The Lost Shrek Film (Retold)

A lot of people loved Shrek because it featured the comedic riffage of Mike Myers and up and coming celebrity Martin Lawrence. What a lot of people don’t know is that Shrek was originally planned to be part of a five film series. The film’s production took a strange turn after Shrek the Third was released with actor Mike Myers’ reportedly claiming that if he had to voice the big green ogre again he’d quote “fucking kill himself”. The arduous process of making the masterful Shrek films has led to a huge cult online following of people who DEMAND a fourth Shrek film.

I work for DreamWorks, I was a doll grip on both Shrek films. One day I heard actor John Leguizamo discussing his part in the Shrek Forever After feature when the production manager immediately told him to leave angrily, and never to mention the fourth Shrek film again.

Well, I managed to slip into office one night when everyone else was asleep under the guise that I’d forgotten my prized Lord Farquaad mug. Little did I know that I was about to discover something that would completely destroy the Shrek mythology and possibly explain the death of Mike Myers theories related to Shrek that are swimming around the internet.

The DVD had “Shrek 4” written in a Sharpie marker with a picture of Shrek in a permanent frown. Shrek looked really disappointed. He was staring at his feet and he had dark circles under his eyes. The DVD itself was a CD-RW with an onion with a smiley face on it that said “For Jeff Small :D” With one of those “D” mouthed smiley faces. I think Jeff Small was one of the higher ups at DreamWorks, if not the CFO. I knew I was risking the job, but I stole the DVD and replaced it with a Family Guy DVD, expecting to get some heat from my boss in the morning. I smashed the security camera on the way out and went home.

It turns out that this disc was a promotional Blu-Ray for a straight to DVD copy of Shrek. I put the disc into the DVD player and it started. The intro was bizarre. It looked like a bunch of fairies were hanging from trees, and there was just the sound of someone screaming “OH MY GOD!!!” over and over again. But the next part was really fucked up,. We see the house that Shrek lives in, but it seems assembled more like hell. Shrek looks really nervous and his eyes look more glossy and realistic. I am guessing this wasn’t finished, but Shrek looked a lot cheaper. The backdrops were more grainier and there were what looked like human hands sticking up from the ground, “Time to water the hands.” said Shrek. He walks outside and takes a piss on some hands. It was disturbing, I didn’t want to watch Shrek pissing on hands. You even saw his green dick.

I distinctly could tell it was Mike Myers, the actor who portrayed Shrek, doing the voice of him. What was the most disturbing part, however, was that his voice sounded a lot raspier and sad. He sounded like he was playing a sad old Irish man with cancer. He walks over to the donkey, who is not voiced by Eddie Murphy, the actor that originally portrayed him. Instead, he sounded like an angry German man. “SHREK, VE NEED TO GO TO ZE CASTLE TO STOP ZE DRAGON!” he yelled. The donkey was standing on his hind legs and there was clearly a swastika on his forehead. “I’M MAKING VAFFLES!” He yelled, and kicked a gingerbread man into the background. You could see the gingerbread man crying and bleeding, with highly realistic core the likes of which DreamWorks could never produce on its own. I had been a fan of the film, as it reached my demographic as intended by the CEO of DreamWorks, but I don’t see how anyone could enjoy this. Everything just seemed sad and dead. Donkey walked to the end of a cliff and you could see a visible noose around his neck. “Y' SEE, DONKEY. PEOPLE ARE LIKE ONIONS, AND ONIONS HAVE LAYERS.” Shrek started talking abruptly. He took a 3D onion out and shoved his dick in it. You could hear someone snickering rather loudly to the sound of silverware falling in the background. Shrek took out the same knife he used to peel the onion, and started to peel his own skin off. He peeled layer after layer of skin off until he was just a bloody CGI skeleton with a picture of Mike Myers’ real head taped on as a post production artifact. It wasn’t even a scary picture of Myers, just him playing the Love Guru with someone having drawn a dick on his head.

