Minions at Work: A Photocomic

This cartoon features some of my favorite props. The traffic cones are from a line of “Power Team World Peacekeepers” police figures from many years back. In the U.S. these were only sold at Big Lots stores, and the sets that included them (and other useful props) were pretty spendy so I didn’t get a lot. But they included great things like realistic traffic cones, metal 55 gallon drums, and portable police barriers, all of which I wished I could have bought by the dozen. One set in the line had tiny, realistic cardboard boxes wrapped with realistic fiberglass strapping material. They were beautiful, and I really would have loved to have had them, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay the price of a whole action figure play set to get what were essentially small cardboard boxes! Now you can’t get any of them. Live and learn.

The “Nuclear Warheads” are actually tiny, model rocket launchers from a line called “Quest Micro Maxx.” They fold out to form a functional launch pad, and there’s an electric launch control system in the black base. The rockets are about the size of your thumb and the rocket motors well less than an inch long. I got a bunch of these on deep, deep clearance, and never used the launchers, so they became natural Minions at Work props. and I use them a lot.

Finally, there’s the Minionmobile. This started life as a realistic toy replica of a golf cart, and you might be saying, it’s STILL a golf cart. And yes, it is, but it’s more extensively modified than you’d think. While the Minions are all in 1/6th scale (two inches to the foot), the golf cart was made in a smaller scale 1/10th or 1/8th, I don’t remember. To make the larger figures fit, I had to cut the metal supports for the roof and extend them, add leg room, raise the seat by half an inch, and extend the steering column I think (though it’s still pretty short). I also had to repaint it in regulation Minion white. I left off any markings, though I frequently put them on in the computer in individual cartoons. This allows me both to renumber the Minionmobile, suggesting there are many of them, I can also hide in-jokes in the markings and warnings. Actually, I DO have a second golf cart waiting conversion, and this Minionmobile does now have one permanent marking, a tiny bumper sticker from California’s famous In N Out Burger!

You can tell this is a fairly early cartoon. That brick wall was the background for many early Minions cartoons, until I started building more elaborate sets. And of course the logo is “Minions” and not “Minions at Work.” I changed the name because I just thought the title was too generic. Who would ever use just “Minions?” (Little did I know.) Also, the web domain “Minions.com” wasn’t available, but “MinionsAtWork.com” was. Now I own both that and “TheMinionsAtWork.com.”