WHAT WENT WRONG - Shrek (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Oscars! Cannes! Smash Mouth? In Part 2 of our Shrek coverage, Chris & Lizzie get to the bottom of Mike Myers' Scottish brogue, why 'All Star' became an anthem for the ages, and Katzenberg's all-out blitz against the Mouse House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to the What Went Wrong Swamp for Shrek Part 2. We're very excited. I'm very excited. Just a quick recap of where we are in the story. Shrek had been languishing in basically development hell after beginning its life as a children's book. Under Jeffrey Katzenberg, it's now at DreamWorks where the animators have been going through many, many versions. But they found their Shrek in Chris Farley. and then of course Chris Farley met a very untimely demise. So now the team is unmoored and they're going back to square one because they've realized what they had at the beginning was actually pretty good. So let's find out what's going to happen next. That's right, Lizzie. When we last saw our heroes, they just began to pull themselves together following the death of their champion, as you mentioned, Chris Farley. And they'd settled on a more comedic, irreverent tone for the film, not dissimilar from where they started.

all those years before. Meanwhile, 350 miles south of Shrek's Silicon Valley swamp, Jeffrey Katzenberg's battle with the magical kingdom was heating up because DreamWorks A film, Prince of Egypt, was set to be released in November of 1998. Do you remember where you were in November of 1998, Lizzie? No, I was nine. Yeah, exactly. I did see this movie in theaters, though. The same month as Pixar's A Bug's Life. I do remember seeing that one.

Leaving Katzenberg, it can be deduced, anxious about the prospects of DreamWork's first animated release, which is a film of biblical proportions. According to Steve Jobs, Katzenberg went so far as to call Pixar and ask them to move the release date for a bug's life in exchange for him pulling the plug on ants. Should have just done that. Sorry, I don't like ants. I do like ants. We'll argue about that film later.

Katzenberg denies this. Katzenberg did, however, push Prince of Egypt to December. Disney countered by moving Mighty Joe Young to the same month. So in June of 1998, Is that the guerrilla movie? Yes. Katzenberg pulled a surprise attack by announcing a decision he'd actually made months earlier. Ants publicly slated for a June 1999 release was pulled in to October of 1998.

That's a lot. Seven, eight months ahead of schedule, a month ahead of a bug's life. Such a dick move. So petty. So petty. Key to our story is that the completion of ants and the delay of Shrek freed up Pacific data images, if you guys remember, PDI, the company that DreamWorks had bought a 40% stake in resources for Shrek.

In fact, one of the ants directors, Eric Darnell, joined Shrek as a storyboard artist, and we'll get to his contributions in a little bit. While Katzenberg and Disney continued to duel, both at the box office and in the courtroom, remember, Katzenberg is also suing Disney and Michael Eisner for breach of contract. Yep, suing the crap out of them. Absolutely. Sueing the pants off of the inspiration for Lord Farquod right now. Directors Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen learned largely on the fly how to direct a 3D animated film.

Now, Jensen had come from the world of 2D animation. She had to learn how to conceptualize a camera in 3D space for the first time and visualize objects prior to fully being rendered. As she later said, quote, my first day is directing up north. I'm sitting in a darkened room with all these heads behind me and they show a gray log. And they say, what do you think about this log? And I'm like, it needs bark? And they go, well, that comes later.

That comes in lighting and servicing. But what do you think about the shape of it? And I'm like, it'll do, end quote. Jensen and Adamson were also learning how to work together. Jensen described the division of labor in an interview from 2021. Quote, I know on Prince of Egypt, for instance, they had a director that worked with just the story and another director that worked more with animation.

Both of us really wanted to do everything and work with each department and really direct the movie, so we broke it up into sequences. A sequence would be everything that happens in one location. The opening of the movie with Shrek's walk the credits, the gingerbread man sequence, so we divided the movie up that way, end quote. Apparently her first sequence was them escaping the castle after they'd saved Princess Piona and the dragon is chasing them out of the castle, which is a literal trial by fire for your first sequence on this movie.

Yeah, that's a lot going on. So it was likely around this time that screenwriters Joe Stillman of Beavis and Butthead do America and Roger Shulman, a very accomplished TV writer, who had also written 1995's Balto. Did you see Balto? Lizzie? Of course I saw Balto. I loved Balto.

He has to save those children from diphtheria. From being unvaccinated. Yes. That's right. It's a great combination, I think, too. Beavis and Butthead do America and then the earnestness of Balto. It's a little bit of what Shrek is. So they were brought onto the project.

There are conflicting sources regarding when, Elliot and Roscio's involvement that's the last screenwriters, not the two original screenwriters who'd penned a ladder. Right, the Pirates of the Caribbean guys. Exactly. Suffice as to say, they did leave at a certain point, and these other two writers were brought on. According to storyboard artist, Cody Cameron,

the catalyst for the story's final tone and the meta-riff on fairy tale characters as a whole came from the development and inspiration of one specific scene. Lizzie, if you had to guess, Which scene they stumbled on, it's a small moment, and it's in the first act of the film that kind of set the tone for all of the fairy tale irreverence. What would you guess? I... The mirror?

That's a great guess because that's one of the scenes that they were obviously doing a big riff on, and it's very similar to this... The mice? The mirror, the mice. Okay, I'll tell you, do you know the muffin man? The muffin man? The muffin man. Okay. The interrogation of the gingerbread man.

Yes, which I love. So Conrad Vernon, for his part, credits the story team for cracking the scene. However, he is the one who pitched the scene with the voice to Andrew Adamson and producer Aaron Warner and left the two, quote, literally just crying with laughter, end quote. They took it to Katzenberg. Again, they had Conrad Vernon, a storyboard artist, perform the scene. for Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Katzenberg goes, quote, this is exactly the type of humor, end quote. Nice.

Now, that is Conrad Vernon's voice in the movie, the storyboard artist. That's awesome. So his performance was so good that he actually went on to voice the character in the film, and he said, quote, they tried for about two months to find actors to replace me, but they finally said, screw it, we can't find anyone. Can you do it? Now, the question is, where did he get that voice, Lizzie? And I would like to play a little clip for you.

I know. You do? I have an idea. I don't know if you know. Okay. The gingerbread man was probably the funniest character of all, to me, that came out of the Shrek movies. Where did the voice come from? Like, where inside of you did you hear that voice?

Did you ever babysit one of those kids that is where they're like eight and they wear open sandals and pink shorts. And they're just a little off. Yeah, yeah. You look like boarding school reject. We took him to dinner one night when we were babysitting him. He gets out of the car and he's got his dad's shoes on. And we're like, what the fuck are you doing with your dad's shoes on? He goes,

my dad said someday had Philly shoes. And so that voice, we used to do that voice. For Christmas, I'd like three gones of rose milk cream. And and so that was just, the voice I put into the gingerbread man. Oh, God. And yes, that is Harlan Williams.

