“OOOOHHH!!! Gru touched Lisa. Lisa’s got cooties.”
That is one of my favorite clips from the 2013 movie “Despicable Me 2.” In a flashback, the gangly super villain Gru becomes a tiny Transylvanian boy in a black suit holding a blue flower in a schoolyard. Young Gru is about to ask a girl for his first date. As soon as student Gru touches the much taller blond on her arm to get her attention to make his shy request, a red-headed schoolmate with big glasses screams: “Cooties!”
“Despicable Me 2” (2013) is reported to be the most profitable film in the 100-year history of Universal Studios. Grown-up Gru returns from the first “Despicable Me” (2010) and teams right back up with Kevin and a hoard of yellow, bumbling, endearing, hilarious minions. This second combination has made more money for the home lot than the Academy Award Best Pictures “Gladiator” (2000) and “A Beautiful Mind” (2001), combined.
Universal’s next installment is reported to be a movie entitled “Minions,” with a planned release date of July 10, 2015. This new film will focus itself on the pill-shaped curiosities with the blue overhauls, odd glasses, no noses and sparse tufts of occasional black hair. By Wikipedic definition, “Minions are small, yellow creatures who have existed since the beginning of time, evolving from single-celled organisms into beings who have only one purpose: to serve history’s most despicable masters.” Perhaps their motivations are not the best, but their actions must be the most entertaining yet for the evolutionary descendants of bacteria. In the realm of biochemistry and my long-ago science experiments, bacteria were affectionately referred to as “bugs,” which brings us back to cooties.
Cooties are bugs. How do I know? I played with them as a child. A postman in Minneapolis, Minnesota invented the game in 1948. In the box, you got bug parts (bodies, heads, antennae, eyes, proboscises (noses), legs) and dice. You rolled a die, took a turn, grabbed a part and started to assemble a cootie bug. First to build a whole cootie won. The game was incredibly successful. Over 50 million boxes of bug parts sold between 1949 and 2005. In 2003, the Toy Industry Association immortalized the Cootie Game as one of the 100 most creative toys of the 20th century.
Before the game, the original cooties were real bugs. In the damp trenches of World War I, crawling, biting, itchy bugs bothered the tired troops. They weren’t nice bugs. Somehow, somewhere, those bugs were called “cooties.” The name stuck and traveled back home with the soldiers. In their backyards, they swatted bugs and called, “’Cooties,’ get away from me.” Their children heard and yelled to each other: “Cooties. Cooties. He has cooties. Run!”
Poor Gru.
That’s where it all started — out there, in the backyards and on the playgrounds of life. Girls used the term to run from boys. Boys used the term to run from girls. The separation of the sexes had begun, and it had found a new term to perpetuate and justify the distance.
Poor Gru. He had cooties.
I think the creators of the Despicable Me movies may have played the Cootie Game. Their young minds made and assembled cooties. They built them and yelled at kids on the playground and met and collaborated and invented a new cootie. The writers created minions who were not bugs themselves but were the descendants of bugs. They envisioned new bugs, nicer bugs, milder bugs — with wayward tendencies, yes — but funnier and more loveable bugs.
Why is Gru not despicable? Didn’t he have cooties? Yes — we remember the playground. Didn’t everyone run from him? Yes – he was and is a quirky guy with a limited wardrobe and skinny legs. Didn’t he steal the moon? Yes – I guess that was bad. But, wait, he found his minions. Even before the three little girls and the pretty spy lady, he had his minions. Those fun-loving relatives of bugs and their wildly disarming antics were at work on his shy, rejected, hurt heart. Who better to cure a super villain of the cooties than the relatives of cooties themselves?
We have now seen a miraculous transformation in the march of time, bugs and cinema. Cooties have evolved from real insects that bite, to plastic bugs in a box, to the bumbling fumbling yellow progeny of bacteria whose big smiles and disarming manner cure the cooties of that small boy we found alone on the playground so long ago.
Even a super villain has no chance when confronted with a minion, or a million or two cooties.
Roll the dice, start assembling and let the next show begin.
Minions cure cooties!
Grandpa Jim