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

Alright evil friends, it's 2021, what evil thing should we do today? We could use a network of hackers to steal the identities of thousands. We could use an army of bots to spread our propaganda on Twitter. We could steal billions for ourselves through a combination of underpaid workers. insider trading and tax evasion, we could develop a monopoly on everyone's childhood and control all entertainment. Being evil in 2021 sucks. Hello Internet, welcome to Movie Theory, a show that cares about the really big issues preparing humanity for the Minion apocalypse right now. You're probably wondering why I would want to

kill

the

minion

s on the surface.

These adorable little

minion

s who made their first appearance in the 2010 movie, Despicable Me, have taken the world by storm with their cuteness, their unique language, and their obsession with monkeys seems like the worst thing ever. What we do is simply annoy the parents forced by their children to watch the antics of these little yellow silos over and over again, but today's episode is not just about preserving the sanity of all the parents watching, although they are welcome. Not that, it's about preventing an extinction level event, think Mad Max Fury Road, but instead of riding around in burning cars, it has a bunch of little yellow tic tacs around monster banana trucks for those of you who don't They know the story of a minion's stated purpose. is to aid in the creation of evil, they are all different but they all share the same goal: to serve the most

despicable

master they can find, that is their driving cause in life, the top of their Maslow hierarchy, oh, sure for most His existence has been mostly harmless serving vampire dinosaurs to the French, but when things go well for him they quickly become truly dangerous when Bob the Minion becomes King of England, changing the country's laws to give him the crowns scarlet,

kill

s too much a woman who wants to rule through a strict dictatorship to top it all off in Despicable Me 3, they leave Gru because he has become less

despicable

and go out in search of a more evil employer and you see that this matters because their numbers are growing rapidly in a previous

film

theory

. episode, we learned through an official Facebook post that since they partnered with Gru in 1968, their numbers have expanded from around 230 and minions to 10,400 by the time Despicable Me 3 arrives and sure, all of this may not seem like a big deal. thing now that "You're working for a guy whose definition of evil is stealing trinkets from the Las Vegas Strip.

Once Gru and his family are no longer in the picture, these henchmen will look for another despicable boss and it could mean chaos, death and destruction or them." In short, I will end up working for Jeff Bezos, these things are 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 prepare for the eventual name, dare I say the inevitable minion wars. I'm going to investigate these creatures to find their weaknesses so we can exploit them now.

This may at first seem like an easy task, like how difficult a little yellow tic tac can be, but when you look at all of their movies and all of their related media, the answer is that they are virtually indestructible. Cold temperatures, for example, do not affect them. In the first "Despicable Me", a minion floats in space and does not freeze to death in a place where temperatures can reach -455 degrees Fahrenheit or -270 Celsius, that scene also shows us that they do not need oxygen since there is no air in space, meanwhile, humans would be dead in about a minute in space, so the fact that it's hanging around there for the better part of a week is mind-boggling.

Speaking of biological needs, they don't seem to require that much food, yeah They occasionally smash bananas and ice cream in their faces and very rarely show signs of hunger, but judging by the fact that in the movie Minions we see them surviving in an ice cave since the time of the French Revolution in 1789 Until the year they met in 1968, that is, 179 years without food, starving them will not be a viable option. Alternatively, it is quite possible that, like other long-lived creatures, such as turtles, they can slow down their metabolism to stay alive in adverse conditions or during hibernation, so if metabolic processes do not really offer us a viable solution, what about the old methods? ultra violence no these things are incredibly durable in the competition cut to the minions blu-ray two minions survive a 25 second fall followed by the explosion of two large missiles after checking a free fall calculator to a rough estimate of about 1.9 miles. fall or three kilometers straight from being at point blank range of a missile explosion and this is also not an isolated incident in My Despicable Me I see an errant rocket being fired at a crowd of minions instead of seeing limbs we see the minions looking Slightly scraped and upset , this means that the shrapnel exploding from the rocket does not penetrate the Minions' skin.

All this also tells us that they are heat resistant. The temperatures of a nuclear explosion become surprisingly hot and can reach as high as the interior of the sun at about 100 million degrees Celsius or 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. In the minions we see them fearful of a pool of lava that at most would be like 1250 centigrade 2282 fahrenheit but the fact that they can ingest anything close to an atomic warhead means that in reality they would have nothing to fear, they probably just fear the unknown, like you too could be resistant to lava, but I don't encourage you to try that in the short term.

Our next guest actually gave us very little information other than the fact that. he's uh impervious to acid oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah in the franchise they've been beaten, crushed, crushed and crushed and they just keep going and not just keep going, they enjoy it, the torture makes them laugh, wow, harder than I thought, the next serious machine in minions. They put them in medieval torture devices and treat them like a playground, their bodies are stretched out, the ropes don't seem to work on them and the guy torturing them is legitimately impressed by their toughness, plus they don't seem to be getting massive amounts of radiation. to have lasting effects on them, or kevin gets bombarded with massive amounts and the minions turn into giants, swallows a big rocket, explodes and flies away totally fine, so we can't blow them up, drown them, send them into space or wait for die real cartoon character, they seem to be completely indestructible, so what do we do?

