Headscratchers / Minions: The Rise of Gru

• How on Earth does this movie fit into the franchise's established continuity? This film is noted as taking place in 1976, but Gru looks the same as in the first Minions, which takes place in 1968, yet Gru mentions to be eleven years old here. So was he three years old when he stole the royal crown from Scarlet Overkill? Why do Dr. Nefario and Gru meet for the first time here if they had already met each other at the Villain Con in the last film? Gru was there with his mother when Nefario tested the Freeze Ray (and that's without mentioning that he became Gru's assistant after being impressed by a science fair project of his according to Word of God), so why would Nefario be working as the owner of a record shop who just makes gadgets in his free time? Why do Gru and Marlena live in a suburban house if they were shown as having lived in that manor since Gru was little in a flashback sequence of the first film? If Gru already knew from this film that Vector is Mr. Perkins' son, then why did Gru freeze Vector's head in the first film? Annoyed as he could be by Vector's antics, assaulting your superior's son is frankly a really stupid idea. And lastly, if Silas Ransbottom already knew Gru since he was little and Gru knew about the AVL, why didn't they recognize each other when they met again in Despicable Me 2 and Gru acted amazed, like if it was the first time he discovered that there was a heroic organization that hunted down supervillains?
  • To answer the first question: Nostalgia. 1976 was the year of Bicentennial (in the United States), Pet Rocks, blockbusters like Jaws and Rocky, and other markers of a 1970s childhood.
  • Some of the other questions could be answered by memory loss due to aging. Gru aswell as the other characters forgot about these details later in life, maybe because they didn't find it important enough (For Silas point of view, Gru was merely another child victim).
  • Here's another surprise: The first Minions movie says the minions existed before humans, but a short film from the first Despicable Me movie says they all came from a single strand of mutated DNA. This could mean that both Minions 1 and 2 are just set in a parallel universe from the main franchise(might also explain why we never see Bob in the main franchise).
• With the gadgets he makes, how is it possible that Gru isn't popular at school? If, as a kid, you saw one who had a flying motorcycle or a cheese gun, wouldn't you immediately want to befriend him?
  • Mob mentality is a hell of a thing. Once a small handful of kids decide "Gru's a weirdo, he likes weird stuff and always hangs out with little yellow people," the rest of the kids would keep it going for fear of being labelled as other too. It doesn't matter what cool stuff Gru invents, it'll all be deemed weird by virtue of being associated with "the weird kid".
• Why doesn't Gru has his Freeze Ray here? He had one at the end of the first Minions film, the one he used to freeze Scarlet and Herb Overkill.
  • It's most likely her mother took it away, so he made a replacement with the Cheese Ray.
• If Gru really wants to impress the Vicious 6, why doesn't he think about showing them the stolen royal crown of Queen Elizabeth? By the way, how is it possible that no one has heard about Gru before if he stole such a historical artifact? Plus, when he stole it, dozens of people witnessed the theft.
  • Keep in mind that a quite long time happened between the events of Minions and Rise of Gru (and as one user pointed out, more time than logically possible), and people would be less impressed about an achievement that happened such a long time ago.
  • There is also the possibility that stealing the Queen's crown wasn't that much of a challenge during the events of the original Minions, since Scarlet Overkill was already in a weak and crazed state before Gru stole the crown. The Vicious Six/Five seem to have very rigorous criteria for new candidates, afterall.
  • He was probably rushing out to the henchmen/member audition and probably didn’t have time to prepare to show them proof of his evil deeds and instead had to improvise his reasoning for why he would fit in with them.
• If the Vicious Five mocked Gru for being a kid, why did they call him to make auditions for a new teammate in the first place?
  • As they said in the movie, they originally thought he was a short adult when they sent out the invitation.
  • Also, they are an evil bunch, and what is more evil than setting up a child with high expectations to be among their idols only for them to ridicule them?
• Where do the minions get all these suits from? And how do these suits they borrow suddenly become their size?
• Why does Stuart have a Scarlet Overkill themed lunchbox? It's really doubtful that after Scarlet tried to, well, blow him into smithereens he would keep something that reminded him of her attempted kill...
