My Favorite Minions

Did you see the animated film, “Despicable Me,” starring Gru (voiced by actor Steve Carell)?

Gru was a despicable despot who planned to shrink and steal the moon so he could take over the world.

His loyal staff consisted of several hundred pint-sized workers who looked like tiny, mostly bald, robotic yellow cylinders wearing identical blue denim uniforms, tiny black leather gloves and boots.

They all wore over-sized silver goggles to protect their eyes. Most had two eyes but a few were short-changed and possessed only one.

By the end of the movie, Gru was no longer evil, and I had become enamored of his strange but appealing loyal staff known as minions.

Three years later, a sequel was released, “Despicable Me 2,” with those adorable, naïve, mischievous minions and that film earned almost twice as many millions as the first.

How much did these two films earn?

Despicable Me (2010) – $543,113,985

Despicable Me 2 (2013) – $970,761,885

With grosses like that, you could well imagine there has to be another animated “Minions” film to be released. And you would be correct.

A third movie, a prequel, is in production and will feature three of my favorite mischievous minions – Kevin, the leader; Stuart, the teenager; and little Bob.

Since I have had no difficulty interviewing deceased celebrities, weird animals and inanimate objects, arranging an interview with these creative creatures was supernaturally simple. Here is what I learned.

me – It’s nice to meet you – Stuart . . . Kevin . . . Bob. I appreciate your taking some time off from your shooting schedule for this interview.

Bob – [alarmed] Shooting? What are you talking about?

Kevin – Don’t be afraid, Bob, that’s just a show biz expression.

me – The third Despicable movie to be released this summer is a prequel titled “The Minions.”

Bob – What’s a prequel?

Stuart – A prequel tells a story to explain what happened before the first film and its sequel.

Bob – What’s a sea gull got to do with it?

Kevin – Absolutely nothing! A sequel tells a story to explain what happened after the first film.

me – I watched your new movie trailer and learned that minions have been around much longer than anyone knew. Take a look at this preview and see for yourself what transpired.

Kevin – Since the beginning of time, minions have been programmed to serve powerful and sometimes evil leaders.

me – Your new film indicates that minions were involved in a number of hysterical, historical events.

For example, what really happened to cause one of the famous Egyptian Pyramids to tip over?

Bob – What’s a pair of ‘mids’?

Kevin – The Pyramids, Bob, are ancient structures that still stand in Giza not far from Cairo. The minions just wanted to christen that pyramid as if it were a large ship. Who knew?

me – It was news to me that minions served in Napoleon’s army.

Stuart – Minions never shirked their duties. When they served in Napoleon’s army, their gunnery talents, you might say, blew him away.

Bob – I ate a Napoleon once – it was delicious.

me – You have excellent taste, Bob. Did you know that in your new movie, minions also worked with Dracula and were the cause of his decomposition?

Kevin – That was simply an unavoidable accident. It was the bright light of sunshine and all those lit candles on his Surprise Birthday cake that caused Dracula to disintegrate.

Stuart – It wasn’t in the movie but it was a minion assistant working in Sir Alexander Fleming’s lab in 1928 who failed to thoroughly clean a contaminated Petri dish the scientist had discarded.

Fleming noticed the mold in the dish was dissolving all surrounding bacteria. Voila! Penicillin was discovered.

me – I didn’t know a minion was involved.

Kevin – That’s not all. A minion working for Percy Spencer, an engineer, at Ratheon Corp. in 1946 was eating a candy bar near a new vacuum tube in Spencer’s lab and it started to melt. The candy bar, not the tube.

In 1947, the first commercially produced microwave oven was about 6 feet tall, weighed about 750 lbs, and cost $5,000 ($52,800 in today’s dollars).

me – So that’s how the microwave was discovered?

Bob – Oh, yeah! And it was a marketing minion at Ford Motors who convinced Edsel Ford that the Edsel automobile would be a winner.

me – The Edsel was a stupendous failure, Bob. In the late 50s, Ford lost about $250 million with that car – about $2 billion in today’s dollars.

Bob – So? Nobody’s perfect.

me – Those are fascinating anecdotes about mischievous minion mishaps. Can you verify them?

Kevin – Of course . . . NOT! Those stories have been handed down from generation to generation by our ancestors.

me – Speaking of ancestors, how did minions get to America?

Stuart – We borrowed a small rowboat and the three of us rowed across a really big ocean to reach the U.S. in the 60s before we met Gru.

Kevin – We were searching for a new master to serve and we found Scarlet Overkill, an ambitious female villain (voiced by Sandra Bullock), and her husband, Herb Overkill, an eccentric inventor (voiced by Jon Hamm).

Bob – I loved Sandra in that movie about a visually impaired dog.

me – That’s a film I must have missed. What was the title?

Bob – “Blind Spot”!

me – That was a good one. Bob. Thank you all for the entertaining interview. I look forward to seeing “The Minions” when it’s released this summer.

Good luck with your film, and break a leg!

Bob – [whispering to Kevin] That wasn’t a very nice thing to wish us.

Kevin – Don’t fret, Bob – that’s just a show biz expression.

Note: If you are a dedicated Minions fan like me, you may have noticed that many of the Minions' teeth were crooked and not aligned in their first "Despicable" movie. But by the time they appeared in "Despicable Me 2", every single Minion had perfect, beautiful teeth.

Hmmmm! Must have been the work of those dental wizards: Dr. David H and Dr. Nico.

© Copyright BJ Rakow, Ph.D. 2015. All rights reserved.

Author, "Much of What You Know about Job Search Just Ain't So."