Netflix’s new animated movie Thelma the Unicorn is full of soulful rock music, but one number stands out like a neon-colored sore thumb: “Here Comes the Cud.” And that’s deliberate. Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie designed “Here Comes the Cud” to be as disgustingly catchy and synthetic as possible. Creating a viral sensation — or at least, a number that could pass for a viral sensation within a movie’s fictional world — is a tall order. Thelma directors Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and Lynn Wang (Cartoon Network’s UniKitty! series) talked to Polygon about how they conceived and planned it.
As pony-masquerading-as-a-unicorn Thelma (Brittany Howard) chases fame, her manager Vic Diamond (McKenzie’s Flight of the Conchords partner Jemaine Clement) sets her up with super-popular social-media influencer Danny Stallion (Fred Armisen), whose whole schtick is regurgitating cud for his followers.
Wang says the filmmakers looked to real-world online behavior to shape the character. “Danny was kind of just an amalgamation of all kinds of over-the-top influencers,” she says.
Thelma and Danny pretend to have a relationship for the PR value, just to whip up some intrigue and romance for their followers, and Vic decides they should collaborate on a song. At first, Thelma is eager, presenting a binder of songs close to the powerful rock ballads she sings in the beginning of the movie. But Vic says superstars don’t write their own songs: “The Algorithm” does it for them.
He puts a request into a machine called “Bridget,” and it spits out “Here Comes the Cud,” a song with a catchy-yet-soulless beat, simplistic lyrics, and an over-the-top music video set on a yacht. It’s incredibly catchy, yet its lyrics are about hacking up partially digested food, and it’s punctuated by burps and other bodily noises. It’s a far cry from the emotional, more personal songs Thelma belts out in a barn at the beginning of the movie. For Flight of the Conchords fans, its straight-faced humor,
UPS
Music
fun
song
rock
Show
Jared Hess