Serena Toros

So I think Shrek actually taught 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.

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 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 coming off of a decade of 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.

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 yeah, they're starting to get this like meta sort of like wry self-referential sort of comedy.

They're like aware that they're in like a tropey plot, which I find really interesting.

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.

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...