  • For a sake of a Call Back to the first Minions movie, I guess...
• Where are the Lehman Brothers? The first film establishes that they were the presidents of the Bank of Evil before Mr. Perkins, but there is no one at the bank's president office. So the bank's previous owners didn't care to manage their business?
  • Most banks have multiple locations, so there could be more than one Bank of Evil location. The one from the original movie might have originally been Lehman Brothers before the Bank of Evil took over that location as well.
• When Gru and Wild Knuckles infiltrate the Bank of Evil to steal The Mona Lisa, Mr. Perkins shows them a picture of his son Vector, the same one seen in Despicable Me, albeit with Mr. Perkins having a slightly different hairstyle. Nice Easter Egg, without doubt, but... does this mean that Vector doesn't really show his age, à la Tom Cruise? This film takes place in 1976 and the original Despicable Me takes place at the very least in the late 2000s or the early 2010s (evidenced by the fact that Vector has a Nintendo Wii, which were released in 2006). In the photo, Vector is at the very least five or six years old, while Gru states to be eleven years old here, which proves that Gru is at least five or four years older than Vector. However, in the first film, Vector is at the very least in his late twenties or early thirties, and his father's comments about Gru's age making him an unfavorable candidate for a loan in contrast to younger successful villains like Vector, suggests that the age gap between Vector and Gru is far more than just four or five years.
  • Unless if you support the Vector Grimwalker theory, this will be hard to explain.
• During the Bank of Evil scene, is that Sergei from The Secret Life of Pets 2?
  • Seeing how Gru appeared in The Secret Life of Pets, yes, that's Sergei.
• Upon returning to his destroyed house, Wild Knuckles instantly assumes that the Vicious Five were behind it. While this was actually true, how did he guess that they were responsible for that? At this point, Wild Knuckles was unaware that they had been made aware of his survival, so his house could have been destroyed by anyone.
  • Does he think anyone else would've done that? He knows the Vicious Five have their own vehicles, so he mostly thought it was their doing.
• Can we say that Stuart was a hermaphrodite for a short time? Word of God is that all minions are male, but while transformed into a chicken hybrid during the battle against the Vicious Five, Stuart hatched an egg, from which a chick emerged. Such a surprise that Stuart doesn't seem traumatized at his sex momentarily changing even for a short time.
• Why does Silas Ramsbottom attend Wild Knuckles' funeral? It's not like they were friends anyway...
  • Maybe they were...
• If Wild Knuckles faked his death and the minions knew about it, how is it possible that Gru didn't know that Wild Knuckles wasn't really dead? He did seem surprised at finding out that Wild Knuckles still lived, but if he hadn't seen his corpse (as the casket was filled with bananas), how didn't he feel that something was wrong?
• Overall, what was the purpose of the Wild Knuckles character? He doesn't appear nor is he mentioned in other films. Shouldn't it have been easier to just merge him and Dr. Nefario into the same character? Nefario did have an established story with Gru.
  • He's Gru's inspiration to become the greatest villain of all time. Everyone has inspiration for someone in their lives at one point.
• Whatever happened to Bob, Otto and that minion chick thingy after the events of the film? They are nowhere to be seen in the Despicable Me trilogy.
  • They most likey did something wrong and got banished, seeing they are never spoken of.
  • Or they're just out of focus—those crowd scenes pack a lot of minions in, they could be hiding in the group somewhere.
  • Despicable Me 3 might actually have proof that Bob's still here. When the minions are getting things from the other prisoners, one of them gets a replica of Bob's teddy. Bob seems to have grown up and got hair(his green eye's hard to see though).
• How do random people understand the minions and vise versa? Even if they served humanity's evilest members, after Napoleon, most of them were stuck in an ice cave and had no human contact. And as we all know, language is not static. It evolves over time and 100+ years is no small time. Not to mention that the Minion language seems to be a mix of all other languages in the world.
  • Spoken language isn't the only way the minions communicate with others. There are also their various facial expressions and overall body language which can say lots. These random people likely use that, plus the little words that they do understand.

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