This year marks the 25th anniversary of Shrek, the animated upstart that launched a DreamWorks franchise, won an Oscar, spawned a stage musical and greatly extended the cultural life of the band Smash Mouth.

Hey now, you're an all star, get you game on, go play.

Hey now, you're a rock star.

Get the show on.

Get the show on. Get paid. And it all started with the story of a crabby green ogre who just wants a bunch of fairy tale characters to stay out of his swamp.

I'm Aisha Harris.

And I'm Stephen Thompson.

Today in this encore episode of NPR's pop culture happy hour, we are talking about 25 years of Shrek.

Joining us today is freelance culture critic and reporter Serena Toros. Hey, Serena.

Hey, Stephen. Jazz to be here. I am so glad you're here. So in 2020, Shrek was added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry,

canonizing it as a work of historical and cultural significance.

I don't think many people would have predicted that when it first came out in 2001.

At that time, DreamWorks was hardly an animation powerhouse, and Shrek

is basically a feature-length Disney disc track. It's got a big old fart joke right out of the

gate. It's got Mike Myers playing an ogre with a Scottish accent.

Oh, I don't know what? Maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads on a pike.

Got a knife, cut open their spleen, and drink their fluids.

Does that sound good to you?

Yet, Shrek was a huge blockbuster with a very long shelf life on DVD and cable and eventually streaming.

Part of its appeal lies in simplicity. It takes a very familiar kind of Disney-fied fairy tale world and

upends it with a farting ogre, a talking donkey voiced by Eddie Murphy, a butt-kicking princess

voiced by Cameron Diaz, and a diminutive but treacherous villain named Lord Farquod voiced by

...