Let's Watch This: "Scared Shrekless" (2010)

Can you believe that it's been more than twenty years since the first Shrek was released?

I've already talked about the big green ogre a few times on my blog before. There once was a time when this franchise ruled the world. You couldn't go into a toy store without seeing Shrek merchandise. If it was 2004 or 2007, it'd be difficult not to find at least one thing in your local A&P that didn't have him or Donkey on the packaging. Trailers for upcoming DreamWorks movies like Shark Tale and Madagascar would proudly boast that they were from the same studio that brought you Shrek.

And then Shrek the Third came out. And... well, I'll let some quotes from critics sum it up for me...

"The film has little new to offer and the trailers show most of the funny moments." - Scott Chitwood of comingsoon.net

"Shrek the Third isn't awful, but it's bland, with a barrel-scraping averageness." - Peter Bradshaw

"What's lacking is that intangible sense of fun, of inventiveness, of ingenuity, that made the first Shrek something you ran to your friends, grabbed them by the arms and told them they simply HAD to see." - Steven Snyder

I haven't actually seen Shrek the Third in full myself, nor do I want to, but it was enough to get DreamWorks to decide not to make five Shrek movies as they'd initially planned. Instead, they just made FOUR Shrek movies. And a spin-off movie starring Puss in Boots. And a few holiday specials.

And by "a few", I mean "two", because I suppose a Shrek Thanksgiving special or a Shrek Fourth of July special would be really, really stupid. The first of these, 2007's Shrek the Halls, is the more well-known of the two, and still usually gets aired once at some point during each Christmas season. 2010's Scared Shrekless, on the other hand?

I don't know how many times this has been broadcast over the years, but it certainly doesn't air EVERY October. You can, however, find it on Netflix, where it's bundled with Shrek 4D (yes, the ride that was at Universal Studios and a bunch of other theme parks... and released on DVD) and the Monsters vs. Aliens Halloween special (note to self: review Monsters vs. Aliens at some point) as "DreamWorks Spooky Stories".  You can also find it on DVD. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Raman Hui, the special is at this point a footnote in the franchise's history, but I remember liking it well enough.

So, seeing as it's the only Shrek production obscure enough to qualify for a review on my blog - and also because it's the Halloween season - let's take a look at Scared Shrekless... which admittedly isn't nearly as good a pun as "Shrek the Halls". Though apparently they were originally going to call it "Shrek or Treat"...

We begin with a bunch of terrified teenagers running from... Shrek and Fiona's babies. Yes, apparently the movie where they debuted was so bad that just seeing the babies is enough to make people wet their pants. Or maybe they're just reminded of that nightmare Shrek had in the third film about the millions of ogre babies running rampant.

Shrek (voiced once again by Mike Myers) shows up and congratulates the babies on doing such a great job terrifying the teens. He and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) bring their kids back to their house to discover all of their friends waiting for them... Donkey (voiced not by Eddie Murphy but rather by Dean Edwards) is dressed as a jester, Gingy (Conrad Vernon) is dressed as a mummy, the Three Little Pigs (Cody Cameron) are dressed as clowns (making them the scariest thing in the whole special so far), the Wolf (Aron Warner) is dressed as a witch, and Pinocchio (also Cody Cameron) is... pretending to hang himself. Jeez, Pinoke, even for Halloween that's pretty dark...

If Donkey really wanted to scare Shrek, he should've just an ogre baby mask.

(For those unaware, that's another reference to the creepy nightmare scene in Shrek the Third)

Fiona insists that ogres don't get scared. After all, THEY'RE the ones who do the scaring. "And that's why we're the kings of Halloween," Shrek adds. I think Jack Skellington might object to that claim, Shrek. But Donkey and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) have an idea - they'll spend the whole night telling scary stories, and whoever makes it through the night without running out of the house screaming is named the King of Halloween. Everyone is all on board with that.

I think the Three Little Pigs already win. Put clown makeup on 'em and they're far
scarier than Shrek.

Fiona takes the kids out to scare some more trick-or-treaters, and then Shrek suggests that they do their scary story-telling not at his house, but rather in Duloc. Remember Duloc? This is the first time since the first movie that it's been brought up. Apparently, after Lord Farquaad got eaten by Dragon, it became a ghost town.

I notice that everyone took off their costumes before they arrived at Duloc. Well, the Wolf still has his witch's hat on, but that's about it. I wonder why that is...

"I thought Duloc was bought out by the Walt Disney Company and turned into a
theme park."

"Nah, they just sent Farquaad a cease-and-desist letter..."

Pinocchio brings up that he's heard Duloc is haunted by Farquaad's ghost - perhaps a reference to the aforementioned Shrek 4D? If so, wasn't Farquaad's ghost extinguished or whatever at the end? Does Pinocchio just not know this? But nobody is willing to forfeit, so in they go. Donkey makes a reference to House of Wax, because it wouldn't be a Shrek production without some pop culture references, and then Shrek notices the Information Booth from the first film that was a parody of "it's a small world". It's more or less the same, except it's in desperate need of repair and the dolls now sing about how run-down and creepy Duloc is. Was it reprogrammed? Or are the dolls actually sentient?

