The mantra that guided Seinfeld’s final seasons

In the “Seinfeld” Episode “The Butter Shave” (September 25, 1997), Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander) and Kramer (Michael Richards) have decided to shave the mustaches they have been promoting. Somehow, Kramer finds that butter proves to be a superior substitute for shaving cream. All are baffled by this, but Kramer loves, claiming that butter makes his skin softer. He even tries to keep his whole body and sleep in the sun for a spell. Unfortunately, he falls asleep while broncing, and wakes up with a crunchy turkey skin.

This proves to be a problem later when Kramer goes to a restaurant and meets Newman (Wayne Knight). Newman believes Kramer smells … delicious. Newman is baffled by his appetite. You look at a whole, a stuffed turkey that is served in the restaurant, and begins to hallucinate. He sees Kramer’s head on the turkey’s body. This type of hallucination may have been common in cartoon shorts, but in “Seinfeld”, it was frankly surreal. The manufacturers of “The Butter Shave” had to film Richards’s head against a blue screen and then compares it in the turkey. For a situation comedy such as “Seinfeld”, it was a very sophisticated special effect.

“The Butter Shave” was the first episode of the ninth and last season of the program, and “Seinfeld” was one of the greatest television programs of all time by then. The cast received a hand for FIST, with Seinfeld himself winning $ 1 million per episode and his three co -star won $ 600,000. It seems that the cast and the writers had allowed power to get on the head, since the final season was more strange and more wild than the eight who preceded it.

Seinfeld said in the special characteristics of the DVD “Seinfeld” that he had a new mantra for the last seasons of the show: the credibility of the trench. Reality was out of the window.

In the special features of “butter shave”, Seinfeld himself said that “NBC gave us many strings at that time, to do anything (we want. They would cover any cost, overload. Yes, then we lived quite high in the pig.” Interviewed, and recalled that the stories were becoming bigger and more ambitious as the program advanced, and that they were increasingly deranged.

“(Jerry would say) ‘Do you remember the episode in which George hit a golf ball, and stayed in the hole of a whale? Is this less credible than that?’ And using that rule, any story could happen.

This is a reference to the episode of the fifth season “The Marine Biologist” (February 10, 1994), and is only a bit badly remembered. In that episode, Kramer was the one who was hitting golf balls in the ocean, since he had just owned 600 headlines. At the end of the episode, in a story previously disconnected, George finds a whale stuck while walking along the beach with an old flame. Previously in the episode, he lied about being a marine biologist to impress her, but now he has to present his non -existent marine biology skills to save the whale. Wouldn’t you know, the whale was sick because Kramer’s golf balls were housed in his sopor? George has to confess, while recovering the ball, who is not a whale doctor.

Of course, it was destined to be a comic coincidence, of the type that occurs all the time in “Seinfeld”, but Seinfeld felt that he was too wild to ignore, and could serve as precedent. If Kramer could throw a ball in the well of a whale that passes, then everything was on the table. Reality has gone, and everything is allowed. Do what you will be the whole law. Strange is good, after all.