Mild spoilers ahead!
In the past year, we’ve gotten a bunch of “consumer product origin story”-type movies, such as Air, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot, and even Tetris (the funniest name I’ve seen for this subgenre is “buy-opic”). On May 3, the latest entry to this ongoing phenomenon arrives to Netflix — the Jerry Seinfeld-directed Unfrosted purports itself to be the origin story of Pop-Tarts. But if you’re expecting a slightly dramatized “true story,” you may end up getting something else entirely.
The star-packed ensemble comedy, which features roles and cameos from a murderer’s row of comic talents including Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Sarah Cooper, Aparna Nancherla, Bill Burr, Jim Gaffigan, Dan Levy, Jim Gaffigan, and many, many more — is more of a parody of the slew of buy-opics we’ve received over the past 12 months than anything. While the film does do the usual timeline shuffling and character condenscing we’ve all come to expect, it also has zany subplots like a milkman mafia, and has Kellogg’s recruiting astronauts, fitness gurus, and even other food companies’ mascots in its quest to beat rival breakfast Post to the store shelves with its toaster-friendly pastry.
Fortunately, it has a pretty good reason for just how silly the re-telling is: A framing device in which Seinfeld’s Bob Cabana (a stand-in for the real-life Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts inventor Bill Post) recounts how he invented the product to a runaway boy at a diner (it’s adorable; he’s got a bindle full of toys and everything) to keep the kid occupied until his parents can catch up. It’s exactly the goofy sort of invention you’d do for an under-ten-year-old, which makes all its cartoonish twists seem almost logical, and turns it into a family-friendly version of a now-familiar filmmaking style.
Unfrosted is streaming on Netflix on May 3.