SEINFELD movie allusions (1 Viewer)

[Rex Bachmann]

Quote:



(1) Apocalypse Now ("The Chicken Roaster" (#142))
(18) The Wolf Man ("The Junk Mail" (#159))





In "The Chicken Roaster" (episode #142), Elaine is desperate to keep her job as acting president of J. Peterman, and she's about to be fired by the auditor (or whatever he is), Mr. Ipswich, for an $8000 sable hat, the purchase of which is only questionably a "legitimate business expense" and which, in any event, has gone missing, thanks to George Costanza. To avoid being fired she seeks the absent Peterman's intervention, for which she has to travel to the jungles of Burma ("Myanmar").

There she is led into a darkened chamber of some massive, old stone edifice by a turbaned native boy. A grubby-looking Peterman is shown in the dark corner behind her drenching his head with water from a sponge and he startles her with a greeting: "Hello, Elaine." He then orders the boy to leave with words more suited to an old Tarzan movie.

Elaine: "Mr. Peterman, you speak Burmese?"
Peterman: "No, Elaine, that was gibberish. How did you find me?"
Elaine (diffident): "Well, there was only one white poet warlord in the [neighborhood?]."
Peterman: "Are you an assassin?"
[Elaine: (she denies this, I believe, adding something like) "If you could just sign the authorization for this expense, I can catch the [TIME] out of Burma."]
Peterman: ". . . [More like] An errant grocery boy sent to collect on some grocery bill."

Receiving the expense-account voucher, he looks it over.

Peterman (with a wide-eyed expression on his face as he inspects the bill): "I'd be happy to, Elaine, but first I must see this hat."

Elaine then rolls her eyes in exasperation and defeat. [End of scene]

Later in the epilog to the episode, the scene finds the two still together in the same darkened chamber, he sweaty and lying on a cot, she there next to him showing him some photographs.

Elaine (pointing): "This is the 'urban sombrero'. I put it on the last [J. Peterman] catalog cover."
Peterman (stunned and turning his face slowly from the photographs toward the ceiling, whispers): "The horror! The horror!"

I can't compare it directly with the scenes in Apocalypse Now because I've seen the complete film only once and now quite a bit ago. I'm sure this is supposed to parody the meeting between Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) and Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), the paranoid-mad, stray military man who's subjugated the SE Asian natives and established his own "kingdom" in a jungle redoubt, which itself was fashioned after scenes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Africa-based narrative). Peterman's final quote is directly lifted from the movie, if I recall correctly.



The movie allusions in episode #161, "The Junk Mail" are pretty generic. In the process of dealing on a used van with "fragile" Frankie Merman, a man who's never grown up from his high-school days of hiding in holes in the ground in situations of social stress, Jerry develops an itch that gets "itchier" as the episode proceeds and the full moon rises. (I don't remember whether a reason is ever given for the itch. I think not.) By the end of the episode, which takes place at night, Jerry feels compelled to rip open his shirt and run off into the woods under a tree, where he can and does scratch his hairy torso without restraint. "It feels so gooooooooooooooooooooooooood!", howls Jerry in the moonlight, as he exults and scratches himself aaaallllll over his body.

Naturally, the close-up shots throughout the scenes of Jerry's body hair growing or thickening and the focus on a few other aborning canine mannerisms (including, if I remember correctly, slow-mo' shots of him scurrying hulkishly into the park), rehearse the stock scenes from many a werewolf-movie. It might be a coïncidence, but this episode was first telecast on October 30, 1997.

 

[Jkhudg8440]

The one where Wilfred Brimley plays the Post Master General questioning Kramer about his not wanting to receive junk mail is a parady of the movie "Absence of Malice" which starred Wilfred Brimley and Paul Newman. There was a scene in that movie just like this one.
Also, in the same episode when Newman tells Kramer not to accept the invitation when someone pulls up beside him and get in the car was out of a scene from the movie "3 days of the Condor" where Cliff Robertson tells Robert Redford the same at the end of that movie.

 

[WillG]

Wow, old thread. But reading it for the first time and noticed this

Real films whose titles are mentioned in episodes, but which in no way have anything to do with the content or style of the story they appear in, such as Schindler's List ("The Raincoats" (pt. 2) (#83)), or Plan 9 from Outer Space ("The Chinese Restaurant" (#16), "The Postponement" (#112)), do not count here.

In "The Raincoats" there was a direct in-story parody of Schindler's List where at the end the Judge Reinhold character is emotionally pontificating on the ways he could have shown even more hospitality to Jerry's Parents.
And while this is not necessarily a direct movie reference, a character named Rebecca de Mornay (Black woman who wouldn't accept muffin stumps for homeless shelters, and wouldn't accept the return for the Brentano's book that George takes into the Bathroom) in a couple of episodes.