Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess and UniKitty!’s Lynn Wang on Thelma the Unicorn’s „viral hit,“ sung by Brittany Howard and Fred Armisen. On Netflix now.
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.
