Shrek

Shrek launched a Dreamworks franchise, won an Oscar, spawned a stage musical, and greatly extended the cultural life of the band Smash Mouth. And it all started with the story of a crabby green ogre, voiced by Mike Myers, who just wants a bunch of fairy-tale characters to stay out of his swamp. The film turns 25 this month, so we are revisiting our conversation about its legacy. Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/letterboxd.com/nprpopculture http://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Stephen Thompson?

  This year marks the 25th anniversary of Shrek, the animated upstart that launched a DreamWorks franchise, won an Oscar, spawned a stage musical, and greatly extended the cultural life of the band Smash Mouth.

• 0:37Aisha Harris?

  And it all started with the story of a crabby, green ogre who just wants a bunch of fairy tale characters to stay out of his swamp. I'm Aisha Harris.

• 0:45Stephen Thompson?

  And I'm Stephen Thompson. Today, in this encore episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we are talking about 25 years of Shrek.

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• 2:10Stephen Thompson?

  Joining us today is freelance culture critic and reporter Serena Toros. Hey Serena.

• 2:14Aisha Harris?

  Hey Stephen, jazzed to be here.

• 2:16Stephen Thompson?

  I am so glad you're here. So in 2020, Shrek was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, canonizing it as a work of historical and cultural significance. I don't think many people would have predicted that when it first came out in 2001. At that time, DreamWorks was hardly an animation powerhouse, and Shrek is basically a feature-length Disney diss track. It's got a big ol' fart joke right out of the gate. It's got Mike Myers playing an ogre with a Scottish accent.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Oh, I know what. Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads on a pike, got a knife, cut open their spleen and drink their fluids. Does that sound good to you?

• 2:57Stephen Thompson?

  Yet Shrek was a huge blockbuster with a very long shelf life on DVD and cable and eventually streaming. Part of its appeal lies in simplicity. It takes a very familiar, kind of Disneyfied fairy tale world and upends it with a farting ogre, a talking donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy, a butt-kicking princess voiced by Cameron Diaz, and a diminutive but treacherous villain named Lord Farquaad voiced by John Lithgow. But there really are a lot of familiar fairy tale beats. There's a quest, there's a dragon, there's a princess, there's a love story. So Ayesha, I'm going to ask you first, how did you come to Shrek? And what do you think of the movie itself?

• 3:37Aisha Harris?

  Well, picture this. It's 2001. Little Ayesha is 13 years old, and the three things she's most obsessed with in 2001 are Save the Last Dance, Moulin Rouge, and Shrek. And I watched it so many times, I could quote it back and forth. I knew all the like songs. To this day, I can probably still recite the Welcome to Duloc song, the song that's sort of a rip-off of It's a Small World.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  Please keep up on the ground, shine your shoes, wipe your face. Duloc is, Duloc is.

• 4:13Aisha Harris?

  The Merry Men song. I steal from the rich and give to the needy. Takes the 8%. But I'm not greedy, I risk your pretty duck. As much as I loved Disney and did love Disney at that time, I was also 13 and was going through that rebellious phase and starting to enjoy more edgy, quote unquote, edgy humor. And so this movie was perfect for that because it was sending up all of these familiar tropes that I already knew about with the elbowing and the winkie wink nod about Snow White, but she lives with seven little men, but she's not easy. Those sorts of jokes, totally my jam. Now I look at it and I just feel as though it doesn't

• 4:55Aisha Harris?

  fully work for me. And I'm really surprised to go back and read all of the reviews because I've always thought of it as a type of movie that if you were 13, you would love this. If you were an adult, you wouldn't. But when you look at the reviews, this movie was beloved by pretty much everyone. Roger Ebert gave this a four star review and he called it jolly and wicked, filled with sly in jokes and yet somehow possessing a heart. And he also called this movie an astonishing visual delight, which, I mean, maybe then it was. Now, this movie is an eyesore to me. It's not a pretty movie. It looks like it was made in, not even 2001, but honestly, it looks like it was made in 1997. I can understand

• 5:37Aisha Harris?

  why some people might find this such a fun oddity to pull from as a cultural artifact, but it's not a movie that I probably ever want to re-watch again.

