Six ‘Seinfeld’ Storylines That Never Saw the Light of Day

6 The Soup Nazi Is a Real Nazi

“We joked a whole bunch about an end scene that would take place in the jungles of Brazil, à la The Boys From Brazil,where the Soup Nazi would return to the other Nazis — the actual former Nazi war criminals — with his soup recipes,” David Mandel once told Entertainment Weekly. “It was sort of half-serious, half ‘Should we do this?,’ half ‘We’re never going to do it.’ But it was much discussed. Going down a river and seeing lots of young boys with blue eyes from experimentation with the soups — it was a full coming together of soup and Nazi. Probably just as well that we didn’t do that one.”

5 Kramer’s Police Tape Love Story

Kramer’s role in “The Frogger” mostly revolves around him having police tape and helping George secure his Frogger machine, but there was another storyline he had that was cut for time. It began with him meeting a woman outside of the bathroom at Monk’s and concluded with him luring her into a restaurant with the use of his police tape.

4 “The Bet”

As our own Keegan Kelly wrote in late April, “In the unfinished Season Two episode ‘The Bet,’ (Larry) Charles attempted to put a Seinfeld spin on the hot-button issue of gun ownership by writing an entire storyline out of Elaine’s decision to exercise her Second Amendment rights with the same level of care and responsibility that she had when wielding her corporate card when she temporarily took over the J. Peterman Catalog. The Seinfeld team had already built the sets, cast the extras and began rehearsals for ‘The Bet’ by the time Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among other cast and crew members, raised concerns over Elaine’s flippant treatment of firearms in the episode, which led to the producers pulling the plug.”

3 ‘Seinfeld’ in Mexico

Per Mandel, again per Entertainment Weekly: “There was one story that we never got to for any particular reason, but I always loved it. Had there been another season, I certainly would have tried to write this, because it was near and dear to my heart. The idea was that Jerry and the gang go on a vacation somewhere — say, Mexico — and they would check into their hotel rooms, and Jerry would end up with a hotel room right across from Kramer’s hotel room, so the hotel-room dynamic would have been the same as the apartments. The entire episode would have taken place in Mexico, but everything would have been kind of the same — there would have been a Mexican diner that they sat in. I just thought the idea of taking the building blocks of Seinfeld — the apartments across the hall and the coffee shop — and transporting that to Mexico would be really fun.”

2 The Claymation Episode

Mandel also shared an unused story idea with us in our oral history of “The Betrayal.” “During Season Nine, Jerry and I met with Will Vinton, who did the California Raisins, about making a claymation episode,” he told me. “The deal fell apart when one of the guys who worked for Vinton mentioned that they did something similar for Home Improvement. If Home Improvement had already done it, obviously Jerry wasn’t going to follow them, so we didn’t go through with it.”

1 Elaine Gets Fat

In Louis-Dreyfus’ episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, she reminded Seinfeld of a story he pitched to her when she got pregnant, telling him, “When I was about five months pregnant with my youngest, big as a house, you came up to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a great idea. How about if we write it in this season that Elaine just gets fat?’”  

This prompted Louis-Dreyfus to immediately burst into tears, and the storyline never went any further.

For what it’s worth, this is precisely what was done to Daphne when Jane Leeves got pregnant in Season Eight of Frasier, and it was one of the show’s worst storylines, so maybe it’s best that not every idea makes it to air.