Crashing A Smash Mouth Concert Gave Rat Race The Perfect Ending
Today came the sad news that Smash Mouth frontman Steve Harwell died at 56. Smash Mouth is undoubtedly best known today for the fact their 1999 hit song "All Star" played at the very beginning of the first "Shrek" movie. Like with everything else related to "Shrek," the song has become a bit of a meme.
It's easy to forget, however, that before "Shrek" debuted at Cannes and went on to win the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, "All Star" was a smash hit way before Shrek. It was considered one of the best songs of 1999 and even got nominated for the Best Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal Grammy. While "Shrek" immortalized it, it was actually another film from 2001 that gave us the best use of "All Star," and one of the best endings to a movie of the last 20 years.
That's right, the perfect ending to the Jerry Zucker ensemble comedy "Rat Race."
Rat Race" is a film heavily inspired by "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," with an ensemble cast that includes Rowan Atkinson, Whoopi Goldberg, Cuba Gooding Jr., Breckin Meyer, Jon Lovitz, Kathy Najimy, Seth Green, Amy Smart, John Cleese and many more. The film centers on an incredibly stupid game where six teams of people race from Las Vegas to New Mexico to find a storage locker with $2 million in cash, all a ruse by an eccentric millionaire who loves to gamble on the dumbest games with his millionaire friends. The movie, of course, ends with all teams somehow converging on one singular spot, crashing a Smash Mouth concert where they all sing "All Star" together.
SomeBODY once told me...
"All Star" is about as much a late '90s song as they come, and it fits the over-the-top nature that Zucker brings to "Rat Race." I'm talking about a movie where Jon Lovitz accidentally takes his family to a Barbie museum that's actually about Nazi officer Klaus "Butcher of Lyon" Barbie before stealing Hitler's car from the museum and driving it into a World War II veterans reunion. This is a movie where Cuba Gooding Jr. fakes his way into driving a bus full of Lucille Ball cosplayers (with lots of screaming) and Mr. Bean plays a narcoleptic man who drops a transplant heart out of an ambulance driven by Wayne Knight.
There are so many shenanigans in the movie that when we see the duffel bag with the money tied to a hot air balloon that crashes onto a Smash Mouth charity concert, it just makes sense. It is a "Rat Race" after all, and seeing a movie with so many celebrities end with a concert where they sing one of the biggest songs of the moment is just the perfect ending. It couldn't be another concert. It couldn't be another song from the time. It couldn't be a Britney concert where they sing "...Baby One More Time," it wasn't going to be a Ricky Martin concert. It had to be the specific '90s brand of alternative pop rock music of Smash Mouth that best captured the chaotic energy of "Rat Race."
The years start coming and they don't stop coming
Between 1999 and 2001, "All Star" featured in such cult movies as "Mystery Men," and "Inspector Gadget," but also the delightfully weird "Digimon: The Movie" (which also featured songs by Barenaked Ladies and Fatboy Slim. No, seriously.) all before the double punch of "Rat Race" and "Shrek."
The reason why it works in "Shrek," the real reason it became such a meme and made "Shrek" such a phenomenon is the perfectly timed needle drop at the beginning of the movie. After all, Steve Harwell's iconic "someBODY" delivery happens right as Shrek opens the door of his latrine in his swamp, preparing audiences for an animated film unlike anything they had seen.
This was not a Disney fairy tale, but a crude, irreverent film full of pop culture references the audience would recognize, and featured songs they'd recognize. There'd be no showtunes or Broadway numbers in this fairytale kingdom, but pop punk, and Smash Mouth. Animation changed forever after that moment, and it is in no small part due to "All Star" and Smash Mouth.