An Original ‘Despicable Me’ Screenwriter Couldn’t Believe That Universal Changed His Minions Lore
Is the Despicable Me franchise a Darwinist project in which the Minions started their evolution back at the beginning of life on Earth, or did intelligent design deliver Gru his wacky yellow Tic-Tac workers? More importantly, are the films’ writers finally ready to answer the Hitler question?
When Despicable Me premiered in the summer of 2010, the star of the smash-hit kid’s comedy wasn’t Steve Carell playing the lead villain Gru, or Jason Segel’s alternate antagonist Vector, or even the thankfully-since-fired Russell Brand as the brilliant scientist Dr. Nefario. No, regardless of the billing order, the undeniable headliner of the massively successful movie that launched a seven-film franchise was the collective order of the Minions, Gru’s colorful cronies whose slapstick antics and love of bananas captivated children and adults alike to the tune of a half-billion-dollar return at the box office.
Like all Despicable Me characters, the Minions are the invention of Sergio Pablos, the guy who came up with the Despicable Me concept originally, and the blockbuster screenwriting duo Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio. But within the Despicable Me universe, the Minions are — or were — the product of Dr. Nefario’s genetic engineering efforts to manufacture an army of loyal workers for his villain-in-chief.
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However, that canon, established only in background details and never explicitly in the dialogue, came under attack when the Minions inevitably earned their spin-off film, 2015’s Minions, which retconned their initial origin story and established that the Minions have been around since the beginning of the universe. Since then, the Minions’ mission has been to serve the most evil of masters throughout history — with an opportune time-out in the first half of the 20th century.
In a conversation with Vulture, which was hilariously titled, “Are You a Minion Creationist or Evolutionist?” Paul shared his initial reaction to the news that the origin of the Minions species was changing, which was, “Wait, what? The Minions were made in a lab by Dr. Nefario, how can this be?”
“They’re all biologically engineered from the same strand of mutated DNA,” Paul said of the Minions’ initial off-screen creation in the Despicable Me canon. “They’re all family. It’s a version of cloning. They’re grown in a petri dish.” Paul further explained, “It was an intentional decision not to show a Minion being created. It might be too disturbing. You don’t want to see how the sausage gets made or how the Minions get made.”
Instead, Paul and his partner let the art team do the storytelling, revealing that audiences can spot one of Dr. Nefario’s blueprints for Minion manufacturing hanging on a wall in one of Gru’s adopted daughters’ bedrooms.
Though Paul recalled “raising a warning voice” when Despicable Me director Pierre Coffin first told the writer that he was changing the Minions’ backstory for their spin-off film, Paul admitted that he understood the logic of the switch, saying, “In the back of my head was, ‘Well, Pierre created the Minions as we know it. It’s his prerogative if he wants to come up with a different origin story for them.’ It’s creation versus evolution. For the purpose of the movie, it’s fun to show them throughout history. The entertainment value trumps the logic of whatever canon was set up.”
However, that “history,” as so many Twitter users have spent the last decade pointing out, is only partially complete. While the Minions’ express purpose since their earliest existence has been to serve the most evil master they can find in whatever treachery those villains work, there is a century-plus-long gap between the Minions accidentally blowing away Napoleon Bonaparte during his disastrous Russian campaign and their re-emergence to the world stage in New York, 1968. In that intervening time — you know, that whole World Wars period we went through — the Minions were conveniently camped out in an ice cave with no impetus to escape and aid some of history’s greatest monsters.
When asked what the Minions would have done during the first half of the 20th century had they not been M.I.A., Paul responded with a laugh, “The reason they were frozen was that nobody ever has to answer that question.”
“You want to love these guys, so you don’t want them supporting the ultimate evil with the Axis powers,” he added. “You want them to support delightful evil with Gru. He’s evil in a way that we wish we could be.”
As a cursory glance at Elon Musk’s Twitter demonstrates, there are still plenty of people out there today who wish they could be evil in the Axis way and who are far more malicious than Despicable Me’s most dastardly adoptive father. Maybe we should all keep a goggled eye out for some short, stocky, gibberish-spouting figures hiding beneath pointy yellow robes.
