follows is made up. It does not sound real. I assure you, it is.
Unfrosted is Jerry Seinfeld’s new Netflix comedy about the origins of the beloved breakfast food, the Pop-Tart. While the film does mention real companies and alludes to actual historical events — there really was a rivalry between Kellogg’s and Post as they both raced each other to market with competing toaster pastries in the early 1960s — much of the film is a work of fiction. That will be quite clear as you are watching it almost from the jump, unless the head of the Quaker Oats Company being a guy in an actual Quaker outfit sounds like something that really happened.
In other words: Unfrosted is a fanciful, silly movie with only the loosest connection to reality. And as it goes, it keeps getting stranger and stranger, especially in the realm of celebrity cameos. Bill Burr as President John F. Kennedy! Dean Norris as Nikita Krushchev! Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day, and Drew Tarver as Snap, Crackle, and Pop! Bobby Moynihan as Chef Boyardee! And on and on and on.
As absurd as all of those names and roles are, two of the cameos are so bizarre and unbelievable, I still cannot believe it’s real, even after watching the entire film once and then rewatching that scene two more times just to make sure I had not imagined it.
Because as it turns out, Unfrosted isn’t just Jerry Seinfeld’s movie about Pop-Tarts. It is also a Mad Men reunion — with Jon Hamm and John Slattery unofficially reprising their roles as Don Draper and Roger Sterling from the beloved (and decidedly not silly) AMC drama series.
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The closing credits refer to Hamm and Slattery’s characters as “Ad Man #1” and “Ad Man #2,” but there is no mistaking what is happening here. Roughly an hour into the film, Don and Roger appear in Kellogg’s Battle Creek, Michigan headquarters to pitch the company’s executives on potential names and ad campaigns for their new toaster pastry. While Hamm is never referred to explicitly as “Don Draper” he is dressed and acts exactly as he did on Mad Men. And he flat-out refers to Slattery — who is also costumed like he just arrived from the Madison Avenue offices of Sterling Cooper — as “Roger.”
The head of Kellogg’s, Edsel Kellogg III (Jim Gaffigan) says he’s brought in a pair of “Madison Avenue ad men” to help hone in on the marketing plan for the (as-yet-unnamed) Pop-Tart. Hamm then gives one of Draper’s patented sales pitches, filled with gravitas and dry charm. His vision involves a tête-à-tête laden with sexual overtones between a husband and a wife who “ignites the coiled heat from a nearby toaster which is also eager to receive his now warm pastries.”
Ad Man #1 says they should call their new pastry “The Jelle Jolie,” and further pitches product variations like a chocolate “Jelle Jolie Noir” as well as a “Jelle Jolie Sensual” with “no packet at all, for those who dare. Because his pleasure … is also hers.”
Again, I am not making this up.
Kellogg and his team reject the Sterling Cooper ad pitch, and the film continues with its over-the-top slapstick comedy riffs on breakfast cereals and processed food culture. Hamm and Slattery aren’t seen again until the closing credits, where everyone in the cast appears to lip synch and dance to Unfrosted’s plot song, “Sweet Morning Heat,” another thing I am also not making up.
It is very hard to square Mad Men and Unfrosted occupying the same fictional space. In terms of time period and subject matter, yes, Sterling Cooper could absolutely have worked on advertisements for Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts. But Mad Men was a gritty and grounded look at corporate culture of the 1960s. Unfrosted has Hugh Grant playing an insufferably snoody actor portraying Tony the Tiger in a fuzzy orange and black costume. These two things should not co-exist in the same universe!
And yet they do now. Seeing Hamm and Slattery play Draper and Slattery should be a huge deal — if Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner announced he was making a Mad Men continuation film or series with both of them the news would break the Internet in half for a day or two. But here they are doing basically that in the middle of this very strange and surreal film for a couple of minutes.
I’m not sure I would recommend all of Unfrosted, although it does have a few solid laughs. But I am going to tell everyone I know that they should at least seek out this scene. Seeing is not even believing in this case. I saw it, and I still don’t believe it.
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