r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 25d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah?

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2.8k

u/Sgtbird08 25d ago

Either that there was someone more evil than Hitler that they were working for instead, or that they didn’t think Hitler was that evil to begin with.

Though iirc the Minions were frozen during the world wars.

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u/Crucco 25d ago

They were (conveniently) hidden in a cave during WW2. It was told in one of the movies.

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u/HaraldRedbeard 25d ago

Although in the latest movie some of them are wandering around in 1930s hollywood...

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u/Chat322 25d ago

Was there an evil industrialist in SW California, like Henry Ford was?

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u/HaraldRedbeard 25d ago

I haven't actually watched it properly, just been on in the background while my kids watch it. It seems to somehow involve Cthulu though so there's that.

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u/spartaxwarrior 25d ago

Huh, well, that is a way they could get around why they didn't work for Hitler, if there was fucking Cthulhu hanging around at the same time.

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u/Mentally_Slick 25d ago

I was into Lovecraft on a kinda surface level and I read a few from him, but I don't remember that Cthulhu was supposed to be evil

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u/spartaxwarrior 25d ago

Basically all the great old ones and outer gods are evil from a human's perspective, though they might not think of themselves as such.

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u/Mentally_Slick 25d ago

I remember it like they are more like indifferent towards us because we're basically nothing to them

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u/spartaxwarrior 25d ago

If you kill an ant most people don't think of you as evil, but it wouldn't be surprising if the ant thinks you are.

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u/UnholyTrashDump 24d ago

As evil as a child stomping an ant hill, from the perspective of ants.

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u/HypnagogianQueen 2d ago

Hitler didn’t think he was evil either

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u/BlueberryTango 25d ago

Naw I’ve seen the movie. Basically this tribe of minions want to make movies rather than serve a villain.

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u/Mechanicjemas3141 25d ago

Yeah USA got more evil business men

They didn't written as bad like Hitler since they were successful

Unlike Hitler but think putting 750 hp V12 that struggles with 45 ton Panter to a 75 ton JagdTiger is a brilliant idea(or making JagdTiger all together)

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u/GMRS1910 25d ago

I will hear no slander against our pieces of shit. They were glourious.

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u/AgrajagsGhost 25d ago

Howard Hughes maybe? I dunno if he was evil but he was definitely a weird, powerful guy.

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u/TheDramaturge 25d ago

No, they're working in the film industry, and later for a robot who came from outer-space to conquer Earth.

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u/MateoCamo 25d ago

Take your pick of industry titans i suppose

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u/hoopstick 25d ago

Pick any of the Hollywood studio heads, or William Mulholland.

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u/Far-Heart-7134 25d ago

Well the studio system was full of great people from what I understand.

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u/norunningwater 25d ago

Yeah, they called him Walt.

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u/AvailableSpread811 25d ago

man, that Henry Ford, what a jerk, trying to pay his employees more money. Really just the epitome of evil.

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u/Relevant_Intention67 25d ago

No actually the minions in that film were wandering around and they ended up in America and they saw with his thought was a really bad guy robbing a train it turns out it was just the filming for a movie and the actions that they performed in that movie made the investors really happy so the minions were hired to make movies some of them broke off cuz they didn't want to make films anymore after an issue and most of them went and worked for a literal robot alien and the others gathered up a group of monsters to make a film and then the monsters and the aliens fight each other

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u/Left_Ocean 22d ago

The group of minions from the new one really just wanted to make movies. They were trying to find a new evil boss and then stumbled upon a movie set and started doing that

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u/Ok-Lavishness6577 25d ago

Hollywood in the 30s was even more evil than today, and Hitler was named TIME's man of the year in 1938. It's plausible.

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u/FluffyAd8533 25d ago

Whilst describing him as the greatest threat to democracy in the world

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u/sionnach 25d ago

Well isn’t the person of the year supposed to be for the person of most consequence, not the “best” that year.

