SO HOT THEY'RE COOL [461]

“Kellanova?!”

This began upon seeing a headline: “Shares in Pringles maker Kellanova jump on Mars bid talks”. The subheading on the article then talks about the “cereal and snacks company formerly known as Kellogg’s”.

If there was ever a time to think “I beg your pardon”, and realise you’ve completely missed something, this might be it. Kellogg’s is so synonymous with breakfast cereal that their products having been made of basic food ingredients has prevented the brand from becoming a verb, in the way “Hoover” and “Sellotape” have done.

However, the article led with their ownership of Pringles, bought in 2012 as a way of pushing Kellogg’s appeal through the rest of the day. That hadn’t necessitated a name change up to now.

I was initially wrong-footed in my understanding of this situation when I looked at an American story which confirmed that, in October 2023, Kellogg’s had split their snacks portfolio from their cereal business: WK Kellogg Co. would remain in the company’s historic base at Battle Creek Michigan, while the everything-else arm would be based on the other side of Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois.

Jerry Seinfeld had made the point that Kellogg’s were unaware, until a couple of weeks before its release on Netflix, that he was making a fictionalised retelling of the birth of Pop-Tarts in his film “Unfrosted”. However, it now appears that Kellogg’s no longer own Pop-Tarts, so it hardly would have mattered to them anyway, and their brand no longer appears on its boxes...

...in North America, at least. A cursory glance in a local supermarket confirms the Kellogg’s name still appears on boxes of Pop-Tarts, Nutri-Grain bars and Fruit Winders in the UK, and that is because the cereal-snack split happened only in North America, where the market for cereals is not growing as quickly as demand for everything else Kellanova makes. On the other hand, Kellanova has a hand in one American market that I have not yet seen it try in the UK: plant-based foods, through its ownership of Gardenburger vegetarian burgers, and of Morningstar Farms, which makes soy-based “meatless meat” burgers, patties and pieces. 

I am not sure whether this is all due to changing tastes or changing times. I don’t have enough time in the morning to sit down and eat a bowl of cereal each morning, and when I do, I still don’t do it. However, I will have a Nutri-Grain oat bar, preferably with raisins.

Going back to the interest in Kellanova by Mars, I found it interesting that the headquarters of its confectionery decision, through its previous purchase of the Wrigley chewing gum company, is also in Chicago, so I expect that Kellanova’s offices there is on a short lease. Furthermore, Mars is synonymous with snacks, but does not make breakfast cereals. In purely business terms, consolidating the two businesses together may provide savings, but there is – I hope – very little crossover between the brands: someone will be paid to develop a future box of cereal with some M&Ms chucked into the bag.

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO [446]

To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.

For Jerry Seinfeld, the stand-up comedian whose eponymous sitcom didn’t set the UK on fire, this was a throwaway statement in an interview for “GQ” magazine promoting “Unfrosted”, a fictional retelling of the birth of Pop Tarts, depicting the clash between Kellogg’s and rival cereal makers Post like it was the Space Race.

Seinfeld talks about how, at age 69, directing a film was totally new: “I thought I had done some cool stuff, but it was nothing like the way these people work. They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea.” Asked to elaborate, he confirmed he didn’t say this to his crew, but explained that film is no longer the pinnacle of culture: “When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.” Asked what has taken film’s place, Seinfeld said (italics as printed), “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?”

My immediate thought upon reading this was “NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING”, the refrain from scriptwriter William Goldman’s 1983 book “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. Having repeated it for emphasis, the writer of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and future writer of “The Princess Bride”, adds “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows [Goldman’s emphasis] for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess – and if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Goldman begins his book by placing it in the aftermath of “Heaven’s Gate”, Michael Cimino’s ruinously expensive film that symbolically ended the “New Hollywood” period of greater artistic freedom, through greater directorial control and more daring subject matter, that followed the death of the old Classical Hollywood studio system at the end of the 1960s. This itself followed a number of experiments in luring audiences away from their suburban houses and television sets, from large “roadshow films” in the 1960s like “The Sound of Music”, “Doctor Doolittle” and “Hello Dolly”, and 1950s innovations like stereo sound, Cinemascope and 3D. It was easier for the Hollywood studios to present their films before the 1950s, just as when they installed sound equipment in their cinemas from the end of the 1920s, but with their having been separated from these theatre chains over anti-competitive practices, studios would have to deal with that loss of control, just as the nascent Hollywood studios set themselves up in the 1910s to escape attempts to control the film industry in New York.

Just as the perceived success and productivity of industry could be measured in peaks and troughs, the film industry had enough of these by the time Goldman’s book was published to make you wonder how anyone got anything done. The following year, 1984, saw the lowest recorded cinema attendance figures in the UK, just as the film industry was adapting to the concept of home video, now largely replaced by online streaming, the studios themselves going from exploiting new content delivery systems to being reconfigured as the content delivery system, both through streaming new films and exploiting intellectual property – why make a new sitcom when one from a generation ago, like “Seinfeld”, will suffice? 