How does humanity fight these adorable yellow marshmallows? This may sound crazy, but I think it all comes down to the lobster. Now follow me on this in Despicable Me 2. The main antagonist of the movie, the male, manages to kidnap thousands of minions and what does he do with them? He alters their DNA with a mutagen that turns them into devastating monsters. This implies that the minions have DNA that we can exploit and that is not our only evidence. In the orientation day short

film

we see that all of the Minion clones come from a Minion DNA sample.

DNA is its weakness, its only weakness, so if we attack DNA, we attack the Minion, which then begs the question: how do we attack DNA well? Any creature that has a chance of surviving as much torture as minions do for as long as they do must have good repair enzymes to prevent their DNA from degrading, and that's where lobsters come in. Lobsters and minions actually have a surprising amount. In general, like a minion, the American lobster can live more than one hundred years. Lobsters have an incredible ability to regenerate and are even able to regrow their claws.

They can survive out of water for weeks, and when placed in cold water, lobsters slow their metabolism. they don't have to eat for months they both have evolved from the ocean they have been around for millions of years man maybe we should title this video minions are lobsters do you know what happens if this video ends up being called minions or lobsters? Anyway, you'll know it was because YouTube flagged the word kill. One of the reasons why several species of lobster can live over a hundred years has to do with a special enzyme called telomerase, an enzyme that constantly repairs lost pieces of telomere. with each new cell division, which raises the question of what a telomere is and why it is important.

A telomere is the non-coding DNA at the end of a chromosome that protects the important DNA in the middle, it's like a bumper or shock absorber for the DNA. A good comparison to this is that shoelaces have that little tip of plastic at the end to prevent them from fraying, that's basically the function of telomeres. It is also a curious fact that the tip of the cord is called an aglet. that bit of knowledge about your friend the next time you see him anyway every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter and shorter until eventually they become so short that the cell can't divide anymore, so at the same time inhibit telomerase in the minion Being able to ensure that their cells can age and degrade, making them older and more susceptible to infections, viruses and bacteria.

In essence, we could make them human and thus kill them, but how do you inhibit telomerase? Here's the big twist, folks. It is a step in a part of many cancer treatments many cancer treatments try to turn off telomerase because cancer cells contain active telomerase. This is what makes cancer so dangerous. Active telomerase allows cancer cells to continue dividing uncontrollably, essentially making the cancer immortal, but still. We talk to lobsters without telomerase activity, these cells become inactive, stop dividing and eventually die. Now, as far as humans are concerned, one of the biggest problems with these types of cancer treatments is the concern about side effects on the body as we are actively trying to eliminate the Minions.

Unhealthy side effects simply make the job easier. We want to weaken the Minions and disrupt their wound healing and ability to fight infections, so eliminating telomerase in the body is exactly what we're looking for. More good news. for us minion hunters, is that in 2010 the Harvard Gazette announced that quote: they achieved a milestone in the science of aging by engineering mice with a controllable telomerase gene, the researchers bred mice without telomerases and this led to premature aging , then they reactivated telomerase and work. showed a dramatic reversal of many aspects of aging, including reversal of brain diseases and infertility.

The fact that scientists are engineering animals with telomerase genes that can be turned on and off like a light switch tells us that inhibiting telomerase is, in fact, possible. According to Science Daily, scientists as recently as 2018 have made great strides. Advances in exactly this, discovering how to turn off telomerase using other enzymes that it tends to work with, this in turn opens a new opportunity to indirectly block telomerase. All this research and more have come to fruition. in the vaccine derived from human telomerase reverse transcriptase, a very long way of saying: we inject you with a needle and we start to deactivate telomerase.

This would also presumably work in the Despicable Me world if engineered mutagens like the male's px41 can alter the genetics of any living creature, then a vaccine or injection can certainly inhibit the telomerase of our little immortal minions. Speaking of vaccines, it's worth noting that whatever we created would have to be injected into the minion. Why, panic in the mail room, a short film? About the minions working in Gru's mail room, a minion swallows some of the px41 and turns into a devastating purple monster, however the rampage stops when the minion spits out the px41 and turns back to normal, so it should get into your system and stay.

Luckily, thanks to the Home Makeover short film we know that pins can penetrate Minions' bodies, so those little yellow guys better keep an eye out for any stray needles heading their way, so there you have it folks, how kill the yellow that cannot be killed. Skinned and dressed monster in general, it's not about subjecting them to extreme heat or cold, isolating them from the wrong food or confronting them with guns and bombs, it's about taking the fight to their own cells to take down their deadliest superpower of all DNA regenerators who come to think. In an ironic twist, the most despicable thing Gru has ever done is hide his genetic secret from the world.Scientists have been trying to figure out the answer to immortality and telomerase for decades and it's apparently been in Gru's underground bunker for most of it. 60 years old and that my friends is the definitive way to kill a minion.

I guess you could also go down the route of, you know, making sure their new movies fail, but keeping in mind that this is a franchise where four movies have grossed a little over 3.7 billion. dollars at the global box office, I'm pretty sure that illuminated entertainment won't kill the franchise anytime soon, but hey, that's just a

theory

, a movie theory and that's it.