WARNING: SPOILERS

For someone who loves the early 1960s as much as Jerry Seinfeld, he sure gets a lot of it wrong. “Unfrosted” is set in 1963 and there’s a whole host of anachronisms. Most feel completely unnecessary. 

They reference Gus Grissom dying. Yeah, that was 1967. Marjorie Post calls one of the dumpster divers “Cabbage Patch kid.” Not introduced until 1978. Fruity Pebbles? 1971. Missing kids on milk cartons? Mid-80s. Turns out the “Doublemint Twins” ad campaign was invented before this, so I was wrong on that; but the idea of “Jackie O’s” as a cereal is a few Kennedy assassinations early.

The entire opening is anachronism. A kid lays out one of those classic red bandanas and loads it up with iconic early ’60s items: Slinky, G.I. Joe, Bazooka Joe bubblegum, 1964 baseball card, and Gold Key Woody Woodpecker comic book. Then he ties it all to a stick and hits the road. At a diner, he asks for Pop-Tarts and reads its origin story on the box aloud.

Kid: Wow, that’s a pretty good story.
Adult: You think so? Bunch of baloney.

The mise en scene is Norman Rockwell, though the runaway kid there is talking to a cop; here it’s Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a Kellogg’s executive who promises to tell the kid the real story. He begins it this way: “Well, in the early ’60s, the American morning was defined by milk and cereal...”

Me: Early ’60s? I thought we were in the early ’60s.

The movie is full of such errors. It feels like everyone was riffing, and the riffs stayed in even if they didn’t connect. As for the real story about how Pop-Tarts came to be that Bob promises to tell the kid? Bunch of baloney.

Gaffigan again
Who cares, right, as long as it’s funny. This isn’t. I’d heard it didn’t have a single laugh in it but that’s not true. Jim Gaffigan, as Edsel Kellogg III, has some good line-readings. Opening the newspaper: “Oh, Vietnam. That seems like a good idea.” I know, but it’s the way he says it. I laughed out loud.

The movie itself seems like a good idea: take the battle between Kellogg’s and Post to launch the first toaster pastry and film it through a “Right Stuff” prism. Make it seem like it matters. But they don’t. They keep shrugging. They keep winking. They keep losing the thread.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg’s is on top, particularly at the annual “Bowl and Spoon Awards,” winning everything; but then why is Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) so smug? What are they working on?

Yeah, toaster pastries. With Kellogg’s own abandoned research into the project! It’s so delicious they have kids diving into their dumpsters for the castoffs. But then why is Post so behind on the project?

Either way, Kellogg’s ramps up. Bob requests his old partner, Donna “Stan” Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), currently employed by NASA. Stan, in turn, hires a crack team of “the most innovative minds of the 1960s”:

• Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez)
• Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer)
• Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon)
• Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan)
• Jack LaLanne (James Marsden)
• The UNIVAC computer

At a press conference, Tom proclaims, in his best “Mercury astronauts” voice: “I give you, Kellogg’s first-ever taste pilots!” Not bad.

Interestingly, all the above people are historical figures. Well, it’s Ignaz Schwinn rather than Steve, while Chef Boyardee is Ettore Boiardi. But yes, Carvel created soft-serve ice cream while von Braunhut was apparently the odd creature who created Sea Monkeys and X-ray goggles and all that crap they sold on the inside covers of comic books.

And here, together, they create … a mess.

I like the subplot about the Milk Syndicate disliking the milk-less turn of events and strong-arming everybody. “It’s the calcium in milk that makes bones strong,” milkman Mike Diamond (Christian Slater) says to Bob outside his home. “Without it, bones can break. They just .. snap.”

Sadly, they don’t do much with it. Too many other subplots. When Post gets close to launch, Kellogg’s talks to “El Sucre” (Felix Solis) in Puerto Rico and cuts off their sugar supply. So Marjorie goes through Nikita Khruschev (Dean Norris) to get Cuba’s sugar, which gets JFK (Bill Burr) involved. There’s a “Mad Man” bit, with Jon Hamm and John Slattery giving the Kellogg’s product an inappropriately sexy French name, so Kellogg’s goes back to the dumpster-diving kids, who tell them knowingly, “Look, the name is the game, people.”

I’m like: Wait, weren’t you kids literally diving into dumpsters for an unnamed product?

More subplots. Marjorie Post and Edsel Kellogg are secretly in love, Von Braunhut and Chef Boy Ardee raise an odd Sea Monkey/ravioli lifeform together, Schwinn is killed in a toaster-pastry experiment, and the actors playing the cereal mascots—including Hugh Grant as Thurl Ravenscroft/Tony the Tiger—not only strike, they storm Kellogg’s headquarters, Jan. 6-style.

Too much, and not enough of it is funny.

Citizen Seinfeld
But the dumpster-diving girl is correct: the name is the game, people, in art and in life. Kellogg’s product was originally called “Pop-Tart,” Post’s was named “Country Squares,” and the former had it all over the latter. It won the space race. 

We get wrap-ups. The Univac is sent to Vietnam (cue unfunny “Apocalypse Now” parody), the Milk Syndicate is implicated in JFK’s assassination (seriously unfunny), and Bob goes on “The Tonight Show” and is shot by Andy Warhol (Dan Levy), angry that Pop-Art is being co-opted. None of this made me laugh.

What did? Stan suddenly becoming a hippy, inventing granola, and pulling out of Dodge in a VW Van. OK, it wasn’t any of that. It was Edsel yelling after her, “Get a job!” Gaffigan again.

Serious question: Is Jerry Seinfeld’s trajectory the Charles Foster Kane trajectory? Rising to unprecedented fame, wealth and power, and all he longs for are childhood playthings. For Kane, it was the red sled; for Jerry, everything in that red bandana.

Maybe that’s all of us. No matter where life takes us, even to great success, we just want to go back.