I prefer the second option. It makes the scene that much funnier (in a "this really shouldn't be as funny as it is" kind of way).

"Please end our suffering."

So everyone gathers in Farquaad's castle, and Pinocchio wants to tell the first story. Wolf correctly guesses that it's about how one time he got trapped in a petting zoo.

...okay, I'm going to need more information. Why would Pinocchio consider that scary? What exactly could any of the animals that live at a petting zoo do to somebody who's made of wood? What, did a goat try to eat him? Was it a BEAVER petting zoo or something like that?

Well, we don't get any more info, because Gingy interrupts to say that HE has a story for them all...

Gee, I wonder what horror movie THIS is going to be a parody of...

Gingy's story begins with him paying a visit to the Muffin Man in a glum mood. Apparently, his girlfriend kicked him out... something about being "too into himself". I guess being the mascot of Wal-Mart went to Gingy's head. Fortunately, the Muffin Man (Conrad Vernon) can bake him a NEW cookie girlfriend... you think this is going to be the same girlfriend who got eaten by Santa Claus in Shrek the Halls? That would be an interesting call-back.

Food (no pun intended) for thought: Gingy was made by the Muffin Man, wasn't he?
If the Muffin Man makes a gingerbread girl, wouldn't she technically be Gingy's sister?

So they get cooking, and Gingy insists that they add a lot of sugar to make sure this gingerbread girl is extra sweet (ba-dum-kssssh). After some Frankenstein references, the gingerbread girl is baked and brought to life. And she has the voice of Kristen Schaal.

The gingerbread girl declares that she and Gingy will be together forever. Montage time!

I wonder how they're drinking that, since, y'know, they don't have digestive tracts.

Or do they? I don't know much about gingerbread person anatomy...

Gingy is very happy... until his girlfriend starts getting a bit too smothering. So instead of simply asking her in the nicest way possible to be a bit less clingy, he decides to impatiently ask her to "leave him alone for like thirty seconds". Jeez, Gingy, no need to get so snappy with her. You're gingerbread, not a ginger SNAP.

The gingerbread girl still doesn't quite get the hint, so Gingy decides to make a run for it. Alas, his girlfriend catches up with him and laments that she wasn't trying hard enough to make him happy. One thing leads to another, and Gingy winds up kicking her into a mixing bowl.

Dang. Gingy has a body count.

"When you get to some gluttonous kid's stomach, tell 'em that Gingy sent you!"

Gingy returns home, surprisingly nonchalant about the fact that he just committed homicide... and I like the detail of his remote control being a PEZ (the candy, not the dispenser). Unbeknownst to him, the mixture that his girlfriend fell into is being baked...

The result: an army of gingerbread girls marching towards his house like zombies, chanting "Together forever. Together forever..." Here's hoping Gingy is into this sort of relationship.

"Where the heck is Cookie Monster when you need him?!"

Gingy claims that the zombies ate him, which sends the Three Little Pigs running out of the castle going "Wee, wee, wee!". The wolf walks out after them because they're his ride. Shrek, of course, sees through Gingy's lie and asks how, if they ate him, he is still there. Realizing that he's been caught with his hand in the metaphorical cookie jar (these jokes just write themselves), Gingy runs out of the castle. And just to make the scene even funnier, as he's leaving he calls them "Doody-heads".

Now only Shrek, Donkey, Puss, and Pinocchio remain. Puss wants to tell the next story, but Donkey butts in and begins to tell a story of his own...

So, let me guess... this one is based on Jaws, right?

Donkey's story, much like Gingy's, takes place on a dark and stormy night. He and Puss need to find a place to say. Fortunately, there's a nearby motel that looks like a giant boot. I assume the caretaker is a little old woman who has so many children she doesn't know what to do.

An already-annoyed Puss is irritated by Donkey's repeatedly referring to him as his "sidekick", but Donkey won't let him get a word in edgewise. Instead, he subjects him to Psycho references.

Jeez, Donkey...

Donkey claims that the caretaker murdered Puss, but Puss objects - clearly he was well aware of the approaching danger and grabbed his sword before the caretaker could do anything... but then Donkey showed up and saved him!

And guess what?! The caretaker is actually Prince Charming (voiced not by Rupert Everett but rather by Sean Bishop) in disguise! He's packing heat, and he wants revenge! "I want revenge!" he declares.

He's really mad that he wasn't invited back to appear in Shrek Forever After.

Prince Charming zaps Puss with a magic wand, but Puss is all "No way, that wouldn't happen!" and claims that he repelled the attack and leapt to safety... which, according to Donkey, is exactly what Prince Charming WANTED him to do!

PLOT TWIST!

Charming laughs, just like a crazed maniac... by which I mean he says "Ha ha ha ha HAAAAAAAA!", and then pulls a lever that sends Puss falling down the trapdoor and through the mouth of a gigantic creepy-looking plywood cutout. Makes sense to me, I don't know why YOU'RE confused.

However, Puss complains that this is incredibly unrealistic.

Is that supposed to be a likeness of Prince Charming? It doesn't LOOK like him...

Instead, according to Puss, he woke up. It was all just a dream. Also his bed was on the ceiling.

It's a good thing cats always land on their feet... oh, wait, that was just a rumor spread by dogs.

