Good morning 🐣

Check out yesterday’s intro to SHREK WEEK if you missed the announcement.

The year is 2003. May 2003, to be precise.

It’s already been an eventful year:

• The Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.

• Yugoslavia became Serbia and Montenegro, then the Serbian prime minister was assassinated.

• The U.S. declared war on Iraq.

• Ben Affleck played Daredevil.

• The human genome was sequenced to 99.99% accuracy.

• Baby bump, binge watch, electronic cigarette, flash mob, manscaping, muffin top, and unfriend are all new words, perhaps reaching a peak in the evolution of human language.

• Millennials everywhere became anxious about driving behind logging trucks after watching “Final Destination 2.”

• Shia LaBeouf is still cute and innocent, now starring in the new motion picture “Holes.”

• “Bruce Almighty,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Matrix Reloaded,” and “The Italian Job” are all dominating the box office.

• 50 Cent, Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Coldplay, Dixie Chicks, Evanescence, Linkin Park, and Norah Jones are all top of the charts. (Beyoncé’s debut solo album is still a month away.)

These are moments of great import.

But today we’re at Universal Studios Hollywood to participate in the budding field of Shrekology Studies.

Gather round, students. It’s a bright sunny day in beautiful Los Angeles. As you all know, it’s been two years since the first film came out, with the promise of a new installment in the Shrek Saga only a year away, and a brand new attraction has opened here called “Shrek 4-D.” It acts as a bridge between the two films, filling in the already rich thematic details. (For any time travelers from the 2020s, the ride no longer exists, but you can watch it as a short film on Netflix under the name “DreamWorks Spooky Stories: The Ghost of Lord Farquaad.” I’m not sure how that works though. Aren’t they the company that sends you DVDs in the mail?)

Now put on your OgreVision 3D goggles and take a seat in this grand auditorium. Since this short film is being presented in 4D, expect your chair to rock and roll with the camera movements, wind and water to spray in your face, and little nubbins to tickle the backs of your legs, almost like spiders are crawling all over you. Fun!

You can see the emphasis on 3D from the very beginning: a toad shoots its tongue at the audience and a spider falls in front of the camera. Newlyweds Shrek and Fiona (along with Donkey for some reason) are on their way to their honeymoon, but they’re lost. They take a shortcut through a haunted forest like any good Thomas Guide will advise you, where they encounter Thelonius (the henchman to the late Lord Farquaad from the first film), who kidnaps Fiona on horseback.

A high speed chase ensues and they run straight through the front door and out the back wall of the Gingerbread Man’s brand new gingerbread house, destroying it in the process. Gingy yells after Shrek over how expensive that house was. We can all empathize. But we also must ask, why is he living all alone so far out in these haunted boonies? What is he up to? He’s got to be gentrifying the area at the very least. And I shudder to ponder the chilling implications of a gingerbread man living inside a gingerbread house. It would be as if you and I were living in houses made of human flesh.

The pursuit continues into a cemetery. We pass the grave of Humpty Dumpty and a spectral hand grasps at Donkey. Finally we come to the tomb of Lord Farquaad, a revisionist monument depicting him fighting off the dragon with a spear, the very dragon that actually ate him. It turns out his ghost is still kicking around and he needs to marry Fiona to become King of the Underworld. This man cannot take a hint.

What makes this film and series so significant is that beneath all the juvenile humor beats the heart of a freedom fighter. It perfectly encapsulates not only the struggle to overthrow a dictator, but the aftereffects that can last for generations. Do you think the Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers magically disappeared overnight after WWII ended? Did the Confederates in the southern United States wink out of existence once the Civil War was over? Did they think, “Wow we lost the war. Guess we don’t believe other races are inferior anymore. We were wrong. Thank you.”

No; instead they raised monuments to their “lost cause” and taught their children and grandchildren, perpetuating their ideology across generations. Winning a war or revolution is just the first step. Securing a stable society built on trust and equality requires active maintenance in perpetuity.

And “DreamWorks Spooky Stories: The Ghost of Lord Farquaad” understands that 🫡

See you tomorrow! 💚