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Farley was hired to play the lead, who at this point was a shy and sensitive ogre still living with his parents and being pressured into the family business of scaring people. The glowing review from DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was, "It looked terrible, it didn't work, it wasn't funny and we didn't like it." That wasn't Farley's fault -- by all accounts he did an astounding job recording 95 percent of the film's dialogue before he passed away.

Instead of trying to patch up the remaining audio with a soundalike, the studio decided to let Farley's legacy lie and recast the role with fellow SNL alum Mike Myers. Myers had only one minor request -- a total Page 1 rewrite, radically changing the story and changing Shrek from shy, sensitive and Chris Farley-esque to an older, curmudgeonly misanthrope. It wasn't the last ridiculous demand that he would make -- after years of production and before Shrek hit cinemas, Myers changed his mind about the dialogue and asked if he could start all over again with a Scottish accent, a request we imagine was followed by five straight minutes of disbelieving stares.

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"Also, Smashmouth songs. All over the goddamn place."

Luckily for DreamWorks, Myers really seemed to know what he was talking about. A film that Katzenberg admitted was 90 minutes of slow, agonizing train wreck became a smash hit at the box office and beat Pixar to the Oscar. But somewhere, deep in the vaults of DreamWorks Animation, there are locked away the Shrek recordings that Chris Farley made, presumably next to the Ark of the Covenant and all those novels J.D. Salinger wrote in New Hampshire when he wasn't drinking his own urine.