I loved Shrek so much, I had all the merchandise and movies,” the narrator tells us, explaining that he prayed to Shrek every night until, one evening, after an argument with his homophobic dad, the boy feels the presence of a powerful green ogre in his bedroom. On the 14th of January, 2013, a copypasta titled “Shrek Is Love, Shrek Is Life” was posted by an anonymous user on 4chan. Some posts were innocuous – a screenshot from the film with a pithy one-liner, a pun riffing off a character name – but others took a distinctly darker turn. It was a place for true fans to go deep, undisturbed by casual fair-weather punters to laugh at and with their big green fave, and imagine the rich extent of his life beyond the screen. Wander down the Southbank to get tickets for London’s most esteemed tourist attraction, Shrek’s Adventure!, or catch the Broadway musical adaptation, which ran from 2008 to 2010 for over 440 performances – streaming on Netflix now! However, 2021 also marks approximately a decade since a whole new wave of Shrek fandom began to emerge.īoth Cook and Summers remember being reintroduced to Shrek around 2012 through ShrekChan, a 4chan-inspired imageboard that acted as the unofficial hub for Shrek lovers everywhere. Its continued dominance over the entire century speaks for itself: four films, a dozen video games, countless TV spin-offs, a three-issue comic book series, hundreds of increasingly deranged Instagram filters. Obviously, Shrek was a huge commercial success in its own right. Both the film industry and public were very ready to see them taken down a couple of pegs at the end of the 90s renaissance.” “I grew up with the Disney movies Shrek was having a go at, so I was ready to see them lampooned. “I was nine when Shrek came out, which was a good age, because I liked fart jokes, but was also pop culturally savvy enough to get a lot of the more adult jokes,” says Summers. But it wasn’t just Katzenberg who was ready to rip into Disney. “It doesn’t take much to read into the surface-level of parody,” says 28-year-old academic and self-determined “world-leading Shrekspert” Sam Summers, referring to the speculation that Shrek’s pint-sized antagonist Lord Farquaad was a dig at Eisner. Shrek was released by DreamWorks, a company co-founded by former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had left the company in the mid-90s in something of a strop, after CEO Michael Eisner – a long-time friend of Katzenberg and, more importantly, his boss – failed to promote him following the death of the company’s president, Frank Wells. And perhaps the peevishness and underdogism of this inverted fairytale has something to do with its origins. The ultimate “mood” for an era in which the nihilism and the carefree optimism of the previous decade no longer applied. Shrek rapidly became the poster-beast of 21st century fatigue. He’s kind of a grouch – there’s something quite relatable in that.” The vibe he gives off is ‘CBA’, and he just wants to be left alone. “In Pixar films, the hero is usually likeable or stupid or excitable,” says Cook. Instead, this “anti-fairytale” takes place in a sordid universe – a literal swamp – and is led by an unsociable and gassy protagonist. Arriving at the tail-end of Disney’s 1990s heyday, this brash computer-animated comedy – starring Mike Myers as a Scottish ogre who’s constantly beset by misfit mythical creatures – was about as far from the childlike worlds of Beauty and the Beast or Toy Story as you could get. It’s been 20 years since the smash hit first premiered at Cannes Film Festival (!) and won the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Feature (!!), beating Toy Story (!!!) in the process. “Like, wouldn’t it be funny if you were really into Shrek? And you did that for a decade?” “The whole idea of being a Shrek mega-fan is a joke, right?” Cook continues.
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