I Might Have Found A Discrepancy In The Shrek Universe.
So you know how in Shrek 2 during the most amazing cover of all time Mongo was born?
Yeah. Well, I was curious to see how long it would take to actually bake, cool, decorate, and make alive a Mongo in real life. Would Shrek and Gingy have enough time to save Fiona from Prince Charming and the Fairy Godmother with Mongo at their side?
Here’s how I figured it out.
So Shrek is originally seven feet tall.
But when he takes the Happily Ever After potion, he shrinks a bit. Let’s say… a foot. Shrek is now six feet tall. That’s a good, measurable number. I drew it out in proportion to Mongo here:
So from his shoulder to his mouth, Mongo is about six feet (I added a bit extra here because Shrek is bent over a little because giant gingerbread monster footsteps can be jarring and you need to brace your body for impact). Now, I couldn’t find a full body picture or character model of Mongo, but I could find one of Gingy. They do have the same proportions.
Here’s the model I used. He’s a bit bent, but I made do. Using MS Paint again, I measured about six feet on this model if it were Mongo sized.
Now using the line tool, I measured the space between the two lines and made new lines according to where the space ended. Here’s the final result:
So this is about 12 lines worth of space. The top of his head didn’t make it another six feet, so let’s say it’s three feet. Plug 12.5 and 6 into the calculator in and…
Mongo is 75 feet tall. Add that to your fan wikis.
Now let’s look at Gingy’s size. We need to know how many Gingies make a Mongo. Looking at the picture again, Gingy is a little smaller than Shrek’s head.
So if we look up the size of the average head, we get…
About nine inches. Let’s just say nine. Nine inches is 0.75 feet.
It takes 100 Gingies to make one Mongo. Assuming Gingy is the same size as an average gingerbread man that Muffin Man makes, let’s assume further and say he’s an average gingerbread man.
I found this snip from this recipe by the Food Network. Since Gingy is nine inches tall, we need to tweak this a bit.
If my calculations are correct and I’m not a fool, each batch makes four cookies. We would need 25 batches to make a Mongo. That’s 75 cups flour, 25 teaspoons baking soda, 18 ¾ teaspoons ground cinnamon and ground ginger, 12 ½ teaspoons ground allspice, ground cloves, and salt, 6 ¼ teaspoon milled black pepper (for whatever reason), 25 sticks of butter, 6 ¼ cups of room temperature vegetable shortening, 12 ½ cups packed light brown sugar, 16 2/3 cups of molasses, and 25 large eggs! Jesus, now the Muffin Man’s in crippling debt. And that’s just the cookie part!
Assuming this humble, gentle soul makes his own icing, he would need 25 pounds of confectioners’ sugar, 50 tablespoons of dried egg-white powder he would have to dry himself, and 150 tablespoons of water. I feel so sorry for this man.
Not to mention, Far Far Away can’t possibly sell gumdrops that big, so he’d have to melt them down, build a giant bowl of some sort, wait for them to solidify, take them out as to not damage them, and sprinkle sugar on them before animating his giant, expensive monster.
The melting point of gumdrops, I could not find. But I assume they have a slightly higher melting point than, say syrup sap. And it might also stick horrifically to any pan. So we need an open flame, like a bonfire, and we need it hot enough to melt the gumdrops inside of a big enough bowl. Something like pictured here from Little House In The Big Woods:
So we would need one or two of these set up. Thankfully, our boy Muffin Man lives in a place with quite a few trees.
They are a little ways off, though. Chopping one down, getting chains to propel the pot up, and starting a dangerously hot fire as well as stirring quite close to it would take for ever. And melting that many gumdrops would take forever. So would cooling them.
Now onto the actual bake time. Shrek does take place in what I presume to be Midevil Germany, judging by the architecture, clothing, and art style in the books. Though it has many modern conveniences, such as fast food and concert lighting/sound systems.
So I assume that even a somewhat seemingly poor/lower middle class single baker dude can afford a good oven. Let’s say this type of oven.
Now this is a pretty small oven. How could Muffins possibly create a 75-foot gingerbread man with this small of an oven? It’s impossible. He would have to bake him piece by piece, then somehow paste him all together. And he wouldn’t see a single penny of his back breaking work! Shrek never paid him, and Mongo ended up a soggy mess in the bottom of a river anyway, so all of that time, energy, money, work was all for nothing!
And no, I’m not acknowledging Shrek The 3rd.
Anyway suppose he did paste Mongo piece by piece. How long would it take for him to bake each piece? Let’s look at his model again.
Splitting up the model into head, upper torso, mid torso, left and right arm/hand/leg/shin/foot, and lower torso, we get something like this:
These can sit in the oven more easily. If we break it in half it would be easier.
There we go. If we make twice the amount of icing we need, then we can paste him back together, like Humpty Dumpty.
It’s almost as if Dreamworks wanted someone to do this. Huh.
Anyway, going back to the Food Network recipe. How long does it take for a Mongo to cook? According to the article, it’s about ten minutes. So let’s just say ten minutes. Multiply that by 25, you’ve got 250 minutes in the oven, or a little over four hours to bake an entire Mongo.
It takes 5 minutes to cool a batch. so that’s 150 minutes, or a little over two hours. That’s six hours to bake and cool a Mongo.
So about saving Fiona…
It’s not happening. An oven like the one Muffins has cannot be hot enough to bake it and make it cook enough to not burn nor be raw in enough time to still get to the castle and save Fiona. Especially after mixing each batch, making the giant gumdrops, icing gluing, giving life, baking time, and cooling time. Just by estimating, mixing all that stuff together could take, like, an hour at the most. Plus the gumdrop issue; I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two and a half hours. Don’t forget giving Mongo life. I would expect another two and a half hours since an electric spark of Mary Shelly proportions can be made in a somewhat modern home with the right equipment, but Muffins probably has to make/go out to get the right equipment. (That’s how I remember Mongo being alive correct me if I’m wrong).
Add all of that up, and that’s 12 hours.
TWELVE HOURS.
That’s over 202 times of playing Shrek’s cover of “I Need A Hero.” That’s like playing Shrek 2 in full over eight times. Basically, Fiona is doomed and Shrek should have used a carriage ordering service.
TLDR; Shrek 2 is impossible and Mongo takes a lot of time and effort to make.