Well, that's great, but I have to say my theory was Mickey Mouse. It sounds so much like Mickey Mouse. It does sound like Mickey Mouse. And it's entirely plausible around the office because they're riffing on Disney that they decided to do that. I'll buy the special child. Gifted child. Now, Shrek, in this irreverent satire,

of fairy tales had truly found its rhythm. And it seems like the advantages had is that it was all of these non-Disney weirdos, plus some ex-Disney defectors in Silicon Valley who were working together on riffing on Disney. So they had no reverence for Hollywood and the establishment, and all they wanted to do was take the piss out of it. And so again, director Vicki Jensen later said, quote, honestly, a lot of the job is just recognizing genius and making sure that you just get rid of the weeds that are in the way and hang on to that genius. The comedy gold that if it threw you on your ass laughing and storyboard when it was first pitch, you have to protect that, end quote. Now, much like the Emperor's New Groove, and I'm quite certain so many animated films we will

cover, the ideas are just coming from everyone at this point. Andrew Adamson, for his part, pushed the story team to add more and more fairy tale characters. As producer Penny Finkelman Cox said, he recognized that his real creative geniuses were around him. He was the one that zeroed in on the Conrad, Chris, and Cody grouping, and pulled them into the process. He found comedy through the artists. The beauty of that movie is Andrew Adamson getting all the board artists to do the best they could have ever done with him as the guiding light. end quote. So again, to show how much the storyboard artists are contributing, artist Chris Miller

provided the scratch track voiceover for The Magic Mirror, as you mentioned, Lizzie. So the whole original pitch was the dating show game that they do. And one of the film's lewdest jokes when it says she hangs out with seven short men, but she's not easy. Yes. Very risque. His voice was so good that it was also kept in the film, and Cody Cameron voiced Pinocchio and the Three Little Pigs. Oh, nice. So not only did they do that, a number of these artists went on to do vocal performances in the other Shrek movies, as well as other animated films in general. So they kind of became voice actors as a result of this. They also contributed dialogue as writers, and it is Vicki Jensen who credits

PDI director Eric Darnell, who just directed ants, who joined the team. as I mentioned, as a storyboard artist, with the Doolock Welcome Song performed by the Clockwork Dolls. Make sure you wipe your face. So that, as the kind of riff on Disneyland, you know, came from him. Interestingly, the fairy tale characters in the end,

while being an obvious jab at Disney, were not part of the original script or Katzenberg's original vision for the movie. Similarly, the fact that Doolock looks like Disneyland was more a happy accident, or a result of so many of the animators being former Disney employees. Art director Guillaume Aretos, or Artos, as my French brother-in-law, says, might be correct, who also voiced one of the merry men, said, Jeffrey Katzenberg looked at the images we made and said,

that's exactly Disneyland, go for it, that's even more fun, push it. Jeffrey Katzenberg, just really an edge lord in terms of Shrek. You know, so I spoke to an employee that worked at PDI during... Wow, an inside source. An inside source. They very graciously reached out and spoke to me about their time on the movie. And they said, first of all, that it was an incredible amount of fun. They said it was very stressful because it was of tight crunch and we'll get to why.

And they also said that, yes, Katzenberg is a bit domineering. and he is this larger-than-life presence. But they also said, he's a freaking genius when it comes to animated films. And he could come into a room and look at a wall of boards and say, you don't need these four, and you'd add to here, and everyone would say, yeah, I think he's right.

All right. The team had been slogging for years, and it seems had finally found some fun and momentum, but they still needed an ogre who could fill the void that Chris Farrow, Harley had left at the heart of this production. Now, Lizzie, in the mid-1990s, Canadian Mike Myers needed a break.

Despite a successful run on Saturday Night Live from 1989 to 1995, again, overlapping with Farley for five seasons, and a mega hit with 1992's Wayne's World, which we will cover because it had a difficult production, Myers was extremely burned out. He had lost his father just before the release of Wayne's World. During that production, he clashed heavily with the film's director, Penelope Spiris.

He had perhaps an even more contentious relationship with Thomas Shlami, Tommy Shlami, the director of his next film, 1993's So I Married an Axe Murderer. Which I enjoy, yes. I did too, but that movie did not do well at the box office. And Wayne's World, too, also released. in 1993, failed to capture the zeitgeist in the way the first had, grossing less than 50 million against a $40 million budget. Myers, after the release of Wayne's World, too, took a two-year hiatus from film and returned only when inspiration struck. And Lizzie, do you remember what

inspiring film he returned with? Oh, yeah. Austin Powers, International Men of Mystery, which is just an absolute class. It is. 1997's parody of the bond genre and blowup and others was not an overnight sensation. It did well at the box office, but it was a bona fide smash on home video. That makes sense because obviously we were too young to have seen that in theaters, but I think I saw it shortly thereafter. I did as well.

At home. Yes. And we just watched it all the time. It was one of those movies that became endlessly quotable. and it was that organic memeification of it, so to speak, that led to a very successful home video run. So, Adamson and Jensen, as a result, were fans. But according to Jensen, Myers was not exactly a shoe-in for the part

because despite his successes, he was not a star at the caliber or name recognition level of a Chris Farley. Yeah. And even, for example, with something like Austin Powers, he's playing characters. So his name is not the name the audience is necessarily leaving with. Wayne's world, it's Wayne.

And in Austin Powers, obviously, it's Austin Powers. And he's playing a number of characters. He also looks so different across all of his roles. He had a habit of obviously wearing a lot of, you know, prosthetics, makeup, wigs, and everything. So, yeah, it is very different from Chris Farley who tended to play a very similar character across everything.

That's right. As Vicki Jensen told the New York Times, quote, it kind of took a little selling to the studio because he was still breaking in, but he wasn't the huge name he is now, end quote. Now, one name that we can confirm that the studio was reportedly interested in

was Nicholas Cage. What? Yeah. According to an interview with producer Aaron Warner, Cage came in to meet about the role. I'm guessing this must have been shortly after the kind of face-off the Rock Cage's Action Star run of films.

Yes. Okay. Quote, well, after Chris Farley passed, we, you know, were scrambling to figure out how to make it, you know, who to make it with. So I think Nick was one of the people who came in to talk about it, end quote. So that is confirmed by producer Aaron Warner. There was a lot of speculation online about who else came in for the role, and I can confirm that name. Despite being a smaller name, Myers was perhaps the more obvious creative choice. Perhaps. Yeah.

It does seem that Cage was the one who declined the offer based on the secondary sources I read. He's turned down a number of enormous roles to be fair. So that's entirely possible. Myers and Farley had, of course, worked together on Saturday Night Live. Myers later said that when Del Close, obviously, writer, actor, coached to many comedians who passed through S&L, introduced him to Farley. He called him, quote, a kindred spirit, meaning he felt that their senses of humor would obviously align. Meyer said, quote, the second I saw him, I thought he was going to be a giant star, end quote.

And he was right. By August of 1998, though, Mike Myers replaced Chris Farley and was officially cast as Shrek. So this is roughly nine months after Chris Farley passed away. And sorry, Austin Powers was 97, like less than a year before this? Exactly. Summer of 97. So my understanding is the movie is released. I'm sure the creative team is aware of it, but Chris Farley has not yet passed away. Farley passes away in December.

The movie probably went out on VHS around that time and the momentum built, you know what I mean, across 98. Yeah, that makes sense. That's my interpretation. Now, Eddie Murphy remained on as the one original cast member to stay on to the production as donkey, which brilliant casting. Yes. Cameron Diaz replaced Janine Garofalo as Princess Fiona and John Lithgow. I adore in this movie.

Wonderful. Rounded out things as Lord Farquod. According to storyboard artist Tom Cito, William Shatner was also in consideration for Farquod. I mean, that would have been incredible. It would have been very funny. Lithgow has some fun interviews you can watch where he discusses the production and going to visit the animators. And he seems like a very fun person to be around, very dry sense of humor.