And then the lights go out. Puss seizes the opportunity to turn the tables on Donkey - when the lights come back on, DONKEY is the one taking a shower, leading to quite possibly the best part of the entire special. Are you ready for this? Okay...

Donkey pulls back the curtain and screams upon seeing the danger approaching. It's a gigantic donkey-eating waffle! It's packing heat and it wants revenge! "I WANT REVENGE!" it declares.

"LEGGO MY EGGO!"

Donkey runs... but how far can you run when you're standing on a plate covered in butter? And wearing a pink tutu? And a sombrero? "NOOOOOOOOOO! PLEASE, PLEASE! I'LL SWITCH TO PANCAKES!" Donkey exclaims as the donkey-eating waffle eats him alive.

I declare Puss the winner just for giving us this alone.

But Donkey gets the last laugh by having Pinocchio spray Puss with water, sending the cat running out of the castle. After that, we cut back to Shrek's house, where the Three Blind Mice are walking on a turntable unaware that they aren't in Duloc. Aw, no scary story about them? Surely you can do something with the farmer's wife as the villain. I mean, she cut off their tails with a carving knife. She clearly had some issues...

Well, anyhow, Shrek decides to tell a story himself. I don't think anything could top the gigantic donkey-eating waffle, but let's see what he's got...

And THIS one surely must be a parody of Friday the Thirteenth, right?

According to Shrek, some weird things were going on to a little boy who lived nearby, so Shrek decided to pay the boy a visit and see if he could get to the root of the problem. Since Geppetto (Sean Bishop) is the boy's father, it should be pretty obvious who that little boy is...

This segment allows us to finally get something that the previous two Shrek productions have lacked - Disney references! Seriously, for a franchise that exists mainly so Jeffrey Katzenberg could have an excuse to vent his frustrations towards Disney, I don't think there were ANY Disney references in Shrek the Halls. I guess it's because Disney doesn't have a whole lot of iconic Christmas-themed movies. Here, not only does Geppetto's house look very similar to his house in the Disney adaptation of Pinocchio, but there's a cat who bears a striking resemblance to Figaro snacking on a goldfish very much like Cleo.

"Figaro looked at Cleo, with hunger in his eye...

Then gobbled her up. The end."

Shrek heads upstairs to find Pinocchio having a spazz attack. His head spins around - Shrek dubbing this the result of his head not being screwed on just right - and then he says, "When you wish upon a star, you get lots of stuff!"

Wow, they're not even TRYING to be subtle with the Disney references anymore. How long until a mouse with red shorts and his own theme park shows up?

Pinocchio kicks Shrek in the face multiple times, then falls asleep. That was remarkably easy, wasn't it? Oh, wait, he's lifting off the bed...

I hear alien abductions are a big problem in Far Far Away.

Shrek turns around, discovers that Pinocchio is being lifted up by strings ('cause he's a puppet, get it?) and takes out a pair of scissors. "You never have this problem with sock puppets..." he mutters as he cuts the strings. So what's Pinocchio's problem? He hears voices in his head telling him what to do. And right now, they're telling him to barf on Shrek!

How exactly is a puppet capable of barfing? I was expecting them to make a joke about how the "barf" is actually tree sap or maple syrup 'cause he's made from the wood of a maple tree or something, but nope. It's never specified just what, exactly, Pinocchio just spewed on Shrek.

Shrek should've never taken Pinocchio to eat at Arby's.

Pinocchio spazzes out again, crawling around on the ceiling and reciting expressions about birds... not sure what birds have to do with Pinocchio, but eh... and eventually Shrek gets fed up and punts him out the window. He falls down a large flight of stairs, and upon landing he discovers just what, exactly, was causing him to go crazy. Turns out, there was a Jiminy Cricket parody in his head.

Well, that explains it. ANYONE would go crazy if there was a bug crawling around in their head.

"Could you help me find my way onto the set of Antz?"

The cricket explains that he's Pinocchio's conscience, and he was the one telling him to do things like barf on Shrek and climb on the ceiling. Of course, Pinocchio winds up stepping on the cricket because that's the go-to joke for most Pinocchio parodies - the cricket gets squashed, stepped on, or swatted in a humorous fashion. Even the Shrek Broadway musical had a joke about Pinocchio's conscience getting splattered on a windshield in it. Mind you, the original book did have Pinocchio smash the cricket with a hammer, so it's not even that clever of a joke.

Pinocchio claims that the story is a load of ogre poop and that he never had any bugs in his head. But then Shrek takes out a cricket and he runs out of the castle screaming.

"I told you we shouldn't have watched Geppetto."

So now it's down to just Shrek and Donkey. Donkey insists that Shrek can't scare him, to which Shrek brings up the rumors of Farquaad's ghost supposedly haunting his old stomping grounds... Donkey claims that he doesn't believe in ghosts, which is weird because he actually encountered Farquaad's ghost in Shrek 4D... I suppose that it's best we just don't think about it too much...

But then strange things start going on. Chairs move around on their own. A carving of Farquaad's face suddenly gains an angry look. And then a suit of armor becomes possessed by a spirit with glowing yellow eyes. Zoinks! It's Farquaad's ghost!

