Stephen Thompson

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 is 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.

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

It's totally indulging in it.

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, 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 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.