Explain the white minions with red eyes? Theres so many of them and theyre clearly fan made.
Hello, @easter2007! Thanks for the question, this is something I’ve been wondering myself. Once again, this question took me down a rabbit hole.
What interested me first is that you referred to multiple of this kind of minion edit. As far as I can recall, there’s only one non-yellow, red-eyed minion that comes up in memes all the time. (It could be that the minion is so heavily edited on some that it looks like a different minion.) If I see one that’s different in future research, I’ll follow up. For now, I focused on the one minion I knew that fit this description.
Despite this minion being fan made, you can tell it’s a step above the rest. Usually edited minions look a bit like ransom notes; different pieces like hair and clothes haphazardly cut out and superficially placed onto a canon minion image. But this one is really distinctive and fully rendered - you can see the detail in the form, textures, and particularly, in the goggles. We’re not dealing with an average minion fan here.
But I realized we may not be dealing with a minion fan at all after I was able to track down its creator. The original photo was posted by Maritza Garcia on July 15th, 2013 as a part of a 3D rendering project they were working on. If you take a look at the site, you’ll see different iterations of this minion they made, in different color variations and outfits. (Garcia is now a successful 3D Designer according to their online presence!)
As I’ve mentioned before, the date of Garcia’s post falls in line with most minion creations, with Despicable Me 2 released on July 3rd of that year. It’s likely that while working with the design program, the minions were picked as a subject given the buzz around the movie at the time, and not a conscious decision on Garcia’s part to fuel the Era of the Minion™.
But it didn’t go from portfolio piece to minion meme staple overnight. As a matter of fact, it may have taken years. After the initial posting, I only found it re-posted once on a blog in December of 2013. Following that, I found it re-posted once more to an IGN board on July 15, 2015, exactly two years after the original was posted.
This is where I think this minion became a part of the regular minion rotation. Before the IGN posting, this image would have been hard to come by. Garcia’s page is a portfolio site and probably wouldn’t have attracted much internet traffic, and the same is true for the small blog that then re-posts it later. But the IGN thread was specifically talking about minions, and given that it was forum style, it has a ton of comments and content on there referencing minions, which would put it higher on the list in search engines. So, someone looking for a new minion image to jazz up their memes would be more likely to find this particular posting of the image.
Around December of 2015 is when I first see this minion on a meme:
After this, there’s no need to follow a trail. Minion meme creators all blatantly steal and copy from one another, so once this shows up, it will be reused over and over again. The thing that really baffles me is that this particular minion has absolutely nothing to do with any text around it, more than most other minions on memes. Why use a silver, gold toothed, red goggled minion on your meme about text messages? I just don’t know.