And it doesn't look anything like Farquaad's ghost from Shrek 4D!

Donkey flees, and of course it turns out that there is no ghost - the suit of armor was controlled by the ogre babies, with some help from Fiona and a pair of fireflies. After celebrating their success, they go pelt the Seven Dwarfs with eggs. The end.

What's the Verdict?

I personally like Scared Shrekless. Ogres and fairy tale characters just lend themselves really well to a Halloween special, and when you combine that with some hilarious writing, you've got a fun time on your hands. This special is genuinely funny - I particularly loved Prince Charming's cameo, the donkey-eating waffle, and the Disney references (which I found weren't too mean-spirited - more "let's make jokes about a far more iconic version of Pinocchio" than "let's make fun of Disney because Katzenberg is still holding a grudge"). It's neat that they brought Duloc back, and I have to give a lot of credit to Dean Edwards, whose Eddie Murphy impression is spot-on. It is kind of disappointing we don't get to hear how Pinocchio (maybe his story could've been about Pleasure Island), the Wolf, or the Three Little Pigs would tell a scary story... but I guess that would've dragged the special out a little. I recommend giving Scared Shrekless a watch if you're a fan of the movies... or at least the first two.

One more thing... I have some more Halloween special ideas for DreamWorks. How about a Madagascar Halloween special called "MadagaSCARE"? I dunno, could work. Or an Over the Hedge Halloween special where the animals raid candy from trick-or-treaters? That movie is really underrated.

Did You Know? - Fun Facts About the "Shrek" Franchise

Hellooooooooooooo, all you animation fanatics out there! Welcome to the first edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

And for the first edition of Did You Know?, I thought it'd be a good idea to dive into what was at one point one of DreamWorks' most popular franchises - Shrek.

As I've said before, when the very first Shrek film was released in 2001, people loved it. It won an Academy Award, it got critical acclaim, it made mucho moolah at the box office, it was a smash hit. And then in 2004, Shrek 2 was released, and everybody loved THAT movie too. Many consider it to be even better than the first one. And then Shrek the Third came out in 2007. I don't know what went wrong with Shrek the Third, but very few people liked it, and people started to become bored with the franchise. Shrek Forever After was unceremoniously released in 2010 as a way to cap off the franchise (there was originally going to be a fifth film, but... well, just read this article), then the year after that they released a spinoff film starring fan favorite character Puss in Boots, and since then the franchise has basically become a punchline. In recent years, the films (at least the first two ones) have regained a bit of popularity as memes have begun to spawn on the internet, and in 2016 it was announced that a FIFTH movie was in production, initially planned for a 2019 release. I'm writing this article in 2020, and we still haven't gotten said fifth film, but it's still in development, along with a sequel to the aforementioned Puss in Boots movie.

Soooooooooo... Shrek. What are some things that you may or may not have known about the franchise? Well, you probably already know that Chris Farley was originally cast as the voice of Shrek, and that there was a Broadway musical based on the first film. You probably already know that the film is Jeffery Katzenberg's middle finger towards Disney, complete with Lord Farquaad being designed to resemble Michael Eisner. Heck, you probably already know that it was based on a book. But did you know THESE things?

1) When Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the book back in 1991, he pitched the film as a hand-drawn production at his animation company, Amblin Entertainment. His original choices for the roles of Shrek and Donkey were Bill Murray and Steve Martin respectively.

2) They also briefly considered making the film a live action/CGI hybrid, or being done with motion capture.

3) Mike Myers originally recorded Shrek's dialogue in an American accent. When he was shown a rough cut of the film in 2000, he got the idea to give Shrek a Scottish accent and asked if he could re-record the dialogue - his mindset was that, since Lord Farquaad has an English accent, he felt that a "working-class" accent like a Scottish accent would help create a good contrast between Shrek and Farquaad. "I thought, well, Scottish people are fantastic at being super-happy and then super-mad," he said in an interview. "And I thought, that's an ogre!"

Concept art of Shrek and Donkey.

4) Before Mike Myers got the part, Nicholas Cage was offered the role of Shrek. He turned it down because he didn't want to play an ugly green ogre. In a 2013 interview, he clarified, "I'm not afraid to be ugly in a movie. When you're drawn, in a way it says more about how children are going to see you than anything else, and so I care about that."

5) Janeane Garofalo was originally supposed to voice Fiona, but she was replaced by Cameron Diaz.

6) A few members of the film's development team actually took mud showers like Shrek does at the beginning of the first film in order to study the movement of mud. The film's art director, Douglas Rogers, also visited a magnolia plantation in South Carolina for research (and wound up getting chased out by an alligator).

7) Chris Farley's version of Shrek was a tad different than Mike Myers' version. For one thing, he had hair. And let me tell you, seeing Shrek with hair was really jarring when I first saw this concept art.

More concept art of Shrek and Donkey. Note the mop of brown hair on
Shrek's head.