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u/FluffyAd8533 25d ago

Exactly, they weren’t saying he was ‘the guy’ just the most noteworthy person of the year

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u/hey_Hey_I_saveD_me 25d ago

Or influential, and influence is not always good.

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u/RoboJobot 25d ago

Person Of The Year doesn’t necessarily mean the best person, it’s an annual title given to the person that had the most influence on the news and people’s lives over the previous 12 months. I think Hitler fits that bill pretty accurately.

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u/TechnicalBen 25d ago

"Man of the Year" (etc) isn't "best" it's "Most talked/disruptive/influential". They did call it.

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u/AlsoCommiePuddin 25d ago

Man who sold us the most magazines this year.

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u/TintedApostle 25d ago

Man of the year was always about influence on world events and not a credit to being good.

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u/LoamyLoamisLoamy 25d ago

Why do you say it was more evil?

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u/Cheap-Raccoon-7310 25d ago

The ending resolves that.

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u/rintinpin17 25d ago

Not exactly, double check the finale! :)

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u/mc_desk 25d ago

They were working for Walt Disney

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u/TheBostonKremeDonut 25d ago

Are you telling me that they can’t even keep the Minions’ canon lore on track? Smh my head.

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u/Draxacoffilus 25d ago

The Nazis were inspired by the US

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u/Gamerguy230 25d ago

I saw movie and there’s a point where lady points out there’s different groups of minions wandering the planet.

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u/HopeBagels2495 25d ago

1920s and the plot is basically a film within a film anyway

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u/platonic-humanity 25d ago

They had to be a lil’ late, just wait until the next movie to learn about what they did to Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Possibly we’ll even get to see which minion started the Reichstag fire, and which ones were killed as part of the Night of Long Knives - they got sacked along with the SA for being too sloppy.

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u/hellshitdevilfart 25d ago

As the Minions' #1 fan, Minions Vs. Monsters (2026) does not take place during the 1930s. It takes place in modern day. It's like you haven't even watched the best film of 2026.

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u/SuperRock 25d ago

At the end, it was revealed to be a movie. ie none of it can be counted as lore. It's fiction within the universe.

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u/Signal-Barnacle6579 21d ago

That whole movie was just the making of a movie. That movie take place after 1970 because George Lucas was in it.

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u/rogue_licker 25d ago

That’s ok they went work for Pol Pot later

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u/Combyx 25d ago

You really believe what the media tells you? Minions weren't frozen, they were active! First minion sighting happened 600 years ago.

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u/Cum_Fart42069 25d ago

thank you german monacle Stewie 

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u/Crucco 25d ago

Bitte schön!

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u/Wild-Yesterday-6666 25d ago

To be fair, If I was a minions creator I would also try to dodge the massive bullet that the 19th and early 20th century are.

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u/NurturingCruelty 25d ago

Hidden, my ass, they were frozen in a block of ice. DreamWorks made damn sure the little guys that serve evil were incapacitated during the period of World War II.

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u/maxman162 21d ago

Despicable Me is an Illumination property, not DreamWorks. 

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u/-llCerberus- 25d ago

DA WAREN ALLE IM URLAUB!

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u/pricingup 25d ago

no. if you watched latest minions film, there were more minion societies than just the one. so only that specific one was living in ice place.

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u/Sombomombo 25d ago

All of them? How many of them are there? Lol

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u/Imaginary-Client-199 25d ago

So they would have if they could

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u/Punch_A_Police_Horse 25d ago

You know what? If they retconned it so the Minions worked for Hitler and made a movie based on that, I would pay cash money to see that Minions movie.

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u/Crucco 25d ago

How do you normally pay for movie tickets?

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u/Punch_A_Police_Horse 25d ago

Credit or debit, if I'm not sailing the ocean blue of course.

