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.
Image: Netflix
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, synthy music, and rap rhythms will also sound distinctly familiar.
“We had to establish Thelma’s brand of music and what kind of music was true to her that came out of her naturally, and then show how it gets corrupted by fame and stardom,” Hess says. “So it was fun to be able to show that contrast. Once it gets to ‘Here Comes the Cud,’ it all goes downhill.”
The difference between the music Thelma writes for herself and the music the top stars in the world makes was very clearly defined. Wang and Hess collaborated with the movie’s songwriters and music producers to map out how that dynamic played into Thelma’s arc.
“Taura Stinson, Bret McKenzie, and all our songwriters really understood Thelma’s journey and what really needed to go into all of the lyrics to really help boost that emotional journey of hers,” says Wang. “But also making it really fun at the same time. Bret really brought the humor. It was really great.”
Thelma the Unicorn is streaming on Netflix now.