Shrekky New Year

Whelp. My attempt to get this Shrek video out before the end of the year didn't work so well lol.

So where are we at?

The first phase was watching the film and making meticulous notes on every possible reference, no matter how small a reference it might be. And with Shrek 2, this naturally took a long time but it's finished.

The script has been chugging along the whole time, I'm around 13 pages worth now which is pretty close to the length of the Spoof Movies script. The end is in sight, I just need a couple of writing sessions to get these last parts in. Shrek 2 is dense with it's pop culture references, so while I'm trying to be sparing and not detail every single possible thing, there's still a lot of interesting stuff to cover so I want to try to capture much of it. Exhaustive without being exhausting, y'know?

Here, I'll share a little of it here:

Far Far Away Idol. Based on American Idol, this was a DVD extra, technically not part of Shrek 2, so I’m not going to break down everything about it but basically, each character sings a song and you can pick who you want to be the winner. But only Puss, Donkey and the Shrek & Fiona duet have unique endings. Picking any other character will instead have Simon Cowell sing instead. The start of his very short lived animation career. But did you know, there is an official winner? There was also a VHS version which can’t have the function of picking a winner with multiple endings. So instead, they had an online vote. Log on to the site and vote for your favourite. And three days later, Dreamworks officially announced that the winner of Far Far Away Idol was Doris, the ugly stepsister! (good for her)

I like digging for stuff like this, sleuthing through archive.org to dig up original versions of websites to find the official statements etc. There's Wikis that state Doris won which I could have just used, but in this era of misinformation, you know I like to be thorough.

This can send me down wild rabbit holes of trivia (that might not even get put into the video!). Such as this story I shared on my Bluesky about the origin of the "Why the long face?" horse joke.

This script also dips into some pretty serious places, such as Extreme Makeover TV Shows and body issues, transphobia vs trans representation and corruption in Hollywood. So these require more careful scripting than just "this scene is a parody of Spider-Man" etc. Incidentally, does anyone under 20 years old know about the upside-down kiss from the first Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie? I think it's debatable since we've had several Spider-Men since but it is arguably the most iconic scene from that film so... ?

Another factor I'm implementing as I go along is including directions for editors. Normally I write the script first, then go back and add time codes, footage for cutaways etc. But this time, I'm trying to do all of that at the same time, paragraph to paragraph, so by the time the script is finished it is IMMEDIATELY ready to pass onto the editor/s.

So as you can see, a lot of research and a lot of work has gone into this video. I imagine this will be WAY longer that the first Shrek video I did but I hope I've found tons of interesting stuff to share with you!

In terms of timeline, I don't doubt the script will be finished early January. Currently I'm recapping all the real world art portraits that the artists awkwardly photoshopped Shrek characters into. It's wild stuff. And then video production will begin. It's ambitious to say the video will be out in January too since it's so long. It's more likely to be February but naturally it's done when it's done. If I can make it sooner, I will but I don't want to spend all this time on research and scripting just to rush the video itself haha! And then the plan is to not make videos that take SIX MONTHS to write, god damn!

I'll leave you with a neat bit of Shrek trivia. So the film famously covers "Holding Out For A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler, which is a big needle-drop song, heard in the Mario movie, Angry Birds 2, one of the Shazam movies etc. But the Shrek version specifically was used in the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympics Opening Ceremony.

Remember, I'm in the Eddache Discord all the time and here's to a way more productive 2025!