Jerry Seinfeld Snuck The Greatest Cameos Of All Time Into Unfrosted
Unfrosted, a 2024 American comedy movie directed by Jerry Seinfeld, dropped a few days back, telling us a story of the creation of Pop-Tarts toaster pastries that’s loosely based on a true story. The movie dropped via Netflix and has divided the critics, with some saying that the movie is great, while others maintain that it’s average at best. However, everyone agrees that the best part of the movie was its cameo appearances.
…both the Unfrosted movie and the Mad Men series are set in the 1960s…
One of the best cameos in Unfrosted, and probably the film’s best scene, occurs in the final half-hour of the movie when Jim Gaffigan’s Esdel Kellogg III announces that he had summoned some “Madison Avenue ad-men types to present a few ideas to market the company’s new toaster pastry treat. In the next scene, however, we see Jon Hamm standing in Kellogg’s conference room, presenting his ideas, while his colleague, John Slattery, sits to his right.
…it leads us to think that Jerry Seinfeld inadvertently created a new entertainment universe shared by both Unfrosted and Mad Men.
This is an obvious reference to Mad Men, a drama series about one of New York’s most prestigious ad agencies at the beginning of the 1960s. Now, these two characters weren’t properly identified in the movie, but Jon Hamm did refer to Slattery as Roger, and Melissa McCarthy’s Donna refers to Hamm as “Florsheim”—which is an obvious reference to a type of lace-up dress shoes Jon Hamm’s character from Mad Men prefers wearing. Furthermore, they suggest that the still unnamed pastry in Unfrosted should be named Jelle Jolie—a nod to the Belle Jolie lipstick campaign that was central to Mad Men’s first season of the show.
The idea for incorporating Mad Men into Unfrosted stemmed from various breaks Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten took while writing the movie…
What’s even more interesting is that both the Unfrosted movie and the Mad Men series are set in the 1960s, and in the world Seinfeld created, his character would definitely call Don Draper and Roger Sterling to do the advertisement for the new Pop-Tart product. The scene and its numerous nods to Mad Men don’t end there, but it’s hilarious how everything came together in a way that’s a bit too fantastic—it leads us to think that Jerry Seinfeld inadvertently created a new entertainment universe shared by both Unfrosted and Mad Men.
The scene makes it seem like Mad Men was a bigger part of Unfrosted than anyone involved in making the latter originally intended. The idea for incorporating Mad Men into Unfrosted stemmed from various breaks Jerry Seinfeld and Spike Feresten took while writing the movie, during which they often watched Mad Men. They laughed at how mean Jon Hamm’s character would be to his clients in the series, eventually leading to both Hamm and Slattery appearing in the movie.
In fact, Jim Gaffigan’s Kellog, who is bummed by the Mad Men team’s rudeness, asks why the advertisers are so mean, perfectly reflecting the same question Jerry Seinfeld asked Feresten during the writing of the movie. Anyone hoping to catch this hilarious cameo, which is Hamm and Slattery’s third reunion for a movie following the conclusion of the Mad Men series in 2015, can watch Unfrosted on Netflix—it arrived on the platform less than a week ago.