Also funny because he's very tall. He is very tall. John Lithgow, Eddie Murphy, of course, had just done an animated role. Mushu in Disney's Mulan. Yes. Cameron Diaz, for her part, was coming off of the Fairley Brothers hit. There's Something About Mary. she was blowing up as well.

She's, I want to be clear, she's very funny in that movie. She's great in that movie. I love Cameron Diaz. I still like that movie. It holds a place in my heart. It was such a, it was an important film to me at the time. All right. I don't want to know why.

We'll talk later. Some hair issues. So in late 1998, with a fresh cast in hand, the Shrek team goes full CGI, embarking on a trial and error journey through what would become the most ambitious 100% computer animated film of its time. Now, the reason is, unlike Toy Story, as we've discussed, or even ants, they are doing things like hair and skin and mud and water.

And I want to point out this remains a difficult thing with CGI, BFX and animation. We talked about it in Twilight, that it's very hard when you're dealing with fur and skin in particular. Yep. So with Pacific Data Images fully engaged, they set out to make a fairy tale world that was rooted in reality, but not photorealistic, which is a really tricky balance to find. Yeah, because you don't want to wind up in the Polar Express situation. I think they really avoid it in this movie for the most part. And, yeah, Polar Express, which has some wonderful animation in it. But it does, unfortunately, sit pretty squarely in the uncanny valley when it comes to digital representation.

of people on screen. According to Katzenberg, human characters were really challenging. So the fairy tale characters were easier. Obviously, fur is very difficult, but the fairy tale characters were easier. Katzenberg specifically said of Princess Fiona's character, quote, our artists were able to do something that was almost photorealistic, but it was actually too good. And so we really had to dial her back to make Fiona fit inside the fairy tale world.

because when she got too realistic, she really looked out of place in it. So here's a place where technology allowed us to achieve something that if we went to the full extent of its potential, actually became incongruous with the look of the film itself, end quote. Interesting. Now, there were many elements that needed to be pioneered, wrinkled, textured skin, fur, fat, and muscles, hair, plus a surrounding world that featured dust, leaves, grass, water, mud that moved in a physically plaza. way. How do they do it? Well, they did it in the computer and they also did it in real life. There are many stories you can find online of employees going into the parking lot and dumping mud

and water on one another of them chasing a donkey down on a nearby farm to use as a reference for the film. A lot of it, you know, the early animation days is let's go into the physical world and see how it acts and then see if we can imitate it when we get back to our computer screen. They also were able to use some software developed for one thing to present a different thing. For example, the system they developed for donkey's fur was also used for the grass in the backgrounds. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Now, Ken Pierce of PDI describes in the making of Shrek how they took existing systems from ants and improved upon them drastically while also developing entirely new proprietary software

to bring the film to life. So the film had 14 software developers building the tools that the animators would use, including a facial expression system with 500 controls to animate the face, which was described as akin to puppeteering a marionette. So the idea was to allow the artist to do literally any expression that they could think of with these different points of control on the face. So you'll notice that the skin on the characters really, I think, does not look plasticy. It looks like it has depth as the light is hitting it. I think the animation in this movie looks great. Like, I understand that it's older, it didn't really look that dated to me. No, and I think because so much of the story and the humor holds up as well, once you lock in in the first five minutes, you just don't think about it anymore.

And so many of the scenes are just really beautifully rendered, like, and painted. Like her castle. Oh, yeah. The swamp is gorgeous. I love the design of the dragon that can look fearsome and kind of obviously pear-shaped but then feminine at the same time. Yeah. It's a really, really well-done character. Pear-shaped, rude.

She looks great. That's a compliment. That's my favorite shape. All right. Okay. Let's not get into our personal taste here. Now, according to art director, Guillaume Artos, or Arretus, who had experience as a painter, this was an iterative process. As he said, with Fiona, for example, we have a very complex system of dermis, epidermis, and

base, so it's working almost like a makeup process. And that is a system also that was applied by Rembrandt, so it's not new. You basically don't paint one color straight. You paint a glaze of red, another of yellow, and then you have a base that reflects light, end quote. Not to say that there weren't mishaps. During one animator's first day on the project, they apparently tweaked an input on donkey that changed his hair length and his hair came back so long in all of the rendered scenes that he looked like a chia pet.

And you can see some images of that online. Lead character technical director Richard Walsh described how, quote, there's a case where if the animator accidentally goes off the end, meaning goes too high on a value, in the sense that he asks for a shape that's not there, the face of the character blows up, literally,

absolutely blows up, teeth pop out, the tongue sticks over there, the eyeballs pop out, the whole thing just blows up. So it's kind of freaky, end quote. It's horrifying. Right. So they're dealing with new technology for the first time they're finding these bugs. Cameron Diaz, for her part, was stunned when she saw her character. Quote, the first time I saw it, it was rather eerie because I felt like even though she looks nothing like me, there was something, a quality about her sort of in the eyes that at first I was a little sort of taken aback by. And there were a few gestures that sort of reminded me more of my sister than myself, because I can't really see it in myself,

but I can see it in my sister, end quote. She's great in this, too. She is great in this. But it's also interesting to think. Nobody had seen humans done CGI before. So they're seeing themselves in a weird way. You know what I mean? With their voice applied, it's such a new medium.

Yeah, it's a different, like, specificity of articulation in terms of what they're able to show. Because obviously, like, you know, you can see previous cartoons, animated things where they're clearly pulling certain elements from. Like, you know, Robin Williams in Aladdin, obviously, they're pulling certain mannerisms and things from him and his performance. But it doesn't look like this. Like, what you're talking about is very, like, minute details that they're able to pick up on. Yeah. And, and Lizzie, what you're referencing to, you know, for that reason, when they're making animated films,

they will most of the time record a video of the performer giving the vocal performance to see how their hands move, how their body moves, what their facial expressions are. because these actors are not just vocal performers, they are visual performers. And they're oftentimes in order to give you the vocal performance actually going all out physically as well. And you can use that as reference when you're animating. So directors Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen, meanwhile, continued to push the humor. Now, Lizzie, you mentioned this being a movie for children and adults. Well, that's for a very specific reason, even beyond Katzenberg's desire for a four-quadrant hit. As Jensen later said, quote, Andrew and I, we didn't have kids.

We were making a movie that we would go see, end quote. Their barometer was apparently whether or not they would show a joke to their moms and not get in trouble. Unfortunately, this didn't always align with Katzenberg's vision for the film. One such example, Lizzie, I don't know if you noticed this, and it's very discreet, and I'm not sure I 100% believe it, but apparently, according to I believe in the men who would be king, you can see that when Princess Fiona comes up on the magic mirror

and Farquod is in his bed, he kind of pulls up the blanket as if he has gotten excited all of the sudden. And that was something that Adamson and Katzenberg fought over, and Adamson kept in the film. Katzenberg felt was two adult. And on that one, I kind of actually go with Katzenberg. I was kind of weird when I rewatched it. Yeah. I guess. No one notices it.

