Shrek

Hey, it's Latte from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get 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 Ayesha 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. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, President Trump in China, the latest on a summit that was billed as a major meeting on trade and AI, being overshadowed by the war in Iran, a close ally and trade partner of China. What's happening with tariffs and how is it affecting consumers? On the NPR Politics Podcast, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Joining us today is freelance culture critic and reporter Serena Toros. Hey Serena. 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. 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 don't 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? 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 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 Farquad 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, say the last dance, Mulan 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 rip off of it's a small world. The Mary Men song. As much as I love Disney and did love Disney at that time, I was also 13 and had 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 in the winky wink nod about Snow White, but she's lived 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're 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 a pretty movie. It looks like it was made in not even 2001, but honestly, it looks like it was made in like 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. Wow. Okay. So Serena, distill if you can, how you came to Shrek and what you think of it? 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 two for the first time more so than Shrek one. 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. 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 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 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 who's 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 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 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 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 years. And I think I reacted to it a little bit more like Aisha did as an adult, which is 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 Aisha said, it's a real mishmash. It's trying to be a lot of things to a lot of people. 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. I don't necessarily have 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 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. 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, Anne's had been a success, but it wasn't like, I was waiting for you to bring that out. 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 have the whole Jeffrey Katzenberg notoriously leaving Disney and then coming to DreamWorks. And it seems clearer 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. It's totally indulging in it. Yeah. And its basic MO is like, we'll still be sentimental, but we'll just add some really low brow, 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. It's playing over. 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 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 cheap in a way. And I wish that the humor had been, 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 it was part of this lineage of 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 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. 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. 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 rye 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 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 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, 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. And Shrek 2, which came out in 2004, closes with a performance of Live in La Vida Loka. And if you can imagine something more dated to 2004 than Live in La Vida Loka, I don't know what it would be. And yet that movie made 800 good jillion dollars and is just as entrenched in the Gen Z firmament, I think, as the first one. 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 trips. 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 for a person boots without getting 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. Right. 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 Aladdin being a big example. You later had Danny DeVito and something like Hercules. It was happening. But it was very clear that this movie sort of kicked off seeing that in filmmaking and an animation on an even greater scale. And then you have people like Jerry Seinfeld doing B-moody. It just it gets really in Steve Carell doing the Despicable Me movies and all those things. And it's been diminishing returns I feel for the most part ever since in these films. 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 it's probably my least favorite thing. I love a well placed needle drop but I hate when there's a gluttony of them. And you can you can see it. You can see the seeds of that happening here in this film. So I have one last kind of overarching question in preparing for this taping. Our producer and friend Candice 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 little bit of a commentary on the internet at one point other than the fact that they're both you know drawing from some of the same tropes about meeting the family. Do you have any favorite hot takes on Shrek or favorite in general of among the list I just mentioned? You know it's funny people have kind of turned Shrek into this like Marxist communist meme in the last several years but re-watching Shrek one 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 Donky's kind of questioning it's right before the very infamous onion monologue. He's questioning like well 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 Donky shouldn't talk. I don't get it Shrek. So you know a Shrek not as much as a comrade as you would think that's my hot take. 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 Candace 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. This week on Consider This a stunning shift at the Department of Justice since President Trump took office public corruption investigations have plummeted nearly 90%. 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