I planned on shutting the DVD off. I knew for the love of god, this was going to ruin my image of the wonderful ogre and his lovable acquaintances. The scene immediately cut to Shrek fucking the wall in his house while an entire gingerbread family cried. I took the DVD out of the player. I had had enough, this was too scary for me. All of a sudden, the DVD started to talk in a robotic voice. “PLEASE RETURN ME TO MY OWNER.” A physical tear poured down Shrek’s eye on the front of the case. I tasted it, and it was salty. I opened the case to check for an apparatus where liquid would pour out, and I could find none. It was almost like some sort of magic, demonic possession, or real life magical DVD. All of a sudden, the DVD started to scream “PEOPLE ARE LIKE ONIONS!”. I could smell onions all of a sudden, like one of those old "Scratch and Sniff" cards. I threw the DVD in the garbage can and lit the garbage on fire. My sprinkler system went off as the DVD exploded, sending flaming hot plastic into my eyes and burning my chest and nipple hair. My cat got singed and squealed at me and started to claw my eyes out while the sprinkler system hit electrical currents and exploded, burning away my kitchen and ottoman. I could hear the DVD laughing at me.

I woke up in the hospital again. It turns out people are like onions. The doctors extracted several whole Vidalia onions from my chest cavity during a surgical operation that took roughly 16 hours. They called it a medical miracle, stating I had three days left to live. Well, you can imagine how I spent those three days.

Day 1: Make this write up so that the internet will remember this horrible tale.

Day 2: Visit the world’s largest McDonald’s and order some McSpaghetti.

Day 3: March straight into the DreamWorks Animation SKG building and demand to know the meaning of this godforsaken tape.

I stormed in, slamming the DVD on the counter. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT!?” I yelled, to a man behind a chair. The chair turned around, revealing Mike Myers. He looked horrible! He had gained roughly 200 pounds and his skin had turned green due to leprosy. I had wondered what had happened to him after The Love Guru. He had warts and scars all over his body, and he was exactly like Shrek. “Y’ see, Mark.” He said, leering at me. “PEOPLE ARE LIKE ONIONS,” I began to shudder. “AND ONIONS HAVE LAYERS.” He took out a potato peeler and lunged at me! I took out the DVD as he stabbed the potato peeler and he stabbed the DVD case, the source of his power… probably. Mike Myers exploded into onions and I was fired, but it’s okay because I was immediately detained by the United States Government and exported to Ireland.

Several men have painted me green and forced me to live in a large, genetically modified onion cart with a donkey. They force me to bathe in mud and plow the fields for Vidalia onions on a daily basis. After about a month, a Hispanic man in a leopard print leotard came in holding a video camera. He was filming me and snickering. Other, smaller Hispanic boys threw gingerbread men and plastic fairies at me while I attempted to put in an honest day’s work. The sunlight beat down on my disheveled face as I laid there in the mud, naked, bleeding and cold.

When I woke up, I was laying on some strange, flour-shaped floor. As I looked up, I noticed that the many foods I plowed in the fields were being spread all over my green and naked body. Oh my god. Tomatoes, beans, and sour cream. One of the Mexican pool boys threw Tex-Mex cheese into my painful wounds. I was being…rolled into a tortilla. “Oh my god!” I screamed, and tried to awaken from this horrible nightmare. But it wasn’t a nightmare. It was reality. Except more real, somehow. Like the real reality, and the actual reality is a post-reality that comes after the pre-reality. They poured hot beef sauce onto my body. “Oh my god, I don’t want to be the meat in this tortilla!” I screamed. A familiar voice began to speak to me, though my eyes were filled with spicy lime sauce. “No Mark, you are the onions. And onions...”

My heart skipped a beat.

“have layers.” As they peeled me like a ripe guava, I came to a deep realization about what onions were a metaphor of. See, underneath everything, we’re not deep, intellectual human beings. We’re not special either. DreamWorks fucking lied to us as children. They wanted our money, so they sold us a lie. We’re not even unique in style and taste. There is nothing about is that is any difference from the rest of us. Underneath everything, we’re just skeletons. Go up to your neighbors and greet them as skeletons. Recognize them, for the true skeleton inside. Because one day you might be that skeleton, in fact, you already are that skeleton. As the end credits on my existence played, I noticed that the executive producer was Satan. I become more concerned about who the director was, in fact, it would’ve sent a shiver up my spine if the pool boys hadn’t broken it. It was me.

The End.