Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Listen wherever you get your podcasts. 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.
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.
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. And we could all use a little change. Joining us today is freelance culture critic and reporter Serena Toros. Hey, Serena. Hey, Stephen. Jazzed to be here. 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.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Shrek's 25th anniversary?
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. Oh, I know what. Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads on a pike, gotten a knife, cut open their spleen, and drank their fluids. Does that sound good to you?
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 Disney-fied fairytale 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, Aisha, I'm going to ask you first. How did you come to Shrek, and what do you think of the movie itself?
Well, picture this. It's 2001. Little Aisha 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 songs. To this day, I can probably still recite the Welcome to Duloc song, the song that's sort of a ripoff of It's a Small World.
Please keep up on the grass, shine your shoes, wipe your face. Duloc is Duloc.
The Merry Men song. As much as I loved Disney and did love Disney at that time, I was also 13 and was going through that sort of rebellious phase and starting to enjoy more edgy, quote unquote, edgy humor. And so this movie was like perfect for that because it was sending up all of these familiar tropes that I already knew about.
with the sort of elbowing and the winky wink nod about Snow White, but she lives with seven little men, but she's not easy. Like those sorts of jokes, totally my jam. Now I look at it and I just feel as though it doesn't 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 the 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. Like 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. Like it's not 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 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 rewatch again.
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Chapter 3: How did Shrek challenge traditional fairy tale narratives?
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
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 watch Shrek for 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 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.
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 entry-level satire. That it's kind of like your first foray into 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.
Yeah.
When Shrek came out. It came out actually when 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 years.
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Chapter 4: What cultural impact did Shrek have on animation and humor?
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 making of the film for the 20th anniversary. And one of the people involved 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 new. 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.
It's funny because I don't think that Shrek was meant to be, like, the big capstone film of DreamWorks.
Chapter 5: How did the film's humor resonate with different age groups?
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'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. And this movie breaks those rules right and left. There's like a river dance 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, 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. And Shrek 2, which came out in 2004, closes with a performance of Livin' La Vida Loca. Make you live her crazy life But she'll take away your pain Like a bullet to the brain Offside, inside, oh She's giving a vida loca
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Chapter 6: What are the critiques of Shrek's animation and storytelling?
He's questioning like, whoa. Why are you letting Lord Farquaad hand over possession of your land, which you already own?
Okay, let me get this straight. You're gonna go fight a dragon and rescue a princess just so Farquaad will 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? You know what? Maybe there's a good reason donkeys shouldn't talk.
I don't get it, Shrek. So, you know, Shrek, not as much of a comrade as you would think. That's my hot take.
Okay.
Well, that brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Serena Torres, thanks so much to both of you for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you, Stephen. This episode was produced by Candice Lim 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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