• 5:47Stephen Thompson?

  Wow, okay. So Serena, distill, if you can, how you came to Shrek and what you think of it.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  I'll just start out by saying I was the tender age of five when Shrek came out. So I don't remember actually watching it. I probably would say I remember watching Shrek 2 for the first time, more so than Shrek 1. But if I can paint you a picture, Stephen, it's 2016, David Bowie just died, and I'm having an existential crisis because I'm realizing I heard David Bowie's music for the first time in the Shrek franchise.

• 6:33Speaker 06

  After that moment, I realized that Shrek has permeated my life in so many confusing and wonderful ways. I heard most big-name rock artists probably in Shrek: Joan Jett, Rufus Wainwright, all of these people. And I actually think that you can trace the life of the internet through the myriad ways that Shrek has been adapted by it. I think, I think Shrek is the blueprint for the internet's humor. And I think the internet's humor exists because of Shrek. My blazing hot take is that TikTok would not exist without Shrek. And what I mean by that is that people my age who watched Shrek for

• 7:12Speaker 06

  the first time as impressionable youths, they came of age around the time that Vine first came out. And my favorite part of Vine was musical humor. People who took a weird clip and spliced a pop song over top of it for comedic effect. And Shrek was actually the first animated film to utilize pre-existing pop songs to soundtrack the film. Like, prior to this, you had your, like, 90s Disney animated musicals like Beauty and the Beast, or even if a movie like Toy Story had a pop song in it, it was written for the film. Like, You've Got a Friend in Me was written for the film. So I think Shrek actually taught

• 7:54Speaker 06

  an entire generation of millennials and now Gen Z people how to utilize a pop song for comedic effect, because this was probably the first time a lot of people ever really considered that you could do that.

• 8:08Stephen Thompson?

  Wow. Yeah, you know, you had said that, and I did a bunch of research trying to figure out that it can't possibly be the first animated movie to use pop songs in that way. And you may be right. I was surprised to see that, but it certainly was enormously influential in that way, and its success has been copied in a million different ways. Picking up on something both of you said, Shrek does really function in a lot of ways as, like, entry-level satire, that it's kind of like your first foray into

• 8:40Stephen Thompson?

  Lashing out at things that you take comfort in. And so I think it has had a lasting impact in that way. Now, in terms of my own experience, picture this. Little Steven was but a 28 year old editor.

• 8:56Stephen Thompson?

  When Shrek came out. It came out, actually, when my, a few months after my son was born. Shrek 2 came out right around the same time my daughter was born. So the release of these films kind of maps over my entry into parenthood. And by the time my kids came of any kind of age to watch it, they'd already been out for, for years. And I think I reacted to it a little bit more like Aisha did as an adult, which is to, to kind of look at it and be like, yeah, this is kind of, this is kind of fun. It's fast paced, it's silly, it's throwing a lot at the wall, but it's, but it's an eyesore. As, as Aisha said, it's a real mishmash. It's trying to be a lot of things to a lot of people.

• 9:37Stephen Thompson?

  My favorite weird needle drop in Shrek is the use of John Cale's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, which just dragged that movie to a complete screeching halt.

• 10:03Stephen Thompson?

  I don't necessarily have, as a, as a viewer of the film myself, a particularly strong attachment to it. I have more of an attachment to it as a cultural artifact and as something that has reverberated in so many other pieces of entertainment, including, among many other things, Shrek the Musical, which my son was the stage manager for his middle school's production of Shrek the Musical, which was the first time I think I maybe even knew that such a thing existed. And so I have this weird attachment to that because I loved experiencing that through his eyes. But the movie itself, it's weird. To me, it feels like it's a juggernaut because it is.

• 10:44Stephen Thompson?

  And, and so it's this kind of self perpetuating thing that like, because it was so popular, because everybody knows it, it's this kind of blank canvas that, that everybody can draw on.

• 10:55Aisha Harris?

  So when it came out and it was making all these references to Disney, it was clearly doing so in a way as the underdog. You know, Ant had been a success, but it wasn't like-

• 11:06Stephen Thompson?

  You to Ant.

• 11:09Aisha Harris?

  I was waiting for you to bring that out.

• 11:13Aisha Harris?