But on top of that, he was also going to be a teenaged ogre who didn't want to go into the family business of scaring people. He wanted to become a knight and help people. According to screenwriter Ted Elliott, "It was like 'Shrek the Friendly Ogre', where he goes up to people and says 'Hey, wanna be friends?' And everybody goes 'Aaaaah! An ogre!' And then he walks away with his head down, and his shoulders slumped. That was one of our hardest battles, to [convince the studio] that people don't think Shrek is an ogre simply because he's ugly; being ugly is simply an aspect of being an ogre, but we tried to keep him from being interpreted as just another nice guy. His character had to be somewhat ogre-ish; we always said that because the point of view of the movie is on Shrek, you read him as the hero. But if the point of view had been over the shoulder of any other character, except the donkey, he would have been an ogre. That was how it had to work."

The other screenwriter, Terry Rossio, added, "Our approach was also inspired by the fact, that if you take an ogre and put him in the lead and make him the hero, you've already overturned one of the main conventions of fairy tales, and we felt that's what's cool about this. You can actually do a comic fantasy where all those conventions that you're familiar with are going to be messed with... Shrek is a person who thinks he's just fine, but the world rejects him. How does he deal with that? Well, he decides he doesn't need the world. That's an inappropriate response to his accurate assessment of himself."

8) Mike initially didn't know that Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek. In a 2014 interview with Marc Maron's podcast, he said, "I was working on [the movie] and I looked at the Marquette of Shrek, you know, the little clay model that they make, and I said, 'Was this offered to Farley? It looks like Chris Farley.'"

9) In addition to Shrek, Mike Myers also voices one of the Three Blind Mice.

10) Which fairy tale character is Donkey supposed to represent? Some online have theorized that he might be one of the boy's from Pinocchio who made the mistake of going to Pleasure Island. Others have suggested that maybe he's the donkey from the Town Musicians of Bremen.

11) According to concept artist Rubin Hickman, the directors and artists couldn't agree on how they wanted the movie to look for a while. The directors wanted a more whimsical Wizard of Oz-inspired look, and the artists wanted a darker, edgier style - more like an underground comic. For a while, they went with the latter, but after an animation test that Jeffrey Katzenberg hated they decided on a middle ground of sorts. "A dark color scheme was not going to go over in a mass audience the way that Shrek did," Rubin explained.

12) Shrek takes the Mickey (no pun intended) out of Disney so much that DreamWorks was worried they might get sued. To avoid any potential lawsuits, they screened the movie for both their lawyers and Disney's. They managed to avoid getting sued, but some Radio Disney affiliates refused to let DreamWorks buy airtime to promote the film.

There's actually a pretty funny picture in the book Shrek: The Art of the Quest
that I wanted to put here. It's a sketch of Shrek dressed as Mickey Mouse
cheerfully saying, "I'm branded!"

But I couldn't find that picture online, so have this billboard instead.

13) In the original script, Fiona was BORN an ogre to the King and Queen of Duloc, hence them locking her in a tower. She was to escape and encounter a witch named Bib Fortuna (just like the Star Wars character) who gave her a potion that turns her into a human during the day but turns her back into an ogre when the sun sets. Then she would've been whisked away back to her tower by the Dragon. In the movie, it's never explained just WHY, exactly, Fiona changes back and forth between an ogre and a human (I subscribe to the theory that the Fairy Godmother did it).

Apparently, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had to fight to get the "Fiona turns into an ogre" plotline into the movie. Initially, the higher-ups felt that shapeshifting didn't belong in fairy tales. According to Ted Elliot, "We said, 'Wait, did you not see The Little Mermaid, did you not see Beauty and the Beast?' The other thing we did in the screenplay was we described the princess's other self as being 'furry' or 'hairy'. All we wanted was her 'ugly self' to be uniquely ugly to her, to not be a female version of Shrek but to be a unique version of herself, as unique as her human appearance was." The way they got everyone else to stop objecting to the plotline? Say that instead of a shapeshifting princess, Fiona was an ENCHANTED princess.

14) Donkey was inspired by a real donkey in the Barron Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, California. His name is Perry.

15) A deleted scene has Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey taking a trip through the Seven Dwarfs' Mine, which featured references to Disney Parks attractions Pirates of the Caribbean, the Matterhorn Bobsleds, and the Country Bear Jamboree. Another deleted scene was to take place after the tournament, with Farquaad explaining the quest to Shrek and showing him his desire to turn Duloc into a more "modern" city with convenience stores and mini-malls.

16) In the Norwegian dub of the film, Shrek isn't an ogre but rather a troll. Similarly, the Swedish dub makes him a "swamp troll".

17) Speaking of Norwegian dubs, the Norwegian dub of Shrek 2 replaces the gag of Donkey singing "Rawhide" with an old Norwegian song a la "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" about how many people it takes to pull a root out of the ground. Eventually, he gets to several hundred people... just before messing up the lyrics and forgetting where he was in the song. Then he says, "Oh, well. I'll take it from the top!"

More early concept art.

18) Shrek's line "You're going the right way for a smacked bottom!" was improvised by Mike Myers.

19) Shrek and The Prince of Egypt were in production at the same time. According to one animator, if you failed on The Prince of Egypt, you were punished by being forced to work on Shrek. This was known as being "Shreked".

20) Monsieur Hood is voiced by Vincent Cassel. He also provided the voices of Diego in the French dub of Ice Age and Rodney Copperbottom in the French dub of Robots.

