Accent Depundent: An interesting inversion occurs with Lord Farquaad. that is, "fuckwad" In a rhotic American accent (or indeed, the Scottish one put on by Mike Myers), his name sounds perfectly innocent.
Acting for Two: One of the Three Blind Mice, who says "It's not home but it'll do just fine", is voiced by Mike Myers doing a John Lennon impression.
Actor-Inspired Element: Mike Myers originally voiced Shrek with a roughed-up version of his real Canadian accent (which can be heard in some of the outtakes included on the DVD and Blu-ray). However, he was unsatisfied with the finished performance and asked to rerecord the whole thing. This time he based the ogre's voice on his parents' Scottish accents- and thus Shrek became the Scotsogre we all know and love.
Adored by the Network: Hoo-boy, did Cartoon Network love this movie. Ever since the channel first got the rights to it in the mid-2000's, Shrek has been frequently shown as a movie when Cartoon Network needs time to fill. It was common to see on the network from 2007 to 2011, when the network would air the film at least once (and sometimes even twice!) a week. To a lesser extent, this also applied to the other Turner networks such as TNT and TBS.
The film and some ofits sequels are also pretty beloved by several other cable channels. Much like Jurassic Park, it has shown up on just about every network that airs movies to some extent. In a true twist of irony, even Disney Channel aired it at one point in time.
Approval of God: Despite its many liberties from William Steig's original book, he loved the movie. Reportedly, his reaction was something along the lines of, "It's vulgar, it's disgusting — and I love it!". Sadly, this was the only Shrek movie Steig had a chance to watch, as he died just two years after its release.
The series' Japanese dub is practically a who's who of Japanese voice acting: Masatoshi Hamada as Shrek, Kōichi Yamadera as Donkey, Norika Fujiwara as Princess Fiona, Masato Ibu as Lord Farquaad, Nobuo Tobita as Pinocchio, Kenji Utsumi as the Big Bad Wolf, Hiro Yuki as Gingy, Unshō Ishizuka as Prince Charming, Takeshi Aono as King Harold, Toshiko Sawada as Queen Lillian, Wataru Takagi as the Three Blind Mice, Tesshō Genda as Mabel and Brogan, plus many other voice actors who voice minor roles.
In the Brazilian dub, comedian Bussunda was Shrek. When he died in 2006, The Other Darrin was also The Other Marty: professional dubber Mauro Ramos, whose already recorded track for the first movie served as reference for Bussunda's performance, took over the role in the movies and specials that followed.
Colbert Bump: The film gave a huge amount of renewed attention to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" as a result of featuring John Cale's cover (and Rufus Wainwright's on the soundtrack album), resulting in the track accelerating in popularity and becoming Cohen's Signature Song in the public eye.
Creator Killer: Not to DreamWorks itself, but one of the franchise's sources of fuel was all the snark directed towards Disney boss and Jeffrey Katzenberg's former superior Michael Eisner, including having Farquaad be a caricature of him; this movie was one of the multiple punches that eventually knocked Eisner out of the Mouse House in 2005 (nearly losing Pixar was the final punch to send him to the floor).
One has Fiona meeting a Gypsy woman named Bib Fortuna (a reference to the Star Wars character of the same name), who would eventually become the Fairy Godmother. In this version Fiona is always an ogre, and Bib Fortuna gives her a potion that would make her beautiful, but tells her that she will alternate between her human and ogress forms until she finds true love. After that, she is whisked away by her dragon guardian and returned to the tower.
There was going to be a scene shortly after Shrek and Donkey get Fiona out of the dragon's keep that would involve them riding a mine cart like a roller coaster, complete with at least three references to Disneyland via the talking skull from Pirates of the Caribbean, the yeti from Matterhorn Bobsleds, and the Country Bears. The storyboards for this scene are included in the DVD.
After Shrek won the tournament in the first film, there was to be a scene where Farquaad explains the quest to Shrek and they're standing side-by-side to show their size comparison (explaining Shrek and Donkey's size jokes to Fiona later in the film). Several ideas for that scene include them walking by a garden or having dinner. One was storyboard in which Farquaad shows Shrek and Donkey his desire to turn Duloc into a more modern city with convenient stores and mini-malls, and it shows Farquaad holding the deed to the swamp to entice Shrek to accept.
It's difficult to imagine just how influential and popular Shrek was when it first came out, as just about every western animated feature has been influenced by its humor and style, not to mention "proving" that computer animation was the only way to go in the 21st century. In a nutshell, the trend was for such a film to star talking animals voiced by celebrities and featuring pop-culture references and body/toilet humor, i.e. Ice Age, Open Season, etc.
Genre-Killer: This film had such strong influence on the film, let alone animated film, industry that it ended three genres that were popularized by Disney in the 1990s:
After the first film became a roaring success, it would take nearly a decade for non-ironic fairy tale movies, especially ones made by Disney, to be taken seriously again. It didn't help that, in the decade preceding Shrek, Disney had done nothing but blockbuster musicals, mostly with princesses and princes, following the box office underperformance of The Rescuers Down Under (which Katzenberg oversaw) and some of Disney's staff were losing interest in it at that point themselves, as evidenced by The Emperor's New Groove being a full-blown comedy and Atlantis: The Lost Empire being an action-adventure film.
