Any Seinfeld fan fondly remembers the “Soup Nazi” episode which will always go down as being one of the best episodes in the history of the series. Yev Kassem, played by Larry Thomas, was a stone-faced immigrant chef with a thick Stalin-esque mustache, who was well-known throughout the city for his delicious soups. He demanded that all customers in his restaurant follow his meticulous (and seemingly arbitrary) soup-ordering instructions to the letter, lest they be refused service by his insistent avowal, “No soup for you!” The customer is then refunded, denied his or her order, and, sometimes, banned from his soup shop for a specific duration.
The episode will always remain a classic but did you know that the producers of Seinfeld were actually tinkering with the idea of making Kassem a real Nazi? Per a new interview with the show’s writer-producer David Mandel in EW, the writers’ room was playing around with a much more literal interpretation of the Soup Nazi, which would’ve been revealed in an additional scene when he “arrived” in South America.
“We joked a whole bunch about an end scene that would take place in the jungles of Brazil, Ã 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,” he explained. “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.”
I have to admit I’m kind of glad they stuck with the episode as it was. That would have been super weird. P.S. “No soup for you!”
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