Trivia / Seinfeld S2 E4 "The Phone Message"

• Missing Episode / Unfinished Episode: This episode originally started out as "The Bet"/"The Gun." The premise was more of a seriocomic episode that dealt with Elaine buying a handgun for self-protection and Jerry betting her that she'll never even use it; meanwhile, Kramer returns from a trip and claims to have had sex with the flight attendant in mid-flight and Jerry and George try to track her down, betting that Kramer's story is bogus. The script made it to table reading, but the cast felt it was too dark and not very funny, so it was shelved and ultimately never made. To fill the vacant slot, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David hammered out "The Phone Message" in two days from a rejected sketch David wrote for Saturday Night Live. Both of the guest actors who were cast (Ernie Sabella as the gun salesman and Bobbi Jo Lathan as the flight attendant) would appear in subsequent episodes.
  • In particular, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus read a scene in which Elaine holds the gun to her head and says "Where do you want it, Jerry? The Kennedy? [holds the gun to her stomach] The McKinley?", she turned to Jason Alexander and said "I'm not doing this".
  • "The Gun" lives on as an Internet urban legend in the form of a "creepypasta" story alleging the episode was filmed and all but one copy destroyed. Naturally, the episode supposedly contains disturbing and supernatural phenomena happening to the actors and crew.
• Write What You Know: George replacing the tape in a girlfriend's answering machine to keep her from hearing an angry voice message he impulsively left is apparently based on something the show's co-creator and head writer Larry David did in real life.