Dreamworks Animation, from now till doomsday

Waitress: Well, there’s shrek, sausage, panda and shrek. That’s not got much shrek in it.

Dreamworks has announced its slate of animation through 2012, and it reminds me of Monty Python’s classic spam bit. Except Shrek substituted for spam would taste even more canned and flavorless.

Comingsoon.net has the list:

• How to Train Your Dragon , a troubled teen adopts a… dragon.
• Shrek Forever After, the fourth installment of the Shrek series.
• Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom
• Puss in Boots, his origin story, before he met Shrek.
• Madagascar 3 the menagerie goes to Europe in a traveling circus.
• The Guardians unites Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Jack Frost and the Sandman to fight evil-doers.

There’s this though: Oobermind (formerly Master Mind) with Robert Downey Jr. voicing “a supervillain who finds life a little dull after vanquishing good-guy rival Metro Man.” Tina Fey voices another character. Sounds promising, but can’t Dreamworks trust kids to pronounce √úbermind?

Looking way ahead, to November 2012, just in time for the festive Mayan End of Days celebrations:

Katzenberg has staked out a third date that fall, Nov. 12, for an original feature, to be chosen from a trio of projects currently in development. The first option, caveman comedy The Croods, from directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco, was once intended to be an Aardman collaboration. Another, Truckers, is derived from Terry Pratchett’s The Bromeliad Trilogy with Simon Beaufoy adapting a story of miniature creatures stuck living in a department store. Damaschke also cited a third option, tentatively titled Super Secret Ghost Project, that asks what ghosts think about humans.

Those actually all sound not half bad. Though maybe just because they’re so vague and far away.