The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a heck of a lot of bile in the Disney-DreamWorks relations. Much was made of the rivalry between Antz and A Bug's Life in 1998, when two suspiciously similar-looking films in which the hero was a non-conformist ant were released only a couple of months apart, and Steve Jobs and John Lasseter were both quite vocal in accusing Jeffery Katzenberg of foul play. The enmity really reached its peak in 2001, however, when Shrek and Monsters, Inc found themselves squaring off in a less direct but equally cutthroat grudge match. Back then, the war for Hollywood animation dominance was still waging. 2000 had yielded no clear winner, just one drop-out in the form of Fox Animation Studios, who formally shut down that summer following the box office troubles of Titan A.E. DreamWorks Animation had a mixed year - Chicken Run was a hit, and got their short-lived collaboration with Aardman off to a deceptively good start, but the traditionally animated The Road to El Dorado wasn't nearly so fortunate. Disney's year was overall respectable but worryingly ho-hum for the animation studio that had dominated the preceding decade - Dinosaur, their first predominantly CG animated feature, did not perform atrociously at the box office, but still fell well short of the studio's expectations (for how much they had hyped the bloody thing), while the lacklustre performance of The Emperor's New Groove signaled that the Renaissance era of the 1990s had just about run out of steam. Pixar, meanwhile, did not release a feature film that year, but the strong response to Toy Story 2 at the tail-end of 1999 suggested that their future still was sunny. 2001, on the other hand, saw the balance tip drastically in DreamWorks' favour. The box office success of Shrek was earth-shattering, and with Disney's traditional animation department having struck out with Atlantis: The Lost Empire, all eyes were now on Pixar's Monsters, Inc to redress the balance and defend Disney's throne. Adding to the fire was the uneasy knowledge that both films would ultimately be going up against one another the following year for the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. There was less of the really overt bitterness we saw with those ant movies, but the knives were out nevertheless, and the above THX logo, in which Shrek and Donkey offer their own reinterpretation of Deep Note with bagpipes and a kazoo, wound up paying the price.
The Shrek THX logo was originally intended for theatrical distribution in late 2001. Previously, THX were generally not in the business of doing crossovers with popular characters - there was that Simpsons variant we touched on last time, although the circumstances behind that one were a bit exceptional. And when THX agreed to a collaboration with DreamWorks Animation featuring the jolly green ogre who had recently taken the world by storm, they had unwittingly stepped into a war zone. According to this article, THX expressed nothing but enthusiasm for the logo until roughly a fortnight before it was expected to debut, when they decided, seemingly quite out of the blue, not to use it. THX's last minute u-turn led to speculation that Disney and Pixar had successfully coerced THX into ditching their adversary's promo. And while both Disney and THX denied this, this article gives you a very strong flavour of just how vitriolic the rivalry was between the studios at the time. Part of the problem, it seems, is that the Shrek logo would have debuted alongside the theatrical release of Monsters, Inc, which "coincidentally" happened to synchronize with the home media release of Shrek. Pixar weren't overly keen on the whole notion of sleeping with the enemy - particularly where the enemy might have ulterior motives for climbing into bed with them. The Shrek logo does not explicitly plug the DreamWorks film, but it's plausible that Pixar saw this as a sneaky attempt to steal or at least diminish their thunder. The formal reason for their abandonment of the promo, as given by THX manager Monica Dashwood, was that THX realised they had made a mistake in attaching themselves to a specific film, which was ultimately seen to deviate from the company's key objective: "We're about film presentation in theaters." They couldn't be seen as playing favourites, in other words.
And so it was that the Shrek variant was held hostage for a period, although evidently it didn't stay locked up forever. It seems that it was approved for theatrical distribution alongside Shrek The Third (2007) in the UK, and I'm going to assume other locations. So what happened to reverse the logo's fortunes, then? Maybe the vitriol between Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks was simply cooling over at that stage, and Pixar felt less reason to feel threatened by DreamWorks. Or maybe they were happier with DreamWorks promos when they stayed on their own turf. It seems that this wasn't the only change of heart that THX had on the matter, for despite Dashwood's comments on the wisdom of attaching themselves to a specific picture, they did later go back on that and put out another logo variant featuring characters from Blue Sky's 2008 film Horton Hears a Who! A Horton/THX crossover does not, in itself, seem like the most outlandish of ideas, given the subject of the film, but it raises questions as to how serious THX ever were about this particular policy.
The great, lingering question, of course, is how much of that trademark THX terror is retained when you have the warmth and familiarity of the Shrek and Dr Seuss characters trotting across the ominous black void? As long as there's Deep Note, there's deep despair - although the Horton logo is probably one of the least scary THX variants, thanks in part to how Horton's laughter obscures the initial portion of Deep Note, and the reassuring wink he shoots at the camera, which really takes the sting off. With the Shrek logo, I think the presence of that kazoo actually makes it all the more ear-piercing, even if it pays off with the final punchline.
Also, just what does Donkey say at the very end of this logo? Most sources have his closing words down as "Chill Shrek", which I suppose is more plausible, although first time I saw it I could've sworn he said, "See a shrink."
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