Yeah. Yeah. It didn't register for me. I didn't notice it. But yeah. There are a lot of weird. phallic hidden symbols in a lot of Disney movies if you want to go down that route on Reddit. Anyway, lucky for Katzenberg and the movie, it seems that above all else,

Andrew Adamson was unfazed by Katzenberg's dictatorial style. Now, perhaps it was because of his reticence to be involved with the project from the get-go, or because of his Kiwi sensibilities, or because he was 400 miles away from Hollywood most days out of the week. Adamson was one of the few people who was willing to go head to head with Katzenberg on creative points, something that Katzenberg had, I'm guessing, not expected when hiring a first-time director. An unnamed source from PDI, again quoted in the men who would be king, said that, quote, Jeffrey didn't intimidate Adamson in the way Jeffrey intimidated people who came from inside Dreamworks. A lot of that came from the PDI story department, which hadn't

been indoctrinated by DreamWorks' ways. They still had a Bay Area irreverence toward authority, end quote. I do want to say, the PDI source I spoke with also said it was very clear that Katzenberg respected Adamson's opinion on all of this stuff. This is the thing. Say what you will about Jeffrey Katzenberg, and I'm sure he's somebody who's going to keep coming up across this podcast, but he doesn't seem like a complete tyrant. Like, does he seem like someone who needs a lot of control?

Yes, which can obviously be detrimental in some cases. But he also does know what he's doing. Like, this is somebody who has had an enormous number of hits specifically in this space. And you have to, like, you can't do that entirely by yourself. You do have to hire people that you trust. And because if you're trying to control every single tiny detail, it will be a mess. And these are not a mess. Not at all.

As producer Penny Finkelman Cox put it, they also had the advantage of being so far away. And as a result, quote, Jeffrey was very, very involved with Shrek. There wasn't a frame of that movie that he wasn't in the cutting room to see. But the advantage you had at PDI was that you had five days without him in your face, end quote. So five days a week, he just wasn't there. Yeah. The combination of Adamson's strong personality in Katzenberg's remote status seems to have helped prevent Katzenberg from, to reference Max Howard from part one, suffocating the project. Katzenberg also had other matters drawing his

attention. Ants, despite being overall successful when you have factored in, you know, home rentals and ancillary markets, had been more or less stomped by a bug's life at the box office, even though it premiered a month earlier. And Prince of Egypt, despite garnering very positive reviews, and I would argue remaining one of the most beautifully animated films of the last 50 years was only able to manage $200 million at the box office, which was an incredible accomplishment. I believe it was actually the highest grossing non-Disney animated film at that point in time. The problem was Katzenberg had set the benchmark so high. So he had said he would do the Lion King or 80% of the Lion King, but the Lion King made a billion dollars. So he was falling short of the Lockerner.

lofty expectations that he had set. And ironically, it seems that perhaps his miscalculation had been to hew too close to the Disney formula on the first couple of movies. Now, lucky for him, Shrek was spinning off the rails in the best possible ways. So not only did you have the storyboard artists going hog on this whole thing, but you had comedic performers like Eddie Murphy, who, once he entered the sound booth, the movie got a lot funnier and a lot longer. Andrew Adamson said, quote, he'd take a single beat joke and he'd turn it into a three-beat joke. Sequences got longer because his jokes were so good. Amazing.

I know for a fact that, like, the parfei riff is entirely Eddie Murphy's. I don't know about the Waffles line. I could not figure that one out in the morning I'm making waffles. It has to be. I must. I'm thinking it must be. Shrek had also taken on an anachronistic pop culture heavy tone that has to had never been done in children's films.

With references to Babe, that'll do Pig, Austin Powers, you're going the right way for a smacked bottom, played very differently across each of these films. Oh, I didn't even pick up on that. Yeah. And The Matrix, of course, with Princess Fiona. Yes.

DreamWorks and PDI made their official union in 2000, so DreamWorks fully acquired PDI, a year out from Shrek's release. Shrek, the weird little B movie that could, was truly coming together. Now, Lizzie, it's high time that we discuss a crucial element to the final film that is the subject of endless lore and online speculation. And that is, of course, Shrek's accent. I was wondering when this is going to come in.

It's coming in now. We've done our best to piece together the who, what, where, and why of Shrek's Scottish Brug. It seems there are two versions of the story. I'm going to tell you both. They're both from primary sources. You guys can decide. There's the Mike Myers version, and I will call it the Vicki Jensen-Aren Warner version.

That's a director and producer. It's technically possible that both are true, just told from starkly different perspectives. I'll start with the Mike Myers version. According to various interviews, both contemporaneous to the release of the film and given later, it was sometime in the year 2000 when Mike Myers decided that he wanted to re-record his voice for Shrek. According to Myers and the men who would be king, roughly one-third of his scenes were fully animated when he approached Jeffrey Katzenberg with this request.

Quote, Meyer said, I instinctively knew I could do better. I knew I could give them more. I knew there was something missing, end quote. Meyer says that the original voice he did was Canadian, not Scottish, and he says that Katzenberg and the team were supportive of the Canadian accent. Katzenberg recalled, quote, I don't think Mike understood what was going on in my mind, which was that literally one-third of his character had already been animated, end quote, translation, money down the drain. But as Katzenberg remembers it, he managed to, quote, choke out a yes, end quote.

Now, according to Myers, he was a, initially told no. He says, and they went, no, we like it the way it is. And I said, come on, just let me, end quote. Also, if people don't know, Mike Myers is Canadian. His parents are Scottish, right? I actually believe that his parents are from Liverpool, but he does have Scottish relatives. So his family may have been from Scotland originally, and he did have non-immediate family relatives from Scotland. Myers has stated in several interviews that he re-recorded his vocal performance for free. That being said, the animators, according to this version of the story... It's not for free because they have to redo all of it.

Had to recreate his mouth movements and his physical gestures to then match those mouth movements. The process, it was reported, took three months, and cost $4 million in crunch time animating. Myers disputes that number. Quote, they spent some money but not as much money as what's being reported in the press. I'd like to point out. end quote. The crunch and the re-record of the animated sequence was confirmed by the PDI employee I spoke to. They said, yes, we had a crunch.

Yes, it's because we changed the accent. Yeah. They couldn't speak to any of the other conversations. Obviously, that's beyond them. But they confirmed that portion of it. Now, according to Mike Myers, he ended up going with a voice that sounded like, quote, a Scottish person who's lived in Toronto for 20 years, end quote. He said it.

reminded him of his mother reading him stories in her Liverpool accent, quote, and then I could make that connection to that yummy feeling I had when I was a kid and your mom read you stories and the magic of that, end quote. But Myers' story hasn't been entirely consistent over the years. He's given various reasons for wanting to change the accent, including that, quote, fairy tales are a Eurocentric art form, end quote, the fact that Scottish people, quote, are near and dear to me and I have relatives in Scotland and they're working people. it's a working people accent, end quote.

Myers also said that the working people idea is what inspired his initial Canadian accent as well. And so he did have this idea that like ogres are working class people, he should have a working class accent. This may all be true. But co-director Vicki Jensen has a different recollection of the accent process, one that's a little bit more collaborative, so to speak, and also puts less of the onus on Myers. Here's her quote. At the time, there was a scene. where Shrek is kicked out of the swamp by his parents and has found his own place and gets a letter from his dad.

And so Mike decided to read that letter in the Scottish accent. Uh-huh. And Andrew, meaning Andrew Adams and the co-director, and I just grab each other and go, quote, Mike, can you do that? And he's like, oh, no, no, I'm trying to save that for a character. Fat bastard, right? I said, oh, come on, it's just so good.