21) I said earlier that Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the film to be his middle finger towards Disney (he suggested having the information booth take Shrek and Donkey's photo after the "It's a Small World" parody), but that might not have been Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's intent. "For [the scenes in Duloc], I think people are looking at the narrative and judging intent. It is an amusement park, but we knew that people would assign it to Disneyland, and that's what happened," Ted Elliot said. "But people have decided the intent was to rip Disney - if we had wanted to rip Disney, the movie would have been way too mean and dark. I think it would have been distasteful. There are jokes, but I think they're very affectionate for the source material. I think people are ascribing Jeffrey Katzenberg's relationship with Michael Eisner to what is going on in Shrek, and that's unfair."

22) As for whether or not Farquaad is modeled after Michael Eisner, Ted Elliot claimed, "All I can say is, Farquaad's character was created as an antagonist to Shrek's character. You have a misanthropic antihero with no regard for social niceties, so the best antagonist for that is the perfectionist who is all about appearance. In dealing with some of the themes of prejudice, this is the one that seems obvious to me: Farquaad's a self-hating dwarf! He is a fairy tale creature who is driving out fairy tale creatures. He is not acknowledging his own fairy-taleness. In my mind, that's a more interesting aspect to Farquaad. People say, 'Why is he short?' He's short because he's a fairy tale creature who thinks he's Prince Charming, he thinks he's the hero who looks like Tom Cruise. He's not!"

23) For a while, Gingy the Gingerbread Man wound up becoming a mascot of sorts for Wal-Mart, appearing in ads for the store. For whatever reason, in these ads he was given pupils, which looked very creepy.

24) Remember Little Red Riding Hood's appearance in the montage at the beginning of Shrek 2? That was originally supposed to appear near the beginning of the first film, but it was removed because they thought having Shrek scare Little Red Riding Hood might make him come off as unlikable. And that's not the only thing that was recycled for the sequel - originally, instead of giving Shrek the deed to his swamp after he delivers Fiona to him, Farquaad was going to double-cross Shrek and throw him in the dungeon. Donkey would enlist the help of the fairy tale characters to break him out. They felt that this scene, while funny, was slowing down the picture and nobody really wanted to see more of the fairy tale characters when they could be watching Shrek and Fiona, so they cut it.

25) The "Happily Ever After" potion affects both the drinker and the drinker's true love. So what did Dragon turn into when Donkey drank the potion and became a stallion? Apparently, a deleted scene was going to reveal that she became a big pink pegasus.

26) During the scene in Shrek 2 where Puss in Boots is drinking milk in a bar, look closely and you'll see a curly-haired bull on the bottle of milk next to him. That bull is a caricature of Puss' voice actor, Antonio Banderas.

27) Spoiler alert - it turns out that King Harold, Fiona's father, is actually the Frog Prince, as revealed at the end when he saves Shrek and the Fairy Godmother turns him back into a frog. Harold is voiced by John Cleese, who years earlier voiced a frog in The Swan Princess named Jean-Bob, who believes himself to be royalty. Probably just a coincidence, but who knows?

28) Artie from Shrek the Third was supposed to reappear in Shrek Forever After, but they weren't able to get Justin Timberlake back.

29) Remember the Poison Apple bar from Shrek 2? It pops up again in Shrek Forever After - it's now a Chuck E. Cheese-esque tavern called the Happy Apple. Which admittedly isn't as clever of a name.

30) Jennifer Saunders and Rupert Everett, the voices of Shrek 2's villains the Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming, both auditioned to voice Disney villains. Jennifer auditioned to voice Ursula in The Little Mermaid and Rupert auditioned to voice Gaston in Beauty and the Beast (he didn't get the part because the producers didn't think he sounded arrogant enough. He remembered this when he voiced Prince Charming).

31) Shrek actually makes a cameo in at least one other DreamWorks film, Monsters vs. Aliens. General Monger wears a pin of the ogre's head on the right side of his chest. Shrek is also mentioned in the follow-up Halloween special, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space.

32) A whole new computer animation program had to be created to animate Puss in Boots' fur.

33) This exists:

Thank you for joining me in this first edition of Did You Know?. If you already knew any of these things, then I'm afraid that I can't refund the time you spent reading this post. Sorry.

Back to the Drawing Board - The DreamWorks Edition

Welcome to the first edition of something that I like to call Back to the Drawing Board, where we look at things from the development process of something animated that ended up being cut - or cancelled entirely. And stuff like that. It's gonna be much more interesting (I hope) than I'm describing it here, trust me. So, what's our first topic?

"I've been sitting on this moon since the 1990s and I STILL haven't caught anything! What the heck?!"

Ah, DreamWorks Animation. You've always been a bit of a mixed bag of an animation studio. When you made a good film (Kung Fu Panda, the first two Shrek movies), you made a good film. When you made a lousy film (Shark Tale, for instance), boy did you make a lousy movie.

One thing I will say about DreamWorks is that they certainly been able to make the most out of some rather strange premises. For instance, a snail wants to race in the Indy 500. Who would've thunk that they could actually make a good movie out of that? However, this didn't always work out in their favor. I don't think there's any way that they could've made a movie about a bee falling in love with a human woman and then suing the entire human race work.