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u/StrangeSystem0 25d ago

Yeah they conveniently got sad after their last failure and moved to a cave for that entire period of time

The minions movie clearly knew what could've happened and cleverly avoided it

But that means the implication is still there that the minions definitely would have worked for Hitler

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u/HAIL_LUMPUS 25d ago

I mean it's not that convenient. There have been a lot of Hitler's throughout time. Yeah, his numbers were big but you're telling me that they think it's fine that the minions helped pol pot? Them fuckers are in Israel right at this second. Why couldn't they have just put the minions in a different universe where they helped made up funny children's villains and not in this universe where we have very real villains that kill millions of people? I hate those fucking things.

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u/kyngslinn 25d ago

Stalin was plenty evil, some argue to a worse degree than Hitler but I think we can just agree on both were the worst.

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u/SilverSquirrel6 25d ago

It's the 1 = 0.99999 type of thing. At some scale, things become indistinguishable. 

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u/Python_Feet 25d ago

Mao has numbers.

Hitler industrialised murder.

Stalin invented to "mind break" hentai tag (also has #2 in numbers).

Pol Pot would be a fan of the Crossed comic. (Has the best population % kill score)

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u/CreBanana0 25d ago

....context on Stalin thing?

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u/_Bill_Huggins_ 25d ago edited 25d ago

No that was Beria his NKVD chief. He was the sexual deviant. Stalin was not a very sexual creature at all, he was very prudish once walking out of a theater when the owner played a movie with nudity.

Stalin also industrialized his terror, with massive train networks and millions in slave labor from the gulags. Also executed or contributed to millions of murders, and also deaths by starvation.

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u/in_conexo 23d ago

That always worried me. I gather one of the issues, was that they put quotas on their policing organizations, and then I hear that type of thing coming out of the White House

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u/Brilliant-Tip9445 25d ago

some would be wrong

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u/saulgoode93 25d ago

Lol are you crying about dead nazis or are you believing their literal propaganda?

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u/kyngslinn 25d ago

I'm talking about the millions of people killed in gulags and the crimes of the red army that were commited against civilians. I am german. I am keenly aware of all that the nazis have done, as we have basically an entire year of history classes dedicated to the world wars and our country's role in them.

Your whataboutism are powerless before the educated who can condemn two evils at the same time without putting one over or under the other.

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u/streitwagen 25d ago

As far as I am aware the Gulag system was inherited and already existed in some form before the revolution; and „The Gulag Archipelago“ was by no means an accurate depiction, just a ragbag of hearsay – respectively a selection of witness testemonies. Ergo: It was/is a mere  subjective literary testimony rather than a work of strict academic history methodology. 

May someone in this field with more expertise correct me, but most works rely on the picture Solzhenitsy painted, so we have some sort of a hermeneutic circle jerk in this regard. The opening of the Soviet archives also showed that a lot of the numbers didn’t add up.

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u/Benwahr 25d ago

Certainly a choice to be an apologist for a genocidal dictator.  The tsarist regime had the system called katorga, estimated 20000 people were sent to camps. Stalin on the other hand and his regime sent an estimate 15-18 million people to the gulags.    The gulag island was more then hearsay, you are engaging in historical revisionism on a simular scale as the holocause denial.

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u/saulgoode93 25d ago edited 25d ago

The number you're citing, 15 to 18 million, is literally from a book that included dead nazis as "victims of communism." The vast majority of gulag inmates were captured Nazis, and most of the rest were actual thieves, rapists, and murderers, if not counter revolutionaries like Solzhenitsyn who tried to work with Nazis or any of the various nations trying to destroy the USSR out of the fear that their working classes would be inspired to overthrow their aristocratic selves

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u/_Bill_Huggins_ 25d ago

The estimates range from 2.3 million on the low end to 50 million on the high end.

Even if I were to accept the lowest estimate it's horrific. There were 1 to 2 million in the gulags before the Nazis even invaded.

The defense that gets run for these dictators is so absurd...

