It is time now, world, that I spoke. I’ve been hiding in the shadows for far too long. But no more! I will not be silenced or ignored any longer! I don’t care if my colleagues think that I’m some rambling crackpot who used far too much LSD back in the sixties and has been coasting on the minor success of his one and only novel, “Why all the mushrooms in the world celebrate Chanoeka instead of Christmas” ever since! I don’t care! I shall be heard!
Well, then. Allow me now, first and foremost, to introduce myself: my name is Dr. Desiderius Poontang, director of the Department of Comparative Cultural Biology, University of Suckey, PA. I have made it my life’s work to study, analyze, and classify both Gremlinidae AND Minionidae! Because, YES, they’re the same species! And I can’t, for the life of me, understand why this hasn’t occurred to anyone else in the world but me, maar dat zal me worst wezen! They are, world! And knowing this, understanding this, might very well mean the difference between the end of the world as you know it or a Merry Kris-Mus to us all. So y’all better listen up!
Right. As we all know from the excellent documentary Minions (2015, Kyle Balda, Bryan Lynch, et al.), the Minions came first. Very first, in fact: they were there from the very beginning! Yellow, pill-shaped, and utterly indestructible, they offered their services to the biggest and baddest, from T. rex to Yeti and Pharaoh Toot; they served them all, and they killed them all. Yeah, they did! They may seem all innocent and cute and babbling, but they murdered all their ‘masters’! Every single one! And if no one stops them, they’ll keep on murdering and mayhemming! Wake up, people! They’re here! They’re everywhere! Can’t you see they’re taking over the world? And we’re letting it happen! Don’t you… Why don’t you… SEE it… If you just…
(pause)
I’m calm now. I’ve taken a pill. It was yellow. Anyway, so: Minions had been there from the beginning, but the first mention of Gremlins doesn’t occur until 1943, when my esteemed colleague Dr. Dahl describes them in his excellent paper, so aptly called ‘The Gremlins‘ (Random House, 1943). In it, he tells of Gus, an RAF pilot whose Hawker Hurricane is destroyed over the English Channel by one of those murderous little trolls. And yeah, sure, he convinces the critter to not be bad anymore, but good instead — by fighting the Nazis. But come on, people. For anyone who thinks Gremlins are in any way ‘good,’ just watch the 1984 case study by Joe Dante, also extremely accurately titled ‘Gremlins‘! They kill! They murder and maim! Sure, like their yellow and sleek relatives, they start out all cute and fluffy, but feed them after midnight and all hell breaks loose! Just ask all the dead people from Kingston Falls if you don’t believe me. Oh, wait, you can’t; they’re DEAD! Nice and fluffy, my skinny little ass. Death to ’em all!
But first, what happened? What happened somewhere between the dawn of time and 1943 that turned those yellow, mostly bald but likeable accidental murderers into hairy, aggressive, spike-haired intentional killers? What went wrong? Well, world, you can finally rest now, because I, Dr. Desiderius Poontang, figured it out. After many years of study, after scouring the depths of the secret files of the Vatican, after meditating for at least sixteen minutes and seventeen seconds on top of Mount Yamaputra, right next to Swami Egidius Smeerpoets, after all of that, someone emailed me a PDF in which Dr. Nefario is shown experimenting on the poor buggers, turning them into ugly, purple, aggressive, axe-eating weirdos! (You may know this PDF as Despicable Me 2.) And from there it’s only a small step to full-on, actually murdering Gremlins, of course. A few of them must have escaped, traveled back in time to 1943, and decided to sabotage planes. To then lay low for 43 years, after which they decided to slaughter a small New England town. And then die. Until the sequel. Yes. It’s all clear to me now.
Now, before I submit this to ‘Nature,’ one must ask: what, in the end, is to be concluded? What is to be learned from all this? Is there anything left to do for us, human beings, to prevent us from being overrun by the yellow menace? The short answer to that is no. There’s not. It’s too late, people. They’re everywhere now. They always have been. Some of them even got voted president. We’re all doomed. Merry Kris-Mus, everybody!
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