It's so good. if his dad has that accent, why can't he have it? End quote. Now, according to Vicky Jensen, he recorded the film with a heavy Scottish accent, and they screened it at the DreamWorks Theater for Steven Spielberg, who's obviously producing the movie, because he's one of the co-founders of Dreamworks. Spielberg was apparently very complimentary of the film, and then said the accent might alienate people. So Jensen and Adamson were instructed to tell Mollberg,

Myers to do a pass without the Scottish accent, which he did. And I believe this is when he did the Canadian accent. Oh. Months later, they did another screening for Spielberg, after which Spielberg was similarly effusive and said, quote, Mike needs an accent. Can he do German? What? And Jensen says, no, he can do Scottish.

And that's apparently when they went back to Myers and he came up with the, quote, Scottish light accent that ended up in the finished film. That's interesting. I don't know. The version that kind of makes sense in my head is that he did a heavy Scottish accent. Maybe they didn't do the whole movie that way. They show it to Spielberg. Spielberg says no.

So they quickly pivot to Canadian. They do the whole movie Canadian. And then Myers might have been the one pushing. You know, I would like to go back to some sort of Scottish accent. And they were able to convince Spielberg and Katzenberg to go back to it. But it seems like Jensen and Adamson also wanted to do the Scottish accent. You know what I mean? Some sort of accent as well.

That makes sense because to your point, he wasn't a huge, huge star by the time that this came out. It would be pretty hard for him to have advocated completely alone that he's changed the entire accent. It makes sense that they had done it and liked it, maybe did a little bit of test footage or something with it. And then he's pushing to go back to that. Yeah. Now, further confirmation context, storyboard artist Tom Cito and Cody Cameron have both claimed in interviews that the Scottish accent was something that Myers played with originally, along with a voice that sounded like a Chris Farley impression before settling on the Canadian accent. And that would seemingly corroborate Jensen's version of events. Furthermore, producer Aaron Warner dismissed the commonly repeated Myers version of the story during an interview with Creator's society.

So in response to the question, and then you have to... had Mike Myers wanting to redo it with the Scottish accent, Warner said, quote, no, you know, honestly, if I remember this correctly, and again, it's been a long time, it started out Scottish. And then I don't know if this combination of studio notes or whatever, but it was like, no, let's do it, let's not do it Scottish. And then Steven Spielberg came and saw it and said, why is he not doing it with the Scottish accent? So, you know, we just kind of, we had to redo it a little bit. And it wasn't a huge deal, I think, as it's made out to be, but it was just, it was a creative change and those things happened, end quote.

And Aaron Warner was the producer on the movie, and I, as we'll get to, he later accepts an award on behalf of the movie. And again, I confirmed with that PDI employee that Aaron Warner was at the end of the hallway every day. You know what I mean? He was the guy on site, so he would seemingly know. Broadly speaking, the point I want to make through all of this is I read a lot online that there is a bit of a narrative of Mike Myers came in and dictated that the accent needed to be this. Mike Myers came in and dictated that they changed the whole story, so it didn't resemble the Chris Farley version because he didn't want anything to be the same.

That's what I had kind of heard. Nothing suggests that in what I've found. I'm glad to hear that. It's not only are there scenes, like the scene you listen to, Lizzie, which is very similar to the final scene in the film between him and Donkey, right, discussing, like, beneath the stars, like, what's going on, Onion Boy? Obviously, the parents are gone, but that's a narrative change. Like, that's obviously the creators got rid of the parents.

Yeah, that's not him. So, again, this movie really sounds like an incredible collaboration between all parties involved. And I just have, there's a bit of a meta-narrative floating out there online that Myers came in and kind of hijacked things. And that's not the sense I get at all from researching this film. Just to be clear. For sure, that is what I had heard. And I had always had this idea in my head that, you know, oh, Mike Myers is like notoriously difficult. and this was something that, like, came to the surface, you know, about that. Whether or not that's true, it doesn't sound like that applies here.

I have read that he had developed a difficult reputation in the 90s, especially on Wayne's World. And so I married an axe murderer. And that very well may be true, and we'll get to those movies. But that's not the sense I get here on track. Right. Just to drive that point home, Vicki Jensen said, it wasn't just Myers that changed the character, the story changed. So when we hit on this idea of the fairy tale refugees that come to Shrek for help, that was new. That was not in the Chris Farley version. So the reluctant hero was a new aspect to the movie, where the version that I first saw, Chris Farley was very earnestly wanting to fit in with the humans. So the story was naturally evolving, end quote. So the minute those fairy tale characters

need some sort of refuge, you have to make his character not want to provide that refuge in order to have dramatic tension. Right. As a result, you have to change it from the Farley version. That's not coming from Myers. Now, the picture I came away with from this movie, as I mentioned, Lizzie, it was one of true collaboration, where ideas are being offered up from everyone, up and down the hierarchy in an environment where it seems like the best ideas were allowed to win no matter who they came from. And music supervisor, Mary Lada Elton, had a particularly great one. The Prince of Egypt, like the Disney films that had preceded, it during the Disney Renaissance was a musical. Aladdin, Lion King, Beauty and the Beast,

The Little Mermaid. Right. They're all musicals. It was playing in a tried and true genre. Elton and the Shrek team wanted to do something truly different. As she later put it, quote, I knew that we wanted to do something different and I knew that Disney had a certain formula that is just vintage. And I knew I didn't want to do anything that felt like that. I really wanted, I wanted really to have our projects, our vocal, our everything, different than the classic Disney sound or what animation has known to be in music. End quote. Adamson and Jensen, the directors, agreed and likened their project to an independent film, which had been revitalized specifically by Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which obviously

has a killer soundtrack. Yes, a pastiche. Absolutely. They loved how indie films used contemporary music to help illustrate emotional beats in a movie, the style of music called a needle drop in film had never really been done in commercially animated film before. According to Adamson, quote, we would all bring our CDs in those days, and we just sit there and put them up against the storyboard or sequence and just kind of see what would work, and then edit the music around it to make it work. Sometimes a song would work great and be emotionally, thematically so close, and then there'd be a lyric that would just throw you out, and it would completely demolish the rest of the scene, end quote. The final soundtrack is truly incredible.

I owned it right after the movie came out and loved it. Lizzie, do you have any favorite songs from back in the day? I mean, obviously, all of the smash mouth available across this soundtrack. But I'm sure we're maybe going to get to this. I vividly remembered the Rufus Wainwright version of Hallelujah being on the Shrek soundtrack. And it was a strange moment rewatching this because it is not what plays in the movie. It's not. So let's talk about Hallelujah. That was my next point. Written by Leonard Cohen, the song prior to Shrek was popular, but never at the level that it would be post Shrek.

No, and also at that point, probably the most well-known version was Jeff Buckley, right? I don't know if it was widespread the most popular. It was certainly the one. amidst, like, indie circles. That was the most listened to, was the Jeff Buckley version. So, John Cale's Hallelujah is the version you hear in the movie. He has a slightly older-sounding,

raspier voice than Rufus Rainwright. It's a slightly different arpeggiation in the piano, but it's similar to the Rufus Wainwright version. They settled on Hallelujah before settling on a version. Leonard Cohen, his baritone, was not appropriate, so they decided not to go with that version.

