God, I can’t believe there’s minion content in the magazine. I’m so sorry. It’s not always like this.
I play this game where I try to go 24 hours without seeing a minion. I have not won the game, and now that you’ve joined the game, the curse is upon you too. So, last week, I was confused when I found myself agreeing to go along and watch Minions: The Rise of Gru. It was the most I’ve ever drank in a theatre, and for good reason. There were kids in suits, families, and crowds of rowdy 20-somethings, which was hilarious.
Minion dialect is what we’re here to talk about. Their sentences are a jumble of different languages, so that if you have the right ear, you can sometimes understand what they’re saying. It’s usually in Spanish, but I also heard English, Bahasa, French and German. And it made me think: with all these languages in the mix, how many people are out there who can actually speak minion?
No, really, think about it. Being able to decipher minion-speak in real time is like the ultimate test for polyglots. It seems crude, but if you’re trying to figure out who’s really an all-hearing-ear, what better test is there than jumbling every language in the world and playing it at double speed? If you can make sense of that, you can make sense of anything. I reckon translating the minion movie should be the entrance exam for all international delegates and translators. It tests your skill, speed and patience.
The movie also made me think about how infuriating it must be to market movies to today’s young audience. There’s no way that the promoters of this movie thought “this is gonna be a cult hit amongst the meme generation, we’re gonna make bank”. Somewhere, right now, the people who decided to re-release Morbius due to “meme demand” and then saw it spectacularly fail are screaming at their TV’s.
There’s something wonderfully chaotic about the way that young people engage in capitalism. The whim of the meme generation is indomitable, and I like to think that this stochastic spending is our way of fucking with the big dogs that control global markets. Create false demand, make the fat cats suffer, and spend unpredictably. Become ungovernable. Banana.