I have only not mentioned Netflix because its role in disrupting the film industry, from production to exhibition to home video, could be interpreted as the main reason for it being declared as “over”, rather than just the latest reason - that Jerry Seinfeld’s “Unfrosted” was made for Netflix is purely coincidental.

AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT [441]

I found myself rediscovering the sitcom “Seinfeld” recently, an incredibly easy thing to do following a multi-year, multi-national deal with Netflix keeping it constantly on demand, but the high-definition widescreen transfer made from the original Super 16 film is far away from when the show was little known in the UK, when it was found only late at night on TV, and later in DVD box sets.

Created by Jerry Seinfeld and long-time friend Larry David from conversations about the small things in life that make a stand-up routine, creating a rich and relatable seam for stories usually avoided by other sitcoms to that point, “Seinfeld” is a sharply written cultural institution in the United States, and perhaps the greatest live-action sitcom ever made there, the existence of “The Simpsons” providing that necessary qualifier. Set in the Upper West Side of New York, to the left of Central Park, Jerry Seinfeld plays a less-famous version of himself, a central point around which most events happen; Jason Alexander plays George Costanza, a Larry David analogue played as a ball of insecurities; Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Elaine Benes, Jerry’s smart and hot-tempered ex-girlfriend who successfully became a regular friend; and Michael Richards plays Kramer, Jerry’s unpredictable “hipster doofus” neighbour. I feel most people might already be aware of the set-up of “Seinfeld” by now, but I once had to explain the show to people who had never heard of it.

 

The outlandish plots and characters the show often used in pursuit of the biggest laugh is testament to my belief that saying something is based on a true story means nothing, despite the real-life experiences of the show’s writers making their way into episodes. I also find it an easier watch than the later shows that mine their humour from uncomfortable situations, like “The Office” and Larry David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, almost like the multi-camera filming and studio audience laughter is providing a safe distance to laugh at some of the more excruciating situations, ones that coined euphemisms like “shrinkage”, “sponge-worthy”, “master of my domain” and “...not that there’s anything wrong with that”.

 

What I have been watching the most recently have been the outtakes and bloopers, meticulously preserved on the DVDs and displaying both how much fun the actors and production staff had making the show, and how much Jerry Seinfeld really was playing himself on it. The show recently also spawned its own YouTube channel showing highlights, making me go back to watch the full episodes, while wishing they would release these remastered episodes on Blu-ray.

 

However, “Seinfeld” was probably best described as a “cult hit” in the UK during the BBC’s original broadcast of the show. It first showed up on BBC Two in 1993, on Thursdays at 9pm, on the back of the show’s huge success during its fourth season that contained famous episodes like “The Contest”, “The Bubble Boy” and “The Junior Mint”, as well as the season-long story where Jerry and George pitch a sitcom version of their own lives, a line of dialogue giving rise to the false observation that “Seinfeld” is a show about nothing at all.

 

However, the BBC began their broadcasts of “Seinfeld” from the start, when it was initially slower, more low-key, with fewer, longer scenes, with executives at NBC giving the show time to find itself. Infamously, the original 1989 pilot was followed with a 1990 season of only four episodes, using the budget intended for a Bob Hope special, introducing Elaine as a mandated female character, and a second season of thirteen episodes where Michael Richards started playing Kramer as the smartest man in the room, rather than the dumbest. After the first ten episodes, the BBC Two broadcasts moved to Saturdays around 10pm, slipping closer to midnight by the time the fourth season’s denser, multi-layered and often coincidental and absurdist episodes were finally shown in the UK, by which time it took over from “Cheers” as America’s favourite sitcom. The BBC should have started with the fourth season first.

 

My exposure to “Seinfeld” began in about 1998 with its seventh season of episodes like “The Soup Nazi”, “The Sponge”, “The Gum” and “The Invitations”, where George’s fiancée Susan dies through licking the gum on old envelopes. Relegated to cult status, the show was often used on BBC Two as filler during Parliamentary recess, and reviews of the day’s proceedings were not broadcast. Having only read text summaries of episodes online, and with my having been interested in how sitcoms were written, it had already been impressed on me that “Seinfeld” was a show that needed to be watched – I also found it to be a better show than “Friends”. 

 

Now able to track the BBC’s airing of the show, and through its subsequent reappearance in panel discussions and as a specialist subject on “Mastermind”, you end up realising that the biggest audience Jerry Seinfeld personally had in the UK must have been when he appeared on “Des O’Connor Tonight” in 1981, five months after his debut on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson”, where he worked his stand-up routines about cars and left-handedness into the conversation, and when he later appeared on “Jasper Carrott – Stand Up America” in 1987, recorded in Los Angeles.

 

The final broadcast of “Seinfeld” on the BBC was in October 2001, three years after it ended its run in America, but before the DVD box sets began to appear. I never kept the VHS recordings I inevitably had to make to see a show past my bedtime, but the memory of it stayed with me long enough to be rekindled on home video. I’m just glad that more people have heard of it now, an odd thing to say about such a famous show.