Buckley's is a little too musically amorphous. It's a beautiful song, but I think it overwhelmed the anime. You need something a little more rhythmically driving. So... You can't use Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah in a children's film. It is one of the saddest, most depressing. Yeah. So it's beautiful, but there's no way.

So adding to the confusion, while it was John Kale's version featured in the movie, Rufus Wainwright's version was, placed on the soundtrack, not John Kale's version. So in trying to make sense of this following the release of the film and the soundtrack, one rumor that spread was that Wainwright's version was excluded from the movie because he was an openly gay artist. However, it doesn't seem like that's at all what happened. Doesn't make sense because it wouldn't be on the soundtrack. It doesn't make sense. So directors Andrew Adamson and Vicki Jensen offered a different explanation. They preferred the John Cale version from the get-go.

They had tried Wainwright's version. They had tried Buckley's version. And it was rock legend Robbie Robertson, who was working for DreamWorks at the time of the band, who pitched the Wainwright version because Wainwright was a DreamWorks artist. And he had an album coming out shortly after the release of Shrek. his version was probably included on the soundtrack in lieu of John Cale's version because DreamWorks already owned the rights.

So it was cheaper to just release that version on the soundtrack and not have to license it again in addition to on the movie. And you get bonus promo for an artist so you're already trying to push. Exactly. Now, of course, for Lizzie and myself, this led to the Mandela effect of like,

wait a second, that's the wrong version that I remember from all those years ago. Well, because I loved the Rupus Wayne Wright version. It's beautiful. I mean, that's, you know, it is beautiful. I don't know, Buckley's version's amazing. I love the, the Wayne Wright version. It's not my favorite.

The Buckley version is my favorite for sure. The Wainwright one might be my favorite. I love it. I mean, but I also play the piano. So I was like, I know how to play this. I love that the Jeff Buckley version starts with an exhale. Yeah. Anyway, go on.

Above all else, though, Lizzie, there is one song that has become synonymous with everybody's favorite green ogre. And David, play the music over her doing that. In thematically appropriate fashion, Smash Melt's All-Star is as unlikely a hit as Shrek. Adamson and Jensen and Elton dropped the track from the band's second album, Astro Lounge. I owned it. Don't know about you guys.

Sure. Into the opening of the film as a placeholder. The song wasn't even on the original album Astro Lounge, actually. It was added months after the... the first recording at the behest of executives Jimmy Ivine and Tom Wally, and God bless Jimmy Ivine for saying, you don't have a hit in this batch of songs, go try again. So then they recorded All-Star and then The Morning Comes. And of course, those two songs would prove to be the two-hit singles off of the album. I do not remember and then The Morning Comes. And then the Morning

Comes. Oh, I do. Okay. Yes. Man, they had more hits than I thought. I, unironically, unabashedly, adore Smashmouth. They're great. Walking on the sun is great. All-Star is great. Rest in peace, Steve Harwell. A complicated person will talk about maybe if we ever spin this off into music. But I've always loved Smash Mouse, and they're kind of like populist anthems.

And Sugar Ray. I like all that stuff. All right. I'm not going to go with you on Sugar Ray. All right. Popularized by 1999's box office bomb mystery men. I like Mystery Men. I do too.

All-Star was a hit, and it was licensed endlessly. According to Smash Mouth manager Robert Hayes, quote, I licensed the crap out of that song. You could not walk into a grocery store or turn on the television without hearing All-Star. It was very, very saturated, end quote. Which is exactly why the Shrek team only used it as a placeholder. They were like, this song has been played to death. Like, why would we ever use it?

DreamWorks hired another artist, Matt Mahaffee, who, do you know the band's self? No. That's his band. They're an indie band. He's also an accomplished producer. And at the time, he was signed to DreamWorks Music Division, which again, that's under David Geffen. They hired him to write a song that was, quote, like All-Star. His song called Stay Home, which is great, was apparently very well received by the creative team,

As Elton said, quote, he hit every mark. It was fresh. It was exciting. It was catchy. We're like, oh, my God, we've done it. He hit it out of the ballpark. According to Mahaffi, he received a call and was told, quote, congrats.

You're opening the film. End quote. Can I play you a clip of the song really quickly, Lizzie? Because you can hear how it would work. Like, it's timed to the opening. All right, here we go. There's some similarities. A lot of similarities.

It's the same BPS. similar chord progressions, but I think it's a really fun catchy song. It's great. Unfortunately, there was just something about All-Star that felt perfectly well. Shrek. As Vicki Jensen explained to Rolling Stone, quote, every time we had a screening, we would discuss the music. All-Star continued to feel appropriate for the tone of Shrek.

We would have screenings where we would test out the personality of Shrek every single one. We adjusted his attitude. so we had versions like the teddy bear screening. When we hit the right tone for him, the song continued to establish him as a guy who feels upbeat, feels like he has it figured out. He's happy in his solitary existence and has no clue that he has a lot to learn about it.

End quote. All-Star outperformed stay home at all of the test screenings that they did. For some reason, this one familiar song continued from screening to screening as the movie became more and more animated, finished the look of it, and filled in all the gaps,

it just continued to define the character, end quote. According to Elton, it was Katzenberg himself who gave the final verdict. Get All-Star. Though it was much more expensive, its ubiquitousness served as an unexpected and valuable function, providing familiarity to the audience when meeting an unusual character for the first time. Matt Mahaffey received word that his song would be moved to the end credits. As he put it, they said, quote, no, never mind, Katzenberg wants America to hear All-Star one more time, end quote.

Oh, well, he's still in the movie. That's good. He is. If you'd like, you can go on YouTube and you can play the opening of the film while you play Stay Home and you can see how well his version does work. However, Shrek, Lizzie, as you mentioned, was not finished with Smashmouth. No, you need more. It was Jeffrey Katzenberg who wanted to end the film with an upbeat, musical number, as opposed to simply the happily ever after. Adamson tempt the final scene with The Monkeys, I'm a Believer. The original of the version of the song, though, he didn't feel was working.

So they tried a punk rock cover. Now, I'm not 100% sure which version it is. I looked them up, and I believe it's the Reeves and Mortimer and EMF cover from 1995. It's also possible that it's the Frank and Walters cover from 1992. If anybody knows that, please feel free to reach out. According to a 2021 article from The Ringer on the history of Shrek's indelible sound, DreamWorks Records president, Michael Osten, might be Michael Austin, pitched SmashMouth for I'm a Believer.

