The Olympics Kick Things Off by Drowning The Minions

Today marks the official kickoff of the 2024 Olympic games, a celebration of athletic excellence, international cooperation, and… adorable, yet murderous, yellow cartoon blobs? 

The Opening Ceremony featured a parade of boats traveling down the Seine river, as well as a performance from Lady Gaga, but all of these elements ended up being completely upstaged by the presence of the Minions. 

Yes, for some reason, the broadcast included a segment in which we see the Minions in an underwater sub, just beneath the E. coli-tainted waters of the Seine, training for the Olympic games. Also, they seem to have stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre somehow. One Minion keeps tossing javelins, several of which end up piercing the vessel’s hull, causing the ship to fill with water, seemingly drowning all of the Minions. The “Mona Lisa” then bobs to the surface, in real life, presumably to remind visiting dignitaries that their fancy celebration is taking place atop a river that may or may not be filled with bloated Minion corpses. 

While the Minions seemingly didn’t immediately perish in the accident (I guess they can breathe underwater now?), a lot of people took to social media to express their utter disbelief that the Olympic games began with the Despicable Me characters going full “Titan submersible” on live TV.

And some folks were just confused that the Minions were included in the event at all, considering that they’re not exactly representative of French culture, leading others to point out that the Minions are deeply embedded in French history, having previously worked for Napoleon. 

Also, a French animation studio works on these movies, ever since it was acquired by Universal for Illumination, the company behind the Minions. And it probably doesn’t hurt that NBC is presenting the Olympics in the U.S. and Universal shares a parent company with the network, NBCUniversal Media, which is owned by the Comcast corporation, which I believe is a subsidiary of the Sheinhardt Wig Company.

Not to mention, even before today, there have been a lot of synergistic Minion-Olympic marketing efforts.

It’s not like past Olympic Opening Ceremonies haven’t featured wacky pop-culture tie-ins either. For example, during the London games in 2012, James Bond teamed up with the Queen for a segment that couldn’t have been more British if it had ended with the two of them wrestling in an inflatable pool full of baked beans and Marmite.

Besides, the Minions may not have even been the most confusing fictional character that showed up at today’s ceremony, considering that a torch-bearing Phantom of the Opera made an appearance at one point, too. 

Instead of dropping a chandelier, maybe he just dropped a deuce in the river.

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