When it comes to promoting summer blockbusters, studios will use anything and everything at their disposal in order to get the word out there. No publicity is bad publicity, right? Well, recently DreamWorks and Paramount found themselves rethinking the wisdom of those words after a relatively unknown men’s magazine put together a disastrous promotional piece for Shrek Forever After in their summer edition.

The magazine is called Vman, and they initially pitched the idea of doing a tongue-in-cheek photo spread with the various Shrek characters in a similar fashion to Harper’s Bazaar’s classy spread of The Simpsons. The end result was something quite a bit different. The Shrek characters are seen posing with various scantily clad models in scenes that are both provocative and downright weird. Although it’s not quite controversial enough to threaten the family-friendly image of Shrek, it’s still not particularly flattering for anyone. Paramount released the following statement in response:

“While we do respect Vman’s creative vision, the shoot did not turn out the way originally envisioned when the idea was first presented by the magazine… In hindsight, we would have declined to include the Shrek characters in such a magazine spread.”

They don’t plan on pursuing legal action. Meanwhile, Vman must be loving all the extra publicity! Check out the full gallery of photos over on the Vman website.