They opened the movie. Why not have them close it? As Smash Mouth Manager Robert Hayes recounts it, quote, I got a call from Michael Austin, who is the head of DreamWorks, not the head of DreamWorks, DreamWorks Records, anyway. And he said, hey, Robert, before you put out your album, they were working on their third album. I would like you to consider doing a song for this animated movie

that we're doing. It's got a big green ogre, and it's going to be a smash. It's called Shrek, and we want you to do a version of I'm a believer. I brought it to the guys, and they immediately said, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do a cover song for some cartoon, end quote. So they turned it down. Another sticking point, apparently, was the fact that Eddie Murphy was going to be singing along as a donkey as part of the pitch. Sure. Austin kept pressing, and the band kept passing. Finally, two DreamWorks employees were sent via plane with a VHS copy of the film to personally screen it for Smashmouth, which is amazing. Could you imagine being that DreamWorks employee sitting in the room

just with Steve Harwell watching a VHS copy of an unfinished Shrek? That sounds so good. It's amazing. Hay says the band was impressed by the film, but they still didn't want to do it, preferring to focus on releasing their third album. So they shut down talks, and then their album got pushed by the record company until November of 2001, leaving them with an unexpected window and no cash flow from the record release. So they say, hey, what about that Shrek movie? The only problem? They'd locked the Shrek edit because they were so close to the release. Smashmouth had missed their window. In the end, the band paid DreamWorks $25,000 to reopen the edit and include their version of I'm a believer. Worth it. I'm sure that paid them back in spades. Because they also reserved the right

to include the track on their upcoming album and it became the hit single on Smashmouth, Smashmouth's third studio album. As we've discussed, Lizzie, only an audience can make a hit. And so there's perhaps nothing as important as how you introduce your film to the world. And what better venue could exist to trot out the world's most irreverent, gas-expelling hero, than the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes so weird. I could think of a few, but great. Why Can? Well, because they were invited. In the year 2000, Vivendi, the French Communications and Environmental Services Company, acquired Seagram, the owner of Universal, one of Hollywood's major studios, and all of the sudden French cinema was intertwined with American cinema in a way

it never had been before. The president of Unifrance at the time said to Variety that, quote, for once, the French film industry has made a strong decision not to play games with Hollywood, but to get inside Hollywood, end quote. Which I think may have been a sexual comment now that I'm reading it for the second time.

French film companies looked at merger opportunities with American studios. The French government softened trade and tariff rules that restricted the number of foreign, i.e. American films released in France. And perhaps most important to our story, Cannes hired Terry Fremont, a Hollywood movie buff who wanted to counter Cannes' reputation

for featuring, quote, inaccessible and esoteric films. For the first time in years, he traveled to Los Angeles to meet with studio executives to find a slate of competition films that would be more broadly appealing. And prior to his trip, he called to request a copy of Katzenberg's newest movie for a pre-screening in Paris.

So Shrek was flown to Paris. And according to Katzenberg, Framo said the film was, quote, an extraordinary piece of entertainment and cinema. Not words I was expecting to hear. After years of not expecting to hear things like that, when you do, it's quite surprising, end quote. So Shrek and the team went to Cam. It was a risky proposition. The French press was known for trashing American films,

and Shrek was the first studio animated movie since, Peter Pan in 1953 to play in competition at Cannes. Yes, Fritz the Cat, I believe, played before this, but that was not a studio film. Further, it was the only comedy in a slate of serious American fare, including Mulholland Drive, the man who wasn't there, and the pledge. And Shrek. I know which one I'm going to. It's Shrek. The audience settled in, and Andrew Adamson immediately realized that they'd made a whole horrible mistake. Quote, during that whole opening sequence, as Smash Mouth is playing and Shrek's farting in the mud pool, I was just sweating.

I said, this is going to be a disaster. This is not the right audience for this film. The song, the animation, everything about this was a poor choice to be bringing here. He wasn't alone. Producer Aaron Warner later said, quote, as soon as Shrek jumped in the water and farted, I put my head in my hands, end quote. And Vicky Jensen, quote, here we are sitting in Texas. in evening gowns wearing borrowed jewels and everyone's watching Shrek take a put in the water,

end quote. And Katzenberg, quote, for the first 10 minutes, nothing. My heart was thumping. My forehead was breaking out and sweat. I said to myself, they're going to burn the place down. End quote. I would have given anything to have been in the can screening of Shrek. And all I can think of, Chris, if you and I had been able to sneak in there,

do you remember in Drop-Deggorgeous when Ellen Barkin and. And Alice and Janney are watching Denise Richards' performance, and they're just howling, laughing. And everyone else is completely dower. So good. That is the moment I would have loved to have had. Well, that's not the reaction they got because 80 minutes later, the film ended, the lights came up, and the house came down. Shrek received a standing ovation. People fucking loved it.

This was the same can that New Line did the Lord of the Rings party at. So it was quite the eventful can. Shrek opened wide on May 18, 2001, following a clever marketing campaign that featured a particularly effective series of brand partnerships, including one I remember quite well with Burger King. Yes, I remember that. Candy caddies, trading cards, green ketchup. I wasn't able to find anything explicitly on this subject, but I did want to mention that I distinctly remember Shrek as being the first animated film I'd ever seen to, promote the movie with the names of the actors on the poster. Big name actors had obviously been used for their vocal performances in animated films before

this. The Lion King featured the likes of Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg, many more. Aladdin made famous use of Robin Williams. But that Myers-Diaz-Murphy Lithgow line of text at the top of the cardboard cutout made quite the impression on me. Again, if there's a marketing executive out there that knows more about this, let me know. But it's the first time I can remember that.

And that's certainly become a trend since then. That's true. And it's also, you know, you mentioned some of those earlier ones where they definitely didn't do that on the posters. But also, even though there were big names and things like The Lion King, it wasn't all of the leads that were big names. This is, I feel like, one of the first times where it was like every main cast member is a huge name at this point. Absolutely. Shrek opened wide to $42.3 million its opening weekend, but better yet, it not only didn't drop its following weekend, it grew 0.3% to $42.5 million. And if we include the full four-day weekend, it was a holiday weekend for Memorial Day, $55.2 million. As Entertainment Weekly wrote at the time, quote, the offbeat fairy tale from DreamWorks, not only had the second highest opening ever for an animated film after Toy Story 2's $57.4 million,

it ended Walt Disney Company's seven-year lock on the top five debuts for a tune feature, beating 1994's The Lion King and last year's Dinosaur. Analysts had high expectations for Shrek, but no one thought an animated film could score a record-breaking opening without Walt's name attached, end quote. Shrek received generally positive reviews. Roger Ebert and the New York Times praised its humor and shots at Disney, but others, including the Chicago Tribune, criticized the film for lacking the heart, look, and magic of its Disney and Pixar competitors,

and others questioned the use of 3D animation altogether. Stephanie Zacharic wrote for Salon that, quote, The hyper-realism of computer animation begs another question. If your goal is to make things look as realistic as possible, why bother with animation at all? End quote. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker wrote, Call me an uncritical consumer of capitalist fantasy, but I don't recall firing off indignant letters to Warner Brothers to complain about Wiley Coyote

and his insufficiently detailed snout. Those were cartoons for heaven's sake. They were meant to look silly or bendy or pancake flat. All I ever required of Roadrunner was a drastic simplicity, both in his outline and in his psychological motivations. and I still want the same thing. What I don't want is to gaze at Princess Fiona at the multifarious play of her near-human features

and wonder if she is supposed to resemble Cameron Diaz, end quote. I pull those not because I agree with them, but they were an interesting thread of criticism at the time. Yeah, that's so interesting. It feels like the AI pushback. It's very similar. Yeah. Not saying that we are endorsing the use of AI.

