DreamWorks' SHREK

[Ben]

Point exactly. None of that matters. Does Shrek work twenty years on without knowing about the acrimonious background, as if most casual moviegoers even cared in the first place...?

Yes.

[EricJ]

Do people still laugh at a big oversold gag of Shrek using fairytale-book pages as toilet paper? Apparently.

Do they believe the "revolution has begun", and the call has gone forth to tear down Disney Burbank HQ, Jan. 6 style? Nnnnot so much, nowadays.

[Ben]

I refer you to my previous post, above.

[Daniel]

If Mr. kook is done, I also echo what Dacey said above about the soundtrack. Still one of my favorites.

[EricJ]

Until DreamWorks became TOO self-struck with its recognizable-pop-song soundtracks, and the "Karaoke wrap party" became a staple of self-satisfied DreamWorks CGI comedies from there on in.
(Further mutating into the Far Away Idol scene from Shrek 2.)

I remember on a film discussion, we were having a joke thread about "Name your favorite cliche' line by genre", and coming up with some good ones. One of my contributions was:
"(Establishing city shot from early-00's DreamWorks/third-party CGI comedy: )
'Won't you take me to...Funky-towwwn?'"

[Ben]

What’s that one from again?

[Dacey]

A very small portion of the long-sought after test animation for Shrek has been discovered online. Hopefully one day, we'll get the whole thing, but for Shrek nerds, this is a very cool find...

[Ben]

Much more of the grotesque Henson/Gilliamesque approach of the original book, before Jeffrey Cake-and-eat-it-too softened the edges so he could have a Disney-bashing antihero that was also a lovable champ worthy of his own fairytale ending. Which is why Shrek was just *so* huge when it came out the time that it did. Interesting "what if?" though!

[ShyViolet]

That was scary, puzzling and yet somehow awesome all at the same time!

(Also, would love to see it added to the Shrek 1 Honest Trailer!)

[Daniel]

Yep, creepy but fascinating. Always incredible when something like this is found. Here's another discovery, an animation test featuring Chris Farley's Shrek!



Absolutely insane to hear!

[Ben]

I think we all do have to agree, though, that Myers — and *specifically* his eureka moment of re-recording Shrek's dialogue with a soft Scottish brogue — was a touch of genius.

[Randall]

Other than the brogue, Farley was actually pretty close to what Myers did.

[Ben]

Well, yes, because Myers was a replacement for a character that already had a lot of the dialogue having been directed, recorded and animated to. So he had to continue along the same lines, for consistency and because that’s what was being asked for for the character and from the directors. But Shrek himself would have been a pretty unlikable character without the stealth-like softening up — we are, after all, supposed to *like* that he is unlikable at first — and Shrek the film would have perhaps had a very different outcome without what Myers brought to it, ultimately.

[Dacey]

Basically everything from the Farley version was scrapped. The only scenes that remain were the campfire one and the discussion of onions.

JK went to a test screening of the Farley cut and apparently hated everything he saw, telling the crew they had to start over. But before Farley could be brought back to do new material, he died. But Farley’s Shrek was going to be a teenager. His grouchy father wanted him to get into the family business of scaring villagers for a living, but Shrek—who is joyful instead of grouchy, which is atypical for an ogre—dreams of becoming a knight, and joins Donkey on a quest to do so.

An interesting thing about the animation test is it used hand-crafted sets, similar to stop motion, that the CGI characters would then be added to. Obviously, that probably would have been very expensive to do, but we are talking about 1996.

But I doubt Myers was ever “matching” his voice to completed animation that Farley had done, as his Shrek was a different beast entirely. JK was impressed by Myers in Austin Powers, which is how he was brought aboard, and when Meyers decided to give the ogre his distinctive accent, all of the scenes that had been animated for Myers until then had to be redone to match. This boosted the budget by $5 million, but the gamble of course paid off in a big way.

Sorry to ramble like that. I’m a Shreksbert.

[Ben]

Just to clarify, I didn’t state that Myers had to match animation, just the character as written, which obviously then changed as the story got revamped.

As far as I understand it, though, it’s well known that Myers then had to match his own lipsync to what had been animated with the eleventh hour suggestion to change the voice, with only minimal changes. They didn’t reanimate all his scenes, which would have been much more than a $5m redo!