Along with Blue Sky Studios' Ice Age, another hugely successful non-Disney CGI film that was released a year laternote Disney would ironically obtain the rights to that film upon buying 20th Century Fox (Blue Sky's parent company) in March 2019, it wound up being the final nail in the coffin for hand-drawn feature film animation in America, which had been on a slow decent in popularity for the later half of the 90s. Dreamworks would close its 2D animation unit in 2003 and Disney would follow suit a year later, allowing the last few 2D movies they'd produced to die a quick, painless death at the box office so they could jump on the CGI bandwagon as quickly as possible. Despite some conceited efforts to keep the art form alive since then, CGI has remained the standard for all American animated features to this day.
While not as immediately obvious around its release, the film also was a large factor of the death of the movie musical during the 2000's. After the Disney Renaissance films revived the format by making it their bread and butter, the studio slowly transitioned away from them starting with Tarzan to avoid further criticism of becoming too formulaic. Had that been it, the movie musical might have stood a chance of remaining relevant, but Shrek's subversive and aggressive use of pop songs had two lasting effects. Firstly, this made every animated movie after its release for close to a decade to rely largely on pop songs for the soundtrack. Secondly, the film's mockery of musical conventions made people not take the format nearly as seriously. These two aftershocks killed theatrical musicals for basically the rest of the 2000's, with the genre being non-existent until the surprise success of High School Musical. This slowly caused the genre to re-emerge until it was safely declared back with the immense popularity of the songs from Disney's Frozen in 2013.
Kids' Meal Toy: At Burger King, it got action figures and trading cards.
Meaningful Release Date: Fathom Events and Universal brought the film back into theatres for its 20th anniversary on April 23, 25, and 28, 2021, the former being a day after it premiered in Cannes in 2001. Universal brought the movie out in 4K on May 11, one week before the 20th anniversary of its theatrical release.
Missing Trailer Scene: The Magic Mirror was originally going to say "Technically, it's not perfect".
The Other Marty: Chris Farley was originally cast as Shrek, and even recorded some dialogue. When Farley died, fellow SNL cast member Mike Myers got his part. Initial reports were that the script was radically reworked after Farley's death and Myers was basically voicing a different character. Unearthed animatics featuring Farley's Shrek show some differences, but not as many as originally thought; the scene is very similar to one in the final film. Myers himself was initially hesitant about accepting the role, because he was friends with Farley, and didn't want to disrespect his memory. He changed his mind after thinking it over.
Permanent Placeholder: According to Word of God, the use of the Smash Mouth song "All Star" at the beginning of the first movie was only intended as test footage track to get the timing of the opening down - they planned to use an original composition for the final product. However, "All Star" worked so well that they not only kept it in, but even hired Smash Mouth to record a new song for the ending (a cover of The Monkees' "I'm A Believer").
Serendipity Writes the Plot: You'll notice that both times we visit the city of Duloc, the streets are completely empty and deserted. The crowd scenes were specifically written to take place indoors or in another confined location to save on rendering costs for large groups of characters all moving independently of one another.
The line "You're going the right way for a smacked bottom" was improvised by Mike Myers after he got annoyed at one of the directors.
The line "Can't we just settle this over a pint?" was something the producers actually said to Myers to convince him to join the film. They threw it into the script after he agreed.
The scene where Princess Fiona burps was written after Cameron Diaz burped during a recording session after drinking Coca-Cola. Donkey's quip, "She's just as nasty as you are!" was what Eddie Murphy actually said to Myers in response.
Writer Revolt: Well, producer revolt. Former Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg made this film as a great big "Screw you!" to his previous company and especially his former partner Michael Eisner, whom he loathed, after Eisner shot down many of Katzenberg's idea and later beat him out of the studio head position. It worked, seeing as how this film put DreamWorks on the map and ended up indirectly contributing to Eisner being let go by Disney.
Franchise-wide
Cash-Cow Franchise: In the top 10 for "Highest grossing movie franchises of all time" list.
Development Hell: The fifth movie has gone through a prolonged development cycle which has repeatedly stalled. Originally intended for a 2013 release date after Shrek the Third, the latter movie's poor critical reception caused plans for the fifth movie to get cancelled, with Shrek Forever After becoming the series' Grand Finale as a result. The movie's production since restarted in 2016, but has since been repeatedly delayed with next to no information nor a concrete release date in sight, with rumors waffling on whether it's actually a sequel to Forever After or an outright Continuity Reboot.
Jason T. Lewis voices Donkey in the Shrek-related DreamworksTV videos, with Mick Wingert (best known as the substitute voice for Po of Kung Fu Panda fame) voicing Shrek in a handful of them.
What Could Have Been: The game was supposed to show off the hardware capabilities of the Xbox, and was actually supposed to be an original IP before being repurposed into a Shrek game.
Other games
What Could Have Been: The Pocket Shrek app was meant to have Fiona as an interactable character alongside Shrek, Donkey and Puss and even got advertised in-game, but she was cancelled when the app went offline and stopped receiving support.
show some differences, but not as many as originally thought; the scene is very similar to one in the final film. Myers himself was initially hesitant about accepting the role, because he was friends with Farley, and didn't want to disrespect his memory. He changed his mind after thinking it over.