  It had been a sort of success, but it didn't have the back catalog that, you know, the Disney company did. And also you had the whole Jeffrey Katzenberg notoriously leaving Disney and then coming to DreamWorks. And it seems clear as an adult that they had an axe to grind in a way. What I find just ironic about it is that it's making fun of Disney's sentimentality throughout the film. But if you watch it, it's really digging into all that sentimentality.

• 11:41Stephen Thompson?

  Totally indulging in it.

• 11:42Aisha Harris?

  And its basic MO was like, we'll still be sentimental, but we'll just add some really lowbrow, Mad TV level humor to it. It's like, there's a scene where Fiona and Shrek are, it's like a montage, and they're having their bonding moment. The eels is my beloved monster is playing over it.

• 12:00Stephen Thompson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:01Aisha Harris?

  And they take these two live animals and they rearrange them and then blow into them and they become balloon animals. And that's supposed to be both like, subversive, but also it's kind of sweet. And I don't think it hits those tonal beats quite in the way that they're meant to be. It just all feels very, like, cheap in a way. And I wish that the humor had been, like, if it hadn't spent so much time trying to rail against the thing that is also indulging in, I think it would have felt a little bit more genuine. There have been comparisons made to this kind of humor existing in animation before. There was a retrospective in The Times that interviewed a few of the people involved with the making of the film for the 20th anniversary. And one of the people involved

• 12:46Aisha Harris?

  mentioned that, you know, it was part of this lineage of like, the Looney Tunes and all of those sorts of animated versions that are sort of the antithesis of Disney and that whole, like, very squeaky clean image. But the difference is that, like, Looney Tunes, clearly, they have their own thing and they're not always trying to be subversive to like, something in comparison to something else. It's just, that's what they are. And I think, to me, that's part of what makes Shrek so not as interesting.

• 13:15Speaker 06

  It's funny because I don't think that Shrek was meant to be. Like the big capstone film of DreamWorks. Like at the time, they started making this in like 96, I think. People who worked at DreamWorks used to call it the Gulag. If you were not doing, performing well on their main feature Prince of Egypt, you got sent to work on Shrek. And so I think it's almost an accident that it did so well. I think, you know, coming off of a decade of like supremely earnest Disney movie musicals. I think this humor worked for a mainstream audience because people were just sick of the same thing over and over again. I mean, you do see some of these elements of humor starting to emerge from like The Emperor's New Groove or Hercules.

• 13:59Stephen Thompson?

  Right.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  But I feel like because the call is coming from inside the house, you know, it doesn't quite break out the same way that Shrek breaks out because it's an unknown quantity in this new entity. But they're, yeah, they're starting to get this like meta sort of like rye, self referential sort of comedy. They're like aware that they're in like a tropey plot, which I find really interesting. Right. I think Shrek actually influenced my, my taste in media in the sense that I love things that are meta and commenting on themselves as they happen. And I wonder if I can just trace that back to, to my first viewing experience of Shrek.

• 14:34Stephen Thompson?

  I'm telling you, man, entry level satire. It really does work as entry level kind of meta commentary. I do think it's interesting to compare it to Emperor's New Groove, a movie that I think is vastly superior to Shrek. They both came out of very, very troubled productions. They were both endlessly retooled. In the case of Shrek, uh, Shrek was originally voiced by Chris Farley, who had recorded almost all of the vocal part before he died. When he died, they replaced him with Mike Myers, who recorded his entire vocal track and then asked to record his entire vocal track again with that Scottish accent. And you just, when you're looking at it on paper and seeing how many kind of iterations

• 15:16Stephen Thompson?

  of this movie DreamWorks went through before it hit on what it finally put out. It must have been surprising to them that it hit as hard as it did. And I think it's interesting, we've talked on this show before about the idea Of pop culture carbon dating. You don't want to fill your animated movie with a bunch of really current jokes because it will age it immediately. And this movie breaks those rules right and left. There's like a Riverdance joke in the first one. It opens with freaking Smash Mouth. It closes with freaking Smash Mouth. It is so exactly 2001. And yet, for some reason, like because the movie is so popular and because it's resonated with so many people, that it doesn't matter that it's as carbon dated as it is.

