"Funny thing about the zombie process. Sometimes it makes 'em come out real little. Real little and REAL MEAN!"
— Crazy Dave, Plants vs. Zombies
You've fought against normal Mooks, now meet a smaller version of them. An impending Curb-Stomp Battle? Well... you can't be that sure. Sometimes, a Mini Mook will make up for its fragility by being so small and agile that just hitting them is a problem. And sometimes, they defy expectations by being a full-on Pintsized Powerhouse.
Often dealt with using an Area of Effect attack.
Some Mini Mooks come in swarms, relying on sheer numbers to compensate for their diminished strength.
Contrast Giant Mook. See also Adorable Evil Minions.
Examples
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Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering gives us Segovian Leviathan. A 3/3. A normal Dominarian leviathan is a 10/10. Why is this? Well, Segovia is a plane where everything is tiny. More directly dealing with this is Amrou Kithkin, a tiny creature that can't be blocked by anything that isn't also tiny.
Films — Live-Action
- Austin Powers: "I shall call him... mini-Me."
- The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) has a small dwarf version of the doctor (which inspired Mike Myers to create Mini-Me).
- Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun, played by Hervé Villechaize.
Literature
- The Star-spawn of Cthulhu, who are basically mini-mes of Cthulhu. In this case, Cthulhu is a being the size of a mountain. His spawn are still large compared to the average adult human.
- The Deep Ones themselves are mini-me versions of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra (at least, if Father Dagon and Mother Hydra exist; later writers assume that they do, at least).
Professional Wrestling
- While mini estrellas were started in CMLL, AAA took it a step further with the mascot division, where every wrestler must be paired with smaller one using a derivative of his gimmick, or vise versa.
Video Games
- The Battle Cats: Li'l Doge is a much smaller and cuter variant of Doge. It doesn't have much in the way of stats, but can occasionally dodge attacks.
- Little Calebs in the Blood Expansion Pack. Notable in that they are midget enemy versions of the protagonist.
- The midget versions of Psychos and the Midget Shotgunners in Borderlands. They're hard to get a bead on because they dart around like mad as they try to engage you in close range.
- The 1st DLC features zombies as enemies, and even has zombified midgets. Zombie midgets behave different from the regular ones — their MO is staying out of your field of vision and leaping in your face.
- In Borderlands 2, every bandit enemy type has a midget version-even the Goliaths.
- Bug had Reptilia, a stage with literal Army Ants that fired grenades from their tails. At the end of Scene 2, you come across a sign that says: "BEWARE! BIG ANTS". You then face off against three tiny versions of the ant enemies, but these don't do anything except flee from Bug. Until you get to the end... where you indeed fight a giant ant miniboss.
- Evolva featured a few of these, especially at the Parasite's headquarters, where they're supposed to be created.
- EXTRAPOWER: Giant Fist: One type of the fanatic enemies who guard the desert around Blackberry's pyramid is about knee high compared to the others.
- Gunstar Heroes: The diminutive Minion Soldier, who is actually really quite hard to beat.
- In Half-Life, when you get to Xen you discover that the ubiquitous headcrabs are merely mini-versions of the Gonarch. (And the Gonarch spawns mini-headcrabs, as well.)
- In Opposing Force, there is a mini-version of the voltigore.
- Hypercharge Unboxed is a game where you're an action figure fighting rogue toys, and your enemies includes the classic green toy soldiers, whom are tiny from your perspective.
- Every mook in Justice League Heroes: The Flash can become one of these with a cheat code.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Floormasters, when defeated, turn into three tiny Floormasters. They will kill you so freaking dead it is not funny. Whereas big ones shave off less than a heart per hit, the little ones grab you and each takes out multiple hearts until you dislodge it. All three grabbing you at once most likely means you're dead.)
- Mercenary Kings has really little and cute baby boars, which are largely defenseless, but can still be killed and looted for meat and bone. Don't feel too bad about it, though, because the full-grown boars are usually never far away!
- The Nameless Mod has tiny aliens on the space station. They're extremely difficult opponents, approaching Goddamned Bats, because of their small hitboxes and because of how fast they are. They can also somehow tank whole clips of bullets that are half their size.
- Ninja: Shadow of Darkness contains Giant Spider enemies in the caverns, the Spider Queen boss at the end of the stage who's an XXL-sized Queen Mook, and her Weaponized Offspring, smaller spider enemies who chomps away at your shins and can only be squashed by a Goomba Stomp. All three spider-type enemies shares the same design, the only difference being their sizes.
- In level 3-5 of Plants vs. Zombies, as well as in the minigame "Big Trouble Little Zombie", you have to fight small versions of regular zombies. They take about a third of the damage they normally have, but they move twice as quickly and eat your plants twice as fast.
Crazy Dave: Defend your shins!!!
- In Photo Dojo on DSi, in the 1-player beat-em-up sidescroller mode, miniature versions of your opponents sometimes appear. You can't punch them or hit them with fireballs, but kicks and jumpkicks kill them in one hit.
- Invoked by the Pokémon move "Minimize" (which also increases damage from the move "Stomp") which raises your Mons' evasion.
- Psychonauts has mini-censors (like normal Censors, but smaller). Ford advises you to use Raz's Ground Pound attack to take out the whole swarm at once.
- Red Dead Revolver: Them; buildings full of clown midgets. You; gatling gun. Fun times are had by, well, you.
- SAR: Search and Rescue has its first boss, Chagaman - an alien tank several times larger than you - returning later in the game as tiny versions of itself, standing below your knees.
- Serious Sam occasionally toys with the enemies' size just to screw with the player. Most often tiny enemies retain health and power of normal ones, unless they have even more.
- Shrek the Third tie-in game had the mini-versions of evil Pinocchio knock-offs made by Stromboli. These were weaker but also just a short enough to not get hit by Shrek’s fist unless they were at just the right distance.
- The Smallfry of Splatoon's Salmon Run mode can be easily splatted in one hit, or at most, two, from even light-hitting weapons, but they're fast, have a very small hitbox, attack in groups, and can even mess up a player's movement. Slower weapons like chargers will struggle to clear them away before lining up a clean shot on one of their brethren.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Starting with Super Mario Bros. 3, the Micro-Goomba were introduced, a smaller (and much more annoying) version of the usual Mascot Mook.
- Super Mario World introduces Thwimps (as seen in the page image), tiny versions of Thwomps. Instead of slamming down from above, Thwimps jump in an arc from side to side.
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 has Whimps, tiny Whomps spawned as flunkies by the Whomp King. They're faster than regular Whomps, but die as soon as they attack. They also have an adorable high-pitched version of the Whomp's regular growl.
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl: Mites in the Subspace Emissary.
- Wild C.A.T.s (1995) has the baby Daemonites, enemies who stood up to the players' kneecaps. They use the exact same sprites of the regular-sized Daemonites, and interestingly enough the game also have gigantic Red Daemonites as well - when these two enemies appear in the same screen a baby Daemonite can comfortably sit on a Red Daemonite's shoulder.
Western Animation
- Jackie Chan Adventures had Hak Fu summoning miniature shadowkhan. They failed to prove a threat until he discovered their shadow eating abilities. His attempts to teach them martial arts, however, were hilarious.
- One Nindroid in Ninjago is way smaller then his counterparts. He's called Mindroid.
- A season earlier, the Ninja's first opponents against the Stone Army were tiny merchandise versions of them in the Ninjago Museum. Unlike their Nigh-Invulnerable life-sized counterparts, they can be destroyed with something as simple as a Goomba Stomp.