Which leads me into the story of the first film idea we'll be talking about today - in 2005, DreamWorks announced a film called Route 66.

Route 66

What, exactly, was Route 66 supposed to be about?

Well, if you're like me and you haven't been to Route 66, there are all these neat things to see as you're driving down the road. Teepees and dinosaurs and a large blue whale (pictured below).

Insert some sort of Pinocchio-related joke here, I've got nothing.

DreamWorks' film about Route 66 was apparently supposed to be about a giant golf ball statue located on Route 66 named Mulligan voiced by Harland Williams. Would DreamWorks have been able to make audiences care about a giant golf ball the same way it made audiences care about a panda with the voice of Jack Black? Well, Route 66 for whatever reason didn't get made (maybe they thought it would've been too similar to PIXAR's Cars?), so we'll never know. But hey, maybe.

Concept art from the film.

It Came From Earth!

When DreamWorks announced Route 66 in 2005, they also announced a film called It Came From Earth!. This film was described as "a reverse alien invasion story told from the perspective of martians when human astronauts arrive". This, in my opinion, sounds like it would've been a lot more interesting than the DreamWorks movie about aliens that we DID eventually get, Home (seriously, WHY did they cast Rihanna as a character who is supposed to be a little girl?).

Actually, come to think of it, isn't that essentially the plot of Planet 51? Except there's just the one astronaut rather than a whole bunch of them?

I couldn't find any concept art for It Came From Earth!, so here's the DVD cover for Planet 51. I have not seen this movie, but it looked pretty lousy. I like the astronaut's expression and pose, though.

Shrek Goes Fourth

Remember when Shrek was a film beloved by audiences and considered a hilarious spoof of classic fairy tales? Well, it was indeed both of those things... until 2007, when Shrek the Third came out. When everyone saw how awful that movie was, Shrek quickly became a mockery. Nowadays, this franchise is mainly just liked for the multiple memes that it spawned.

Blah blah blah, check yourself before you Shrek yourself, yadda-yadda-yadda...

Well, before Shrek the Third came out, DreamWorks planned on having FIVE Shrek movies. FIVE. The plot for the actual fourth movie starring the Mike Myers-voiced ogre, Shrek Forever After*, was originally going to be the plot of Shrek Five, and Shrek 4 - or Shrek Goes Fourth** - was to be a prequel of sorts about Shrek telling his kids the story of how he found that swamp that they call home in the first place. Or maybe Shrek Forever After always had the plot it was released with and the "Shrek's backstory" thing was to be the plot of Shrek 5, I'm not one hundred percent sure which.

Either way, here's some concept art of a teenaged Shrek. It's very strange seeing Shrek so thin...

And then Shrek the Third came out and got negative reviews. I've seen multiple people refer to it as "Shrek the Turd". DreamWorks got the hint and decided that maybe they were better off just making ONE more Shrek movie as opposed to two (well, technically they DID make two more Shrek movies if we're counting the Puss in Boots spin-off film, but still...).

Thus, Shrek Forever After was released in 2010, didn't get very good reviews either (though its Rotten Tomatoes score is higher than that of Shrek the Third) and Shrek has since then only shown up in television specials and YouTube videos. Then a few years after the fourth film was released it was announced that they were actually making a fifth Shrek movie... or maybe it's going to be a reboot of the whole franchise, once again I'm not sure one hundred percent sure which. If it is indeed a fifth movie, this article is going to be pretty outdated.

Hopefully this at least means that all those Shrek food tie-ins that were everywhere when Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third were in theaters will be back. You know, the Shrek Twinkies, the Shrek M&Ms, the Shrek sundaes at Baskin-Robbins... all that stuff. I probably won't eat any of it, but still, I kind of hope that it'll all back for no other reason than to see people react to it.

Larrikins

Larrikins sounds like it would've been pretty interesting. The film was meant to be released in 2018 and focus on an uptight bilby named Perry (an Australian animal named Perry... where have I seen that before?) who gets kicked out of his burrow and finds himself in the middle of a musical adventure in the Australian outback. Other characters included a hard-edged authority-hating kangaroo named Red and a crocodile named Howard who believes that he is in charge of preventing 'non-native species' from spreading. Peter de Seve, who's done a lot of character designs for the Ice Age franchise, did some concept art for the film, which I have posted below.

Hugh Jackman, Margot Robbie, Ben Mendelsohn, Josh Lawson, and Rose Byrne were just some of the celebrities chosen to voice the film's characters. Alas, in 2017 it was revealed that Larrikins had been cancelled. Tim Minchin, one of the film's directors, was understandably not too thrilled about this.

On a positive note, elements and characters from the film wound up in a recent DreamWorks short called Bilby.

Tortoise vs. Hare

You know the story of "The Tortoise and the Hare", right? If you don't, here's a summary: a hare won't stop bragging about how fast he is, a tortoise says that he can beat him in a race, so they race, the hare takes the lead and then thinks that he can take a nap and the tortoise still won't be able to beat him, but the tortoise takes the lead while the hare is sleeping and wins the race, and the moral is apparently supposed to be that "slow and steady wins the race" but it comes across more as "don't be a cocky idiot and take a nap during a footrace."