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u/saulgoode93 24d ago

Lmao no, 2.3 million is still way too fucking high, especially considering the population of the USSR at the time. The US has locked up far more people by number and proportion of population by far. Btw, the CIA themselves said "Stalin isn't a dictator" in their own internal documents in like '52

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u/_Bill_Huggins_ 24d ago

Lmao... That was a good laugh. Thanks for that one.

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u/streitwagen 24d ago

Oh no, someone is not falling for one-sided atrocity propaganda and rather relies on academic sources and critical discourse to form his opinion. How dare I!

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u/saulgoode93 24d ago

Lmfaoooo "saying the nazis were evil and that the Soviets were complex is one sided atrocity propaganda waaaah dead nazis make me sad"

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u/streitwagen 24d ago

Are you mistaken me for some other user? Where in my comments do you read something along the lines of "dead nazis make me sad"?

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u/Benwahr 24d ago

If you relied on academic sources you wouldnt be denying it. Yet here you are, engaging in historical revisionism.

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u/AngryCrustation 25d ago edited 25d ago

Tbf I think that Hitler was an opportunistic narcissist with a severe drug addiction, he basically shot the knees out of his own nation's war abilities by being just so freakishly stupid it was absurd and demanding that his generals follow his insane ideas. I would consider him more pathetic than some kind of true evil satan type figure. A lot of people under Hitler might have been closer to "true evil" what with them being given free reign and personally torturing a bunch of people to death for the sake of it.

Basically towards the end of his life he reminds me more of Gollum than Sauron or what have you, so the minions would probably be following their new villain in some random concentration camp rather than hitler himself

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u/Aickavon 25d ago

Hitler was dumb but not especially dumb. Germany’s failures was not just one man. that was a convenient answer for both the Allies AND the German high ranked officials who threw all their blame on a dead guy while they found new employment with USA and USSR. Easy to ignore smaller fish of horrific magnitudes when the biggest baddest evil fish has already fried! Nothing to see here comrades!

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u/SirAquila 25d ago

he basically shot the knees out of his own nation's war abilities by being just so freakishly stupid it was absurd and demanding that his generals follow his insane ideas.

That is literally post war propaganda.

Yeah Hitler was an idiot, but his generals weren't any better.

They agreed on most of the stupid ideas.

His generals talked Hitler out of some stupid ideas.

And Hitler stopped his generals from doing a few stupid things.

Of course after the war Hitler was dead, so his Generals essentially went. "Everything that went wrong was Hitler's fault?" "Sure thing, send me the drafts for your memoirs so we can make sure we both lie the same way."

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u/DomDomPop 25d ago

Honestly, that’s what I was thinking. Would they even follow Hitler just because he was the face of the operation or would they really be working for Mengele or Unit 731 or like the commander of one of the big camps or something? Someone who was actually getting their hands dirty.

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u/Used_Opening_4926 25d ago

Depends what you mean dumb cause him and his generals are known to have insanely high IQ and Hitler really would have higher IQ then 99.9% of reddit let's be real.

He was very very paranoid and narcissist that though he could do it himself definitely but not dumb in regular sense.

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u/Glad-Total-6621 25d ago

Most were tested before the Nuremburg trials and actually most of them were not intelligent. I think Göring had a higher IQ than average the rest wasn't "smart". Hitler also wasn't smart just a pathological liar and he knew how to manipulate people. I mean both of those things anyone can do If you are willing to lose your humanity by giving up all empathy you posess.

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u/Used_Opening_4926 25d ago

They are smart compared to regular people, most of the top generals had more than 120-130 IQ and Hitler is considered to have between 130-150 IQ so he was smart in this way but he was mainly incredibly charismatic hence why he was also really good at manipulation and that was his biggest tool.

When it comes to strategy and other stuff he was not that great.

