Acquired
03:35:32 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[03:35:32] S1: Mhmm. Always on every channel every night. Yep. [03:35:35] S0: It's passed from generation to generation that way. I talked to my dad about it. In fact, we were prepping for this episode, and my three year old son is sitting on the couch with me because we had the DVD on. We're watching... He loves putting the DVDs and the DVD player. And he goes... He points to the screen. He goes, is that Jerry Seinfeld? I was like, oh my god. [03:35:52] S1: That is awesome. [03:35:53] S0: Passed it to another generation. And then we're watching the DVD, like, interviews afterwards, and he points the screen. He goes, there. There's Larry David. And I was like, I am so proud of you right now. [03:36:04] S1: Wow. Good for him. [03:36:06] S0: I know. Right? But it's this thing. My parents liked it. I liked it. I like it. It's it's so in the water in our society. There's a crazy stat from Nielsen in 2021. 41% of Seinfeld's then current audience had either been toddlers or not born yet when the series ended in 1998. [03:36:27] S1: Amazing. [03:36:28] S0: So you kinda have to just keep tracing it back. Like, I I think you might be right that it's because it went out on top, but the reason, in my opinion, is because the 1995 and the 1998 syndication cycles were so successful and exploded out of the gate that it created this in the waterness to Seinfeld.
03:36:28 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[03:36:28] S0: So you kinda have to just keep tracing it back. Like, I I think you might be right that it's because it went out on top, but the reason, in my opinion, is because the 1995 and the 1998 syndication cycles were so successful and exploded out of the gate that it created this in the waterness to Seinfeld. [03:36:54] S1: Yep. I I think... I mean, look, at the end of the day, it's a stew of all of these things. But I don't know. I just think if they'd milked it for a few more years and quality had gone downhill, this thing is so hypersensitive to the aggregate cultural assessment and impression of it that if at the end, it didn't have that, like, greatest show of all time vibe in the culture Yeah. The engine wouldn't have continued like this. [03:37:26] S0: Yeah. Totally agree. We're... And we're saying very similar things here. It's it's ultimately that coupled with quality. Like, the the situational jokes that they set up just don't feel dated. Even though a lot of these things could be solved with a cell phone, but the intrinsic quality of the situations they are in Yep. Still feels relevant today. [03:37:48] S1: Well, more than 20% of America agrees with you. [03:37:51] S0: 22%. [03:37:52] S1: There you go. [03:37:54] S0: Alright. [03:37:55] S1: Well, on this one, we've got some fun trivia that we should include here that didn't make the episode. Number one, the theme music. [03:38:05] S0: Yes. That was mine. The bass line. I wish I had, like, beep [03:38:14] S1: beep beep beep beep beep. Then tell everybody why the theme music is so distinctive.
03:38:14 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[03:38:14] S1: beep beep beep beep beep. Then tell everybody why the theme music is so distinctive. [03:38:23] S0: So in the pilot, on my DVD that that I have, you can hear the original pilot with the original theme music, which is not what you are familiar with. The bass riff composed by Jonathan Wolfe is something completely different, and it interferes horribly with Jerry's stand up at the beginning. You... It just like is tonally overlapping each other, and you you almost can't make out his words. So when Jonathan Wolfe got the call about it, he said, oh, I know exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna treat Jerry's voice like the lyrics of a song. Yes. And I'm gonna compose around that, like he's kinda carrying the melody. And he even felt like there was a tempo that Jerry did stand up to, and it came in around a 110 beats per minute. That, like, that's how his jokes were told in that rhythm. So he didn't create a theme song, he created a theme song system where he could uniquely compose on a synthesizer in front of him that had the bass guitar riff, you know, mapped to a bunch of different keys and also all the little sounds, like all the mouth sounds that he makes. And he uniquely composes a theme for every episode that is slightly different that fits in around Jerry's jokes in the intro. And so he has this great quote on this. Every monologue was going to be a variation of the theme. So whatever I did, I needed to architect it modularly so that it could be shiftable, changeable, like LEGO music. It needed to not conflict with his voice. So great. So great.
03:38:23 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[03:38:23] S0: So in the pilot, on my DVD that that I have, you can hear the original pilot with the original theme music, which is not what you are familiar with. The bass riff composed by Jonathan Wolfe is something completely different, and it interferes horribly with Jerry's stand up at the beginning. You... It just like is tonally overlapping each other, and you you almost can't make out his words. So when Jonathan Wolfe got the call about it, he said, oh, I know exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna treat Jerry's voice like the lyrics of a song. Yes. And I'm gonna compose around that, like he's kinda carrying the melody. And he even felt like there was a tempo that Jerry did stand up to, and it came in around a 110 beats per minute. That, like, that's how his jokes were told in that rhythm. So he didn't create a theme song, he created a theme song system where he could uniquely compose on a synthesizer in front of him that had the bass guitar riff, you know, mapped to a bunch of different keys and also all the little sounds, like all the mouth sounds that he makes. And he uniquely composes a theme for every episode that is slightly different that fits in around Jerry's jokes in the intro. And so he has this great quote on this. Every monologue was going to be a variation of the theme. So whatever I did, I needed to architect it modularly so that it could be shiftable, changeable, like LEGO music. It needed to not conflict with his voice. So great. So great. [03:40:08] S1: And so distinctive. I mean, it's it's part of what makes the show.
03:40:08 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[03:40:08] S1: And so distinctive. I mean, it's it's part of what makes the show. [03:40:13] S0: Yes. It's so different at the time too. Of course, like everything else, the network execs hated it because it wasn't like anything else in the market. [03:40:19] S1: Of course. That's a signal of quality when the network executives hate it. Alright. That's number one. Number two, this has come up on Acquired before. Julia Louis Dreyfus is, yes, from that Louis Dreyfus family, the, very large French, commodities trading family. [03:40:42] S0: Yeah. Big multigenerational business.
03:40:44 · David Rosenthal
[03:40:44] S1: Has made an appearance before on acquired in the Ferrari episode because Giulia's grandfather was one of Enzo Ferrari's first clients and raced his privately owned Ferrari one sixty six, like the, you know, the first cars that Enzo made in Le Mans at the, you know, beginning of Ferrari. Amazing. Alright. That's number two. Number three, NBC had a corporate relationship with Nike. And so any of the stars of any NBC sitcoms could just go to the Nike warehouse in LA and get all the swag they wanted. So how do you think Jerry Seinfeld started wearing Nikes Oh. On Seinfeld episodes. Freebies. But, yeah, we talked about this on the Nike episode that, like, you know, they had their athlete strategy, and then they got into entertainment. And this was part of it. Jerry Seinfeld was one of the first, you know, the... Or big parts of Nike's, get into entertainment strategy. Alright. Alright. That's what I got for trivia. Carve outs? Carve outs. So I decided for this one appropriately enough, I gotta just do Seidfeld episode recommendations. Perfect. So the marine biologist, number one, by far, it's it's just the most, like, masterful piece of twenty two minute episode crafting I've ever seen. It's great. Couple deep cuts that I'm partial to. One, the jacket, which I already mentioned. And two, the first Seinfeld episode I ever watched, I vividly remember this like it was yesterday. I was nine years old when this episode came out. I saw it air live on TV. I had a babysitter for the night. My parents were out. I got to stay up late, and I had the TV on. It was the dinner party airing live, which is the episode with the black and white cookie. I will always, always remember Jerry eats a black and white cookie. He's talking to Elaine, he's like, Elaine, the world needs to look to the cookie. Racial harmony here in the cookie. We... What we can learn from the black and white cookie. And then in the end of the episode, he throws up due to food poisoning from the cookie.