"I can beat him... he might be fast, but he's also a lazy idiot!"

Well, in 1999, Aardman announced that they were planning an adaptation of the story with DreamWorks (this was just a year before their first DreamWorks-distributed film, Chicken Run, was released). The project ended up being postponed in 2001 so they could rework the script.

Why didn't we see this film? Well, DreamWorks had a habit of meddling with production of Aardman's third film distributed by them, Flushed Away (which I personally think is a hilarious film and definitely recommend watching). For one thing, it was originally supposed to be about pirates, but DreamWorks claimed that pirate films weren't marketable (this is before the first Pirates of the Caribbean film came out, but I bet they felt pretty stupid when they saw how much money THOSE films were making) and asked them to modernize the idea. They also insisted on more of the film's comic relief slugs.

The entire process was such a migraine for Aardman that they decided to stop letting DreamWorks distribute their films. They went over to Sony Pictures Animation after that, and eventually did indeed make a movie about pirates (which I haven't seen but I've heard great things about). Who knows, maybe someday they'll take another crack at "The Tortoise and the Hare". And by "they" I mean either Aardman or DreamWorks.

Here is a tortoise from an episode of Aardman's Creature Comforts.
I don't know why he's wearing a sweatband. Maybe he just completed a race against a hare?

Tusker

After Antz was released, DreamWorks announced in the December of 1998 that their next film would be Tusker. It would've been directed by the same directors that helmed Antz and focused on a herd of elephants trekking across Southeast Asia. I gotta say, going from a film about bugs to a film about elephants is a pretty big (pun intended) leap.

I love elephants, so I'm obviously pretty disappointing that this didn't get made. I'm not sure why it didn't get made - maybe the CGI department was too busy working on Shrek or something? But if that were the case, why not just make it traditionally-animated?

Here are some storyboards for the film posted by Frans Vischer on his blog:

I don't even have a funny comment here. I just REALLY WISH that this film got made!

While nothing ever came out of the project at DreamWorks, in 2008 it was revealed that the film was now under production at an animation company called Imagi (who also worked with DreamWorks on that Father of the Pride show). But then Imagi closed in 2011, and at no point in-between 2008 and 2011 did they actually release Tusker. In fact, I'm not even sure if they started working on it before the studio closed (they had quite a few other projects going at the time, mind you).

And speaking of cancelled films from DreamWorks' early days...

The Wanderer

This film was to be directed by Paul and Gaetan Brizzi (brothers who worked on a number of projects at Disney, including Tarzan, A Goofy Movie, and Fantasia 2000) and Simon Wells (who also directed We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and The Time Machine and acted as a story artist on many of DreamWorks' other films). All we know about this one is that it was going to be about a stray bear who joins a group of circus bears and changes their lives. In 2012, Devin Crane uploaded some concept art for the film on his blog.

The project ended up being cancelled after Simon Wells went off to direct The Time Machine and some studio changes. We wouldn't get to see DreamWorks' take on a circus bear until ten years later when Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted came out.

Obviously the bears in The Wanderer were to be much more anthropomorphic than this one.

Truckers

I've never read the 1989 book Truckers or its sequels. When I first heard the name I thought "Is it about trucks? Or truck-drivers? Or something related to trucks at all?" Well, it's not about any of those things. It's about nomes (I didn't misspell that, in the book they're called "nomes" - just look at the book cover that I've posted below), tiny people who live hidden among humans. DreamWorks acquired the film rights in 2001 and began planning a film that combined all three books into one story. Initially, the film was to be directed by Andrew Adamson.

And apparently they have pet rats too.

Then in 2008, Danny Boyle (yes, the director of Slumdog Millionaire) was announced as the film's director, but the project ended up falling apart. Then in 2009 it was announced that Simon Beaufoy (who coincidentally enough ALSO worked on Slumdog Millionaire as the film's screenwriter) had been hired to work on the project, and in 2010 it was announced that the film was to be written by John Orloff (who also wrote Legend of the Guardians) and directed by Anand Tucker.

Long story short, I'm writing this article in 2019 and we still haven't gotten Truckers. I don't even know if DreamWorks still has the film rights.

Okay, now, this is just SOME of the films that DreamWorks planned on doing but didn't get around to completing. I limited this article to only talk about eight films because otherwise we'd have an extremely long article.

Actually, maybe I'm just being lazy by suggesting you look these films up yourselves instead of talking about them in this article, but again, if I actually DID talk about all of them we would have an extremely long article that you probably wouldn't find very fun to read.

And by the way, I didn't talk about Me and My Shadow because I'm honestly not sure if that's still in production or not. Same with that B.O.O. film that was gonna star Bill Murray and Seth Rogen, Madagascar 4, and Puss in Boots 2.

* I didn't realize this until I was writing this article, but... Shrek Forever After is intended to be a reference to the fact that it's the fourth Shrek movie. No, really. Shrek Forever After. Say it out loud if you don't believe me.

** I also just realized that Shrek Goes Fourth was intended to be a pun on Shrek Goes Forth. What do you think they were planning on calling the hypothetical SIXTH movie? Shrek Sics Puss in Boots on Some Hooligans That Won't Stay Out of His Swamp?