SPIRIT WOW: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE with THE CRUCIFIED MINION

How Oompa Loompas, a tasteless joke, and the Google algorithm got played by the new generation of Christian evangelicals.

Over the last couple months, the same post has started to appear from different Christian TikTokers. “This may sound a little crazy,” they begin, “but you need to hear this about a Minion. There was an animator who was messing around, when all of a sudden he created a Minion who died on the cross.”

It’s a very strange post, the more so because there are so many of them.

Of course, I was obsessed.

What I found was a story of how a new generation of Christian evangelicals is using a more and more Google-deformed internet to make a buck.

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WHAT IF…AN OOMPA LOOMPA AND BART SIMPSON HAD A BABY…

In 2010, Universal Pictures put out Despicable Me, a Steve Carell-led animated film about the Felonius Gru, an evil genius who adopts three orphaned girls as part of an evil plan, then starts to care for them. It was an unexpected smash hit, and the thing that really seemed to grab people were Gru’s henchmen, the Minions, a seeming endless series of tiny yellow pill-shaped beings who speak a strange high-pitched mishmash of a hundred different languages and are always getting into trouble.

The original script for Despicable Me actually didn’t have the Minions. Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud added them later as funny background characters. And early designs for them ranged from short factory workers in overalls to one-eyed robots, their single eye being used to convey their lack of intelligence. Coffin and Renaud told the LA Times in 2013, their inspirations were the Oompa-Loompas from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Jawas from Star Wars.

In the end they decided to merge the two images they had—tiny humans and one-eyed childlike robots—then played with their color until they came up with the form we know today. The Vanity Fair article which walks through the design process notes how the overalls have gotten smaller, suggesting “a diaper or underwear. This is called knowing your audience.” The Minions are basically cute little kids, their actions unpredictable (and sometimes stupid), their language most incomprehensible, their energy hilarious.

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…AND THEN SOMEBODY NAILED IT TO A CROSS…