"No soup for you!" - Larry Thomas as the Soup Nazi
Seinfeld: Season 7 DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Will comedian Jerry Seinfeld - played, once again, not by Nipsey Russell but by comedian Jerry Seinfeld - and his friends ever grow up? That's the question at the heart of "The Engagement," the first episode of Seinfeld: Season 7. When George Costanza (Jason Alexander) dumps his latest girlfriend simply because she beat him at chess, and Jerry does the same because his girlfriend shushed him while watching TV, they decide to make changes in their lives. Soon, Jerry has nixed the same girlfriend because she eats her peas one at a time, while George - taking their vow a bit too literally - proposes to ex-girlfriend Susan (Heidi Swedberg). Elaine Benes' (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) "grow up" moment occurs when she is arrested for conspiring with Kramer (Michael Richards) and Newman (Wayne Knight) to either kill or kidnap a neighbor's yappy dog...and when she realizes that loser George will get married before she does. As for Kramer, he decides to sue a coffee chain after burning himself trying to sneak a café latte into a movie theatre by shoving the cup down his pants. Now George is engaged to a woman he can't stand, Elaine is jealous of him, Kramer is involved in one of his usual schemes, and Jerry is...well...Jerry. Will comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his pals ever grow up? The answer is gleefully, delightfully, resoundingly "NO!"
The seventh season is probably Seinfeld's strongest, most cohesive yet. The characters don't really grow - lucky for us it's not that kind of sitcom - but story arcs and jokes that extend over several episodes reward loyal viewers with "insider" status. It also contains one of the series' most infamous episodes, "The Soup Nazi." The gang begins eating at the best soup place in New York, but their behavior ticks off the prickly owner/chef, leading him to ban them one by one from his establishment.
George has the strongest continuing story arc in season seven, with his dreaded engagement to Susan pored over in great detail. He regrets proposing to her the moment he does it, and comically stews for the rest of the season. To Susan's chagrin, he refuses to divulge his ATM code to her because the bank says it's supposed to be secret ("The Secret Code"). He becomes irate when Elaine, who has no female friends, decides to start hanging out with Susan, thus causing George's two worlds - romantic and platonic - to collide ("The Pool Guy"). He discovers that couples are expected to share secrets with each other...but this threatens to throw him "out of the loop" with his friends who are worried that their skeletons (like the fact that Jerry crosses out the size "32" on his jeans and replaces it with "31," the same size he was in college) will be exposed ("The Sponge"). He is horrified to learn that one of the dolls in Susan's doll collection looks just like his mother, and that Susan sometimes likes to have it sleep in the bed with them ("The Doll"). Even Susan's relatives aren't safe. Her pregnant cousin steals his favored kid's name ("The Seven") and her parents offend the Costanzas when they don't serve a special rye bread that Estelle and Frank (Estelle Harris and Jerry Stiller) bring over for dinner. The George and Susan storyline reaches its climax in "The Invitations," one of the funniest, most perverse episodes of the series. This episode is so bitter and cynical that even writer Larry David admits that his own mother complained when it was first broadcast. When she later caught it in reruns, however, she conceded that it was funny.
Elaine continues working for clothing catalogue magnate J. Peterman (John Hurley), whose tales of world travel could bore the paint off of walls. She foists Peterman onto Jerry and George when she cancels a dinner date in favor of going out with a guy she once met at a party who doesn't even remember her ("The Secret Code"). She misses out on a work trip to Africa when the poppy seeds on her breakfast muffins cause her to test positive for opium ("The Shower Head"). She begins to suspect that a new hearing-impaired employee (played by Saturday Night Live's Rob Schneider) is faking his disability in order to get out of work ("The Friars Club"). She faces off with her childhood nemesis, "braless wonder" Sue Ellen Mischke (Desperate Housewives' Brenda Strong), heiress to the O'Henry candy bar fortune, and inadvertently creates a fashion trend in the process ("The Caddy," "The Bottle Deposit").
Elaine's shining moment, however, is "The Sponge." When she learns that her favorite form of contraceptive, the Today Sponge, is being taken off of the market, Elaine decides to buy every sponge she can find in a twenty-five block radius. She's only able to scare up one case - a total of sixty sponges. This sets off a season-long obsession with which of her suitors is "spongeworthy" so that she doesn't waste any of her precious contraceptives. This episode is a true classic, featuring excellent performances and three separate plotlines that perfectly dovetail in the end.
Jerry is as petty and selfish as usual. But in a nice way, of course. He decides to rent a villa in Tuscany not because he wants to, but because an acquaintance tells him he can't ("The Maestro"). He is determined to find out why his new girlfriend seems to be wearing the same dress every time he sees her ("The Seven"). He makes a date with a woman he met at a party by cadging her number from an AIDS Walk donations list ("The Sponge").
Kramer files not one but two nuisance lawsuits in season seven. In addition to suing over his spilled coffee, he sues Sue Ellen Mischke when her revealing outfit causes him to have a traffic accident in George's car ("The Caddy"). He emulates da Vinci's sleep habits by napping for only twenty minutes every three hours ("The Friars Club"), drives a hansom cab led by a flatulent horse after feeding it Beefarino ("The Rye"), and installs a hot tub in his living room ("The Hot Tub"). Most memorably, he rumbles with a gay couple over an antique armoire ("The Soup Nazi") and over the fact that he refuses to wear an AIDS ribbon during a charity walk ("The Sponge").
From start to finish, Seinfeld: Season 7 is a winner. None of the episodes are out-and-out duds, and many of them feature back-to-back laughs. Yep, season seven is definitely spongeworthy.
The twenty-four episodes that make up Seinfeld's seventh season are divided onto four discs. The simple, elegant design of this set will be familiar to owners of the first five Seinfeld releases. The discs are housed in slim, clear keepcases. The front covers each feature a different publicity photo of one of the show's stars. The back covers include episode numbers, episode titles, and plot synopses. The double-sided coversheets show through to the insides of the cases and feature a photo of the Soup Nazi's kitchenette. Each DVD is imprinted with a publicity shot of the same star depicted on its case. The four keepcases slide into two cardboard sleeves, both of which feature the same publicity photo of the cast members. A booklet listing the basic production credits for each episode is also sandwiched between the keepcases.
The menus are visually and navigationally similar to those in the previous releases.
