Film Theory: How To Kill A Minion! (Despicable Me)

all right evil friends it's 2021 what evil thing should we do today we could use a network of hackers to steal the identity of thousands we could use an army of bots to spread our propaganda on twitter we could steal billions for ourselves via combination of underpaying workers insider trading and tax evasion we could develop a monopoly over everyone's childhood and control all of entertainment man being evil in 2021 sucks hello internet welcome to film theory a show that cares about the really important issues preparing humanity for the minion apocalypse right about now you're probably wondering why i would want to kill the minions on the surface these adorable little henchmen who made their first appearance in the 2010 film despicable me have taken the world by storm with their cuteness unique language and obsession with overalls seems like the worst they could do is just annoy parents forced by their kids to watch the antics of these little yellow silos on repeat over and over and over and over again but today's episode isn't just about preserving the sanity of every parent out there watching though you are welcome for that no it's about preventing an extinction level event think mad max fury road but instead of riding flaming cars you got a bunch of little yellow tic tacs riding around monster banana trucks for those of you who are light on the lore the stated purpose of a minion is to help in the creation of evil they're all different but they all share the same goal to serve the most despicable master they could find that's it that is their driving cause in life the top of their maslow hierarchy oh sure for the majority of their existence they've been mostly harmless serving dinosaurs vampires the french but when things go right for him they quickly become really dangerous when bob the minion becomes the king of england he changes the country's laws to give the crown to scarlet overkill a woman who wants to rule via a strict dictatorship to top it all off in despicable me 3 they leave gru because he's become less despicable and they head out in search of a more evil employer and you see this matters because their numbers are rapidly growing in a prior film theory episode we learned via an official facebook post that since teaming up with gru in 1968 their numbers have expanded from around 230 and minions to 10 400 by the time despicable me 3 rolls around and sure all this might not seem like a big deal now that they're working for a guy whose definition of evil is stealing trinkets from the las vegas strip once grew and his family aren't in the picture anymore these henchmen will be looking for another despicable boss and it could mean chaos death and destruction or they'll just end up working for jeff bezos in short these things are ticking time bombs that are essentially immortal indestructible and crave evil which is why the world needs a plan on how to stop them before they potentially kill billions so today as we prep for the eventual name dare i say the inevitable minion wars i'm gonna investigate these creatures to find their weaknesses so we can exploit them now this at first might seem like it's an easy task right like how tough could a little yellow tic tac be but when you look across all their movies and all their related media the answer is that they're practically indestructible cold temperatures for instance do not affect them in the first despicable me a minion floats off into space and doesn't freeze to death in a place where temperatures can reach minus 455 degrees fahrenheit as minus 270 celsius that scene also shows us that they don't need oxygen since there's no air in space humans meanwhile would be dead in about a minute in space so the fact that it's kicking around there for the better part of a week is mind-boggling speaking of biological needs they don't appear to require all that much food yeah they'll crush bananas and ice cream into their faces occasionally and very rarely do they show signs of hunger but judging from the fact that in the movie minions we see them survive in an ice cave from the time of the french revolution in 1789 all the way until the year they meet grew in 1968 that is 179 years without food starving them to death isn't going to be a viable option it's entirely possible that like other long-living creatures such as tortoises they can slow down their metabolism to keep themselves alive in adverse conditions or during hibernation so if metabolic processes don't really offer us a viable solution what about the good old-fashioned ultraviolence nope these things are impossibly durable in the competition short on the minions blu ray two minions survive a 25 second fall that's followed by two large missiles exploding after checking out a free-fall calculator for a loose calculation that's about a 1.9 mile fall or three kilometers followed by them being in point-blank range of a missile explosion and this isn't an isolated incident either in despicable me we see an errant rocket being shot into a crowd of minions instead of seeing limbs we see the minions looking slightly scuffed and annoyed this means the shrapnel that explodes from the rocket doesn't penetrate the minions skin all this also tells us is that they're resistant to heat temperatures of a nuclear explosion get surprisingly hot able to reach as high as the interior of the sun about 100 million degrees celsius or 180 million degrees fahrenheit in minions we see them afraid of a pool of lava which would at most be like 1250 celsius 2 282 fahrenheit but the fact that they can ingest anything close to an atomic warhead means that in reality they would have nothing to be scared of probably just fear the unknown right like you could be resistant to lava too but i don't encourage you to test that out anytime soon our next guest uh gave us well actually very little information besides the fact that he is uh impervious to acid oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah in the franchise they've been bonked crushed smashed and mashed and they just keep going and not just going they enjoy it torture makes them laugh wow harder than i thought next machine seriously in minions they're placed in medieval torture devices and they treat it like a playground their bodies are stretched nooses don't seem to work on them and the guy that's doing the torture is legitimately impressed by their toughness also mass quantities of radiation don't seem to have long lasting effects on them either kevin gets bombarded with mass quantities and minions becomes a giant swallows a large rocket explodes and walks away totally fine so we can't blow them up drown them send them into space or wait for them to die in true cartoon character fashion they seem to be completely indestructible so what do we do how does humanity fight back against these adorable little yellow marshmallows now this might sound crazy but i think it all boils down to lobster now follow me on this in despicable me 2 the film's main antagonist el macho manages to kidnap thousands of minions and what's he do with them he alters their dna with a mutagen that turns them into ravaging monsters this implies that the minions have dna that we can exploit and that isn't our only evidence in the orientation day short film we