Shrek: The Lord Farquaad scene that traumatised fans – 20 years after the film first came out

Fans are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shrek, the animated film about an ogre and his friend Donkey who are tasked with escorting Princess Fiona to the evil Lord Farquaad.

The film was a box office hit when it was first released in 2001, with positive reviews for the script and a voice cast that included Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Vincent Cassell.

However, one scene continues to cause debate among fans who are convinced that animators went a little too far when creating humour intended for adult viewers.

Early on in the film, Lord Farquaad is shown watching reels of Princess Fiona on the Magic Mirror, while he lies in bed with a cocktail.

As he watches, a small bump appears to rise under his zebra-patterned bedding, at which point he glances down and hastily pulls the cover further up with an embarrassed look on his face.

A viral TikTok post from Kathy Martinez in April questioned whether fellow fans had ever spotted the moment before, suggesting it was possibly more explicit than viewers had initially realised.

“My last 1 per cent of innocence I had just left my soul,” one person commented.

Another, arguably less disturbing detail that fans might not be familiar with is that Shrek didn’t start out with a Scottish accent.

Before Myers was cast in the title role, Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley was originally meant to voice Shrek, recording nearly all of the dialogue written for the film in a light New York accent not dissimilar from his own Wisconsin dialect.

However, when Farley died aged 33 in 1997, another SNL alum, Myers, stepped up.

The Austin Powers star insisted that the entire script was rewritten and recorded the lines in his own Canadian accent, but later asked to re-record everything in a Scottish dialect.

In 2010, he told USA Today that this was because he wanted Shrek to seem “working class” in comparison.

“There is a class struggle in Shrek between the fairy-tale kings and queens and the common people,” he began, going on to claim: “I always thought that Shrek was raised working class. And since Lord Farquaad was played English, I thought of Scottish.”

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