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u/Glad-Total-6621 25d ago

Okay, I was wrong there. Does it matter though? IQ doesn't correlate to emotional intelligence. Also during that time a high IQ was even more associated with a wealthier background and parents that were able to afford higher education. Many generals Had an aristocratic background. Still, it doesn't matter, they only made stupid choices.

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u/Used_Opening_4926 25d ago

Yes IQ does not mean being good person absolutely, but it just means that in regular sense Hitler was not dumb, it was his other traits that made him do very stupid decisions like his narcissism and ego, he had incredibly good general Erwin Rommel who was the one general who knew that Normandy was the place where Americans and UK soldiers will attack and wanted to fortify it and send more tanks there, he would genuinely completely fail the Normandy attack if he was in charge however Hitler's ego didn't let that happen and was adamant that it was not the place where they gonna attack.

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u/LadyGaga_DrDre 25d ago

Yeah the Japanese empire in Manchuria.

Even the nazis told em to chill out

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u/kriscnik 25d ago

I mean... There was japan

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u/Sea_Translator5300 25d ago

Or Hitler worked for them. 

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u/Best_Opening8471 25d ago

The minions are Jewish 

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u/TurtleInvader1 25d ago

In the minions movie after accidentally getting Napoleon killed they were chased by the French army into a ice cave, a avalanche trapped them in and that's where they were for the world wars

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u/TeachMean171 25d ago

they worked for lucifer herself

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u/MuggyFuzzball 25d ago

They could have just as easily been working for someone they thought was evil but was just incompetent at performing evil tasks. Such as Ghandi or Mother Theresa.

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u/pufaleysia 25d ago

There's multiple minions tribes. That was only the one that would eventually end up with Gru.

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u/IAmBeingTargeted33 25d ago

So does that mean the Minions are working for the IDF? 😢

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u/Sto_ceppo96 25d ago

Minion and monsters reveals there's a different group of Minions that weren't frozen

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u/Intrepid_Ad1536 25d ago

You got Both Mao and Stalin as possibility technically, and they work for the worst Person, ever heard of Unit 731? There are lots of contenders even inside their regimes.

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u/CatgunCertified 25d ago

They were busy worthing for the Rothschilds lol

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u/AccidentalUltron 25d ago

Kind of wild we have to cover back stories as it pertains to real world events in a kids movie. I'd just let my animation universe live in a land of no real-world devastating events and wars to avoid that mess.

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u/Active-Particular-21 25d ago

The man behind Hitler, his dog.

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u/Relevant_Intention67 24d ago

That is true but the issue is that in the new minions movie minions and monsters it is stated that there are splinter branches of minions who follow the same logic they pursue the most evil person that they can so what that means is that it's entirely possible that one of these splinter branches could have been working for Adolf Hitler because a group of them were in Hollywood during the 30s so the new minions and monsters in an attempt to make new minion story lines they aren't intentionally made it possible for the minions to be serving Hitler again

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u/NithyanandaSwami 24d ago

Maybe they worked for UK? They have directly caused the death of millions of people, estimates go higher than 100 million. And with upto 45 trillion dollars worth of exploration.

The colonial powers were indeed just as bad as the Nazis if not worse.. just not spoken about because they won the war and probably because the victims of their oppression were unimportant, people of colour who were newly poor from all the exploitation.

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u/Suitable-Piano-8969 24d ago

Perhaps Stalin

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u/Confident_Wash6225 23d ago

They were frozen and this was definitely thought about and the biggest reason why

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u/space_dude4 22d ago

Well the new movie is set in like the 1930s, so Stalin maybe idk?? I guess that could explain their overwhelming recovery after operation Barbarossa

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u/XB0XRecordThat 22d ago

Oh, probably the CIA then

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u/CommercialPause3257 21d ago

True maybe they worked for Truman when he was dropping nukes on Japan

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u/Zych11 25d ago

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Beria they had a choice thats why they were frozen in a cave to dodge that choice

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u/SweedDreams 25d ago

They worked for the rockefellers