see that the minion clones all come from a sample of minion dna dna is their weakness their one and only weakness so if we attack the dna we attack the minion which then merits the question how do we attack the dna well any creature that has a chance of surviving as much torture as the minions do for as long as they do must have good repair enzymes to prevent their dna from degrading and that is where the lobsters come in you see lobsters and minions actually have a surprising amount in common just like a minion the american lobster can live for over a hundred years lobsters have an incredible ability to regenerate and are capable of even regrowing claws they can survive outside of the water for weeks and when put in cold water lobsters slow their metabolism so they don't have to eat for months both have evolved from the ocean they've been around for millions of years man maybe we should title this video minions are lobsters you know what if this video does end up being called minions or lobsters you'll know that it was because the word kill was flagged by youtube anyway one of the reasons various species of lobster can live over a hundred years has to do with a special enzyme called telomerase an enzyme that constantly fixes the bits of the telomere that are lost with each new cell division which then begs the question of what's a telomere and why is it important well a telomere is the non-coding dna at the end of a chromosome that protects the important dna found in the middle it's kind of like a bumper or buffer for the dna a good comparison to this is you know how shoelaces have that little plastic tip at the end to prevent the shoelace from fraying well that is basically the role of the telomere also fun fact that tip of the shoelace is called an aglet drop that little bit of knowledge on your friend next time you see him anyway each time a cell divides the telomere gets shorter and shorter until eventually they become so short that the cell can't divide anymore so by inhibiting the telomerase in the minion we'd be able to make sure that their cells can age and degrade thus making them older and more susceptible to infections viruses and bacteria in essence we would be able to make them human and thus kill them but how do you inhibit telomerase well here's the big twist friends it's a step in a part of many cancer treatments many cancer treatments try to shut down telomerase because cancer cells contain active telomerase this is what makes cancer so dangerous the active telomerase allows the cancer cells to continue dividing uncontrolled essentially making the cancer immortal but just like we talked about with the lobsters without telomerase activity these cells become inactive they stop dividing and they eventually die now when it comes to humans one of the biggest issues with these sorts of cancer treatments is the worry of side effects on the body since we're actively trying to bump off the minions unhealthy side effects just make the job easier we want to make the minions weaker and disrupt their wound healing and ability to fight infection so killing off telomerase in the body is exactly what we're looking for more good news for us minion hunters is that back in 2010 the harvard gazette announced that quote they achieved the milestone in aging science by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene the researchers bred mice without telomerases and this led to premature aging they then reactivated the telomerase and the work showed a dramatic reversal of the many aspects of aging including reversal of brain disease and infertility the fact that scientists are out there engineering animals with telomerase genes that you can flip on and off like a light switch tells us that inhibiting telomerase is possible in fact according to science daily scientists as recently as 2018 have made great strides on exactly this discovering how to shut off telomerase using other enzymes that it tends to work with this in turn opens up a new opportunity to indirectly block telomerase all of this research and more has resulted in the human telomerase reverse transcriptase-derived vaccine a very long-winded way of saying we shoot a needle intia and we start shutting the telomerase down this also would presumably work in the world of despicable me if engineered mutagens like el macho's px41 can alter the genetics of any living creature then a vaccine or injection can most certainly inhibit the telomerase of our immortal little minions speaking of vaccines it's worth noting that whatever we created would need to be injected into the minion why well in panic in the mail room a short film about the minions who work in gru's mail room a minion swallows some of the px41 and becomes a purple ravaging monster however the rampage comes to a halt when the minion spits out the px41 and goes back to normal so it's gotta get into their system and stay in there somehow luckily we know thanks to the home makeover short film that pins can penetrate minion bodies so those little yellow dudes better be on the watch out for any stray needles headed their way so there you have it friends how to kill off the unkillable yellow skinned overall clad monster it's not about subjecting them to extreme hot or cold cutting them off from error food or confronting them with guns and bombs it's about taking the fight to their very cells to bring down their deadliest superpower of all regenerating dna which come to think of it in an ironic twist the most despicable thing that gru has ever done is withhold their genetic secret from the world scientists have been trying to crack the answer to immortality and telomerase for decades and apparently it's been sitting in gru's underground bunker for the better part of 60 years and that my friends is the definitive way to kill a minion i suppose you could also go the route of you know making sure that their new movies flop but considering that this is a franchise where four films have grossed a little over 3.7 billion dollars at the worldwide box office pretty sure illumination entertainment ain't gonna be killing off the franchise anytime soon but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cut [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,839,775

Keywords: minions, minions 2, despicable me, despicable me 2, despicable me 3, minions full movie, minions songs, minions papaya, kill a minion, minions are lobsters, despicable me song, despicable me 2 full movie, what is a minion, what is a minion despicable me, what is a minions favorite food, despicable me full movie, minion biology, film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory minions, film theory despicable me, minions movie, minions trailer, minions banana

Id: nYrQYzapqNU

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CaptainjustusIII]

why is do evil g#mers hate our funny minions

[u/VirginSexPet]

[hash tag]CancelSatanPat!

• Message Transmitted by Beckie R.'s United Aerospace Corporation® Ice Cream Reanimator™

[u/Mad_Doctor_Haunt]

Fun fact: if they hadn't been in that cave for 150 years in Minions, the minions would've served under Hitler and the Nazis.

[u/CP_Rulez]

Minions deserve to die. The deserve all 7 stages of hell and back. The Simpsons shall remain the best yellow characters, not these banana flavored tic-tacs