I have some strong feelings around. when and how that should be used. But it does, it seems like whenever technology is advancing to a place where it is approaching something that a human can do, there's a lot of discomfort around it. Now, a small cadre of critical naysayers were not enough to stop the Shrek train. Shrek ended its run at nearly $500 million worldwide against a production budget of roughly $60 million, which of course is triple what Katzenberg had intended. At the beginning of the film's development, it was the fourth highest-grossing film of 2001, and Katzenberg, having settled his lawsuit with Disney for a reported $250 million in 1999,

was ready for his victory lap. The 2001 Oscars introduced a new category, Best Animated Film. So this would be four films in 2001 presented in 2002. Shrek was up against, yes, Jimmy Neutron, but most importantly, Pixar's Monsters Inc, which had bested Trek at the box office. The two were the highest grossing animated films of the year. And of course, at DreamWorks, there was a behind-the-scenes kerfuffle about who, if they were to win, should accept the Oscar. Given Katzenberg's reputation as, quote, a credit grabber, DreamWorks marketing chief, Terry Press,

was apparently the one to dissuade him from accepting the award. The team also considered having the directors, Adamson and Jensen, accept the award, but in the end, everybody settled on producer Aaron Warner, who even though he had been, according to him, the sixth or seventh producer on the project, he was the one who stuck it out until the end. In a full circle moment, Nathan Lane of the Lion King presented the award and announced Shrek as the first to win the category. Wow. Aaron Warner accepted the award and concluded his acceptance speech by thanking Katzenberg

personally. Quote, Katzenberg, who has a love, for animation that borders on obsession and who is the real reason we're here tonight. End quote. At the end of the day, screenwriter Terry Rossio said that there were more than 5,000 pages of screenplay on his hard drive for an 85-page final script. Oh my God. On the animation end, the final world included 31 sequences, 1,291 individual shots,

63 featured characters, not 17, as Katzenberg had originally mandated, and 36 unique locations. More than 28,000 trees, 3 billion leaves, and 1,250 props were made. It took three years and 300 artists to animate. Of course, as is to be expected, Shrek would go on to become a franchise Jaggernaut, in a way morphing into something closer to what it was parodying, Disney, than it ever could have expected. The franchise has generated billions across multiple films and spin-offs.

Of course, Shrek 5 and a donkey spinoff were recently announced. Shrek has also graced the stage. There is an annual Shrek fest, and perhaps most notably, Shrek has become an intrinsic part of meme culture, a topic that would require an entire episode into and of itself. Now, the talent that went into this film is perhaps no more apparent than when one looks at what its creators have gone,

on to do, and this is only a partial, not exhaustive list. Adamson co-directed Shrek 2 with his original Shrek co-director, Kelly Asbury. J.J. Abrams would co-create Lost shortly after the film came out, listen to our coverage. Vicki Jensen went on to co-direct Shark Tale with Propellerhead original Rob Letterman. Story artist Chris Miller wrote and directed Shrek the 3rd and Puss in Boots. Storyboard artist Conradternard Vernon went on to co-directed Shrek 2, Monsters vs. Aliens, sausage party and the upcoming The Jetsons film. I could go on and on and on, but you get the picture.

When I spoke to the employee at PDI, what they said reiterated by what I'll quote Aaron Warner with, is that the uniqueness of the location and situation being outside of Hollywood is really what gave Shrek its special sauce. It was a bunch of weirdos up in the Bay Area, left to their own devices, who were able to come up with something very special. and that eventually, when a lot of those teams were moved to Los Angeles, a little bit of that heart disappeared.

And we'll talk more about the other films that PDI wasn't involved in, like Madagascar at a later date. I think Aaron Warner wrapped it up really well. We just kind of figured out what the movie was about and that it was about us and the weirdos that we are and have felt like growing up. And that was our key into making that movie and the story team. the best of the best, the funniest people I've worked with, the kindest, the smartest, we laughed our asses off, and the story that we told was about us. That, to me, is what made it work, end quote. And that is our coverage on Shrek. Oh, that was great. Should we what went right it? Yeah, what's what went right it. Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first? I'll go first, and I'm going to take something we didn't talk about a ton over the course of this episode,

I feel like you're going to have something very poignant about more of the process. But especially after hearing how the movie morphed from Chris Farley to Mike Myers, I think something I didn't recognize before was the importance of Eddie Murphy continuing between the two versions. And especially having seen the Chris Farley footage in the last episode, I think Eddie Murphy carried a lot of that sweetness. and heart and was able to bring that into the version with Mike Myers where it was maybe lacking a bit more from his performance. And I think that's really important. I don't think Shrek works without Eddie Murphy. And he's maybe not the performance in this that is the most iconic,

but upon rewatching it as an adult, I just think he's kind of the linchpin. And he's so sweet and sincere. You know, I mentioned in the last episode, sort of how abusive Shrek is to Donkey is like a little hard to watch. But it's also one of the most interesting parts about this movie is that Donkey is just sort of a relentless friend. And I really, really love his performance in this. I agree. I think he's amazing. And I completely agree when they moved a lot of the insecurity and heart away from Shrek. And they made him a little bit colder and walled off, which works really.

really well for the story. Donkey had to pick up that slack. And Murphy's really, really, really, really good and brings so much empathy to that character. Yes. I agree. I'm going to give mine to Jeffrey Katzenberg. I think following Quibi for a moment, he was just a meme and a bit of a joke. And it was very easy to say, oh, my God, look at this out of touch, old Hollywood executive, who thinks he knows what the kids want, blah, blah, blah. First of all, yeah, sure, hubris, but he took a swing in an industry that is contracting due to the competition provided by short-form media.

It didn't work, but he tried something that I would not have the guts to try. And it negates the fact that he has had an absolutely astounding career full of some really incredible movies. that's not like a full-throated endorsement of necessarily his managerial style, which I only know of through the books I've read, et cetera. But it is to say Hollywood would not be the same place that it is. And the animated storytelling would not have progressed to the frontiers that it has

if it were not for Jeffrey Katzenberg. I agree. Well, Lizzie, that brings us to our panhandling portion of the show in which we beg you to get to. give us the support needed to keep this train rolling. We really appreciate you guys listening. We also appreciate you guys writing in. And when we do get something wrong and you write in about it, we appreciate it when

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For $5, you get an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can have your name, shout it out on the podcast, just like this. Lizzie's going for it. Brittany Morris. Should I try and do these in a bad track? Scottish accent? Yes. Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Paul Deziel, Jake Killen, Kang, Andrew McFagelbeagle, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton,

Juisherry Samant, sorry that one doesn't learn this, I'm going to keep going. Lachlin Morrow, Scott Gowrin, Sadie, just Sadie, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Brian Donoghue, Don Schaibel, George, Rosemary Southward, nope, Rosemary Southward, Tom Kristen, Salman Chaynani, Michael McGrath. I'm going to be honest, that was really good. I, mine is so bad. Thank you. And now I launch into the Jabberwocky. Yeah, that was, that was amazing.

Also might have been a hate crime, but it was great. I'm so sorry. I do have Scottish relatives. No, it was honestly, I apologize. 10 times better than anything I could have done. Thank you, everybody, for supporting this podcast. We really appreciate it. I got to be honest, you can send us your recommendations.

Our list is 500 movies long now. We will continue to take your recommendations, but guys, we're going to be doing this for the next 30 years at this point. Yeah, we can't stop. We're excited to do it for you. Our next film, if you missed last week's episode, is... American Psycho, get ready. Not that psycho. The American one.

Watch American Psycho, Super Modern Movie. Hope you understand it. And don't think he's cool like the weird Sigma Mail community online, which we'll probably talk about. Yeah, Christian Bale didn't think he was cool. So just remember that. Yeah. Anywho, we'll talk to you guys then.

Thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed our coverage of Shrek. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong. and check out our website at what went wrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Additional research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer.