The Shrek Data (Patreon)

To make the video How Has Shrek Aged? we combed through the film for as many references as we could find and then analysed them if they sustained relevance in the 20 years since it came out. Basically could a general kid today get it? Obviously the video explodes whether you NEED to understand the origin to appreciate it and so on, but here is the cold hard data for you.

One thing off the bat is I'm certain I didn't catch every single reference, in fact a few have been pointed out in the comments. This doesn't and shouldn't have a massive impact on the overall assessment, obviously there's not suddenly a lot of Hugh Hefner references that outnumber the Disney references, but I will flag that while we have a LOT of data, it is incomplete without someone from the Shrek team to point out every single one for us. But it is as complete as it can be to the best of our abilities, which I still think paints an accurate overall picture, even if the specific numbers might be off.

Furthermore, in terms of the the items outdated, this is the subjective part. Obviously without surveying every child who watches Shrek, it's impossible to say with certainty that they wouldn't know what the Matrix bullet time kick was or the original Disney princess movies and so on. I'm sure there's kids out there who'll put their hands up and say "Um, actually, I have heard of Bette Midler's "Friends" before!" So much of this is based on gut feeling and deep consideration, which will still be ultimately uncertain and even biased. Basically I can only say that this is based on opinion, which can and will be flawed, but once again I feel this still paints an overall picture that I consider to be generally true.

In retrospect, I wish I used the term "aged" instead of "outdated" in the end of the video, but outdated implies it's origin is so far gone it renders the reference meaningless which isn't quite true. Either way, lets focus on Fairy Tales.

The left numbers represent what minute in the movie the reference occurs.

I selected Jack Horner as while the nursery rhyme is still known, the image of him typically with a red hat is something potentially lost. It's possible that the "this fucking thing" in the video may not have been Jack Horner at all and just a general elf or gnome character.

Babes In The Wood I feel like isn't a known fairy tale as it's often re-written to be mixed with Peter Pan like the lost boys, rather than the children die ending. If it's used today, it's often now more associated with murders or edgier pantomimes, neither of which are very good.

As for the Last Unicorn, the animated movie came out in 1982, and while there's a live action movie (apparently) getting made, for now it feels more like a niche reference outside of generic fairy tale creature.

The Disney stuff plays a much bigger part in Shrek than fairy tales, though as mentioned in the video there is some crossover like Snow White and Cinderella references.

As expressed in the video, I felt some of the classic era of Disney movies will be lost on modern audiences, although it was pointed out that the classic storybook intro is referenced during the opening of The Princess and the Frog. 

I struggled to find a true origin for the trope of birds bringing in a cape and crown of flowers, there's elements from Snow White and Cinderella of animal friends helping carry things and Sleeping Beauty dances with birds carrying in clothes, but nothing specific to a flower crown so it may just be a general trope. 

Donkey's "Personal Tail" line might very tenuously be connected to Eeyore always losing his tail but... yeah we probably all know what it actually refers to...

Shrek is an attempt at a modern version of a fairy tale. But it's efforts to modernise it as also the same elements that date it. Irony! A lot of these were covered in the video, but I feel like much has either lost meaning or it's the "Weird Al" effect (where ANY parody song is attributed to him, even if he had nothing to do with it) and now things are actually a Shrek reference now, such as "That'll do Donkey, that'll do". 

A comment pointed out that Bloodnok the Flatulent is from The Goon Show and the audio commentary highlighted the True Lies was the inspiration for dragon flying in to pick up Shrek and Donkey from the swamp (like how a helicopter lands, blowing things around).  As for the rest, like the fighting scene references, much has been absorbed into general trope.

I spent a long time trying to figure out the origin of "It's quiet, too quiet". It's often attributed to The Last Texan but having actually watched the movie it doesn't happen.

Lastly of the main categories, the music. This doesn't include the leitmotifs, basically Fiona's theme which recurs a lot and could be seen as a classic Disney Princess-ish theme but that feels more like a style rather than a specific reference.

I cover a lot of this in the video, but comments have pointed out Donkey's duck walk like Chuck Berry. In general I felt that music has more of a longevity than movie references do due to their more repeated nature. The Night Fever dance could be seen as general disco dancing but it seems to be more of a specific reference. 

And here's the rest! There's a lot I didn't get a chance to talk about sadly, like how Farquaad's bed is Hugh Hefner's from the Playboy Mansion, Mother Fletcher (Donkey's stand-in for a swear word) is a real life activist or the original of many of the common phrases. We hypothesized that the swamp might have been influenced by Rabbit's House in Winnie The Pooh but that's very much a guess.

So that's the data we gathered on Shrek. As previously stated a lot will have been missed but I can safely say we probably got the lion's share of them. I hope all that makes sense!

If you're interested, I've attached the spreadsheet to this post.