• 15:59Stephen Thompson?

  And Shrek 2, which came out in 2004, closes with a performance of Livin' La Vida Loca.

• 16:22Stephen Thompson?

  And if you can imagine something more dated to 2004 than Livin' La Vida Loca, I don't know what it would be. And yet, that movie made 800 gajillion dollars and is just as entrenched in the Gen Z firmament, I think, as the first one.

• 16:40Speaker 06

  I think that Shrek lived long enough to see itself become the villain. I think that what Shrek was trying to do was push back against Disney and create a new landscape for animation and what was possible in animation. And I think it was so successful that it started to sink back down into repeating the same old tropes. I actually talked to a man named Sam Summers, who lectures in animation history at Middlesex University for a piece I'm writing for Slate about this. And he said that Shrek just becomes repeatedly about his midlife crises. I remember being in elementary school and like going to the grocery store with my mom and they were selling like Shrek Gogurt. Like Shrek's face was on everything. The branding was insane. And I think that's also probably why it became a meme, because you couldn't swing a donkey

• 17:25Speaker 06

  or a Puss in Boots without hitting a Shrek branded Gogurt. And so it's funny that Shrek tried so hard to kick back against the establishment and then became the establishment. And that maybe watching Shrek in the year of our Lord 2021 makes it seem outdated and not so fresh and hard to figure out why it was so popular because What made Shrek different has now become the norm.

• 17:49Aisha Harris?

  Right, especially, especially the let's cast celebrities as the voices of these animated characters. Now, obviously, this had been happening in animation for a few years, Robin Williams being in, in Aladdin being a big example. You later had Danny DeVito in something like Hercules. It was happening, but it was very clear that this movie sort of kicked off seeing that in filmmaking and in animation on an even greater scale. And then you have people like Jerry Seinfeld doing B Moody. And it's just like, it just, it gets really, and, and, and Steve Carell doing the, the Despicable Me movies and all those things. And, you know, it's been diminishing returns, I feel, for the most part, ever since in these films.

• 18:33Aisha Harris?

  And the other aspect is just the needle drops. I think the needle drops in Shrek really feel like probably one of the more prevalent things that have stuck in these animated movies throughout. And, oh, it's probably my least favorite thing. I, I, I love a well-placed needle drop, but I hate when there's a glut of them and you can, you can see it, you can see the seeds of that happening here in this film.

• 18:59Stephen Thompson?

  So I have one last kind of overarching question. In preparing for this taping, our producer and friend Candace Lim compiled a list of some of kind of her hot takes on Shrek, like detailing how it's a commentary on race and gender and marriage and gentrification, oppression, beauty standards, Disney, the entertainment industry. We've talked about a couple of these things. And then tucked into this long list are the words, "Shrek 2 has the same plot as Get Out." That floated around as a, as a little bit of a commentary on the internet at, at one point, other than the fact that they're both, you know, drawing from some of the same tropes about meeting the family.

• 19:41Stephen Thompson?

  Do you have any favorite hot takes on Shrek or favorite in, in, in general of, among the list I just mentioned?

• 19:47Speaker 06

  You know, it's funny. People have kind of turned Shrek into this Marxist Communist meme in the last several years. But rewatching Shrek 1 last night, I realized that Shrek is actually like pro landlord, you know? His whole dispute with Lord Farquaad is that he wants people off his land. And Donkey's kind of questioning, it's right before the very infamous onion monologue. He's questioning like, whoa, why are you letting Lord Farquaad hand over possession of your land, which you already own?

• 20:17Speaker 07

  OK, let me get this straight. You're gonna go fight a dragon and rescue a princess just so Farquaad'll give you back a swamp, which you only don't have because he filled it full of freaks in the first place. Is that about right?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  You know what? Maybe there's a good reason Donkey shouldn't talk.

• 20:30Speaker 07

  I don't get it, Shrek.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  So, you know, Shrek, not as much of a comrade as you would think. That's my hot take.

• 20:36Stephen Thompson?

  Well, that brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Serena Torres, thanks so much to both of you for being here.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you, Stephen.

• 20:45Stephen Thompson?

  This episode was produced by Candace Lynn and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.

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