Minions #263-Watching the Perimeter

Click Cartoon to Uncover Bigness!

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Greetings, Minions Buffs!


It's been a tiring week here at the lair, as we were under the threat of a tsunami warning and missed a lot of sleep.  I half-considered just taking the week off, but in these trying times, the world needs its humor.  Unfortunately, all I've got is this Minions cartoon, but I give what I can!

You could give too.  Not to us this time, but to help out Japan.  Frankly, we're disappointed that we couldn't think up an evil plan 1/1000th as bad as what's happening to them now.  They desperately need your help to build them up so that we can knock them down later with a giant dinosaur made of cheese. (We call it Mozilla. Original, huh?)  Anyway, Japan isn't any fun at all right now, and they need your help.

You can donate to the relief effort through the Red Cross,  or even easier, you can donate $10 by texting REDCROSS to 90999 on your phone!  Do it now!  WE COMMAND YOU!

                                                    - Minion Master Steve

Lair Report: James Bond in "Doctor No"

As promised, this is the first in a series of "Lair Reports" highlighting various lairs, minions, and overlords from popular culture.

This time was start with the granddaddy of them all, the 1962 James Bond film, "Doctor No."

This certainly isn't the best James Bond lair (though it's good), or villain, or movie, but it is the one that sets the standards by which all others are measured. It's the movie that launched a thousand cliches!

In the film, Bond travels to the Caribbean to investigate what may be causing U.S. missile and rocket launches to malfunction. He uncovers rumors about the mysterious Doctor No, and strange goings on at his private island, Crab Key.

Eventually Bond arrives on Crab Key, loses his guide to a flame-shooting tank, picks up a half-dressed Ursula Andress, is captured, escapes, in infiltrates the lair just as Doctor No's evil plan is coming to fruition.

You figure out the rest.

LAIR REPORT

Of course, what we're interested in here is the lair and its occupants. I'm going to try and develop a standardized system by which lairs can be compared. Individual features will be ranked from zero (not present) to ten (most excellent).

Forgive me, as the system will probably be refined as we go along, though Doctor No should provide a decent template.

The Overlord:







Appearance: Anglo actor in Asian makeup.
Rank 3

Dress: Chairman Mao suits, plastic radiation hoods. Rank 5

Special Abilities, features, or disfigurements: Mechanical hands under black rubber gloves. Rank 8

Minions:

Minion Type: Basic human, including Chinese guards and soldiers, female Chinese housekeepers, and assorted generic technical types. Rank 4

Minion Uniforms: Chinese looking military uniforms, color coded and transparent radiation suits, nurse-like dresses for the housekeepers. Rank 6 (Add points for color coding, subtract points for those dresses.)

Special Minion Equipment: Assorted guns and machine guns. Radiation detectors. Rank 3


Minionmobiles:
Patrol boats equipped with machine guns. Fire breathing dragon tank. Rank 8







The Lair:

Location: Scenic Crab Key. Blue waters, white sandy beaches, swaying palm trees, waterfalls, and Ursula Andress in a bikini. It doesn't get better than this! Rank 10

Exterior: It's disguised as a mine. Or it's under-water. Or something. We really don't see much of it from the outside. Rank 2

Lair Nerve Center: Check. Massive control room with nuclear reactor and satellite control station. Rank 8

Easily Accessible Man-sized Ventilator Ducts: Check! It all starts here! Rank 10

Overlord Bachelor Pad: Check! Includes "mod" fireplace, antiques, and a gigantic aquarium that magnifies its fish to look even bigger. Rank 8

Guest Accommodations: Check! Includes both Spartan holding cells (with easy access to the ventilator system via a poorly protected vent), and luxury "gilded cage" apartments, complete with room service and pointlessly-drugged coffee. Rank 9

Easy to Identify Self-destruct Feature: Check! Just turn the dial up to "Really Dangerous!" Rank 10

Special Lair Features: Dragon tank garage, nuclear reactor, "hot room" with robot waldo-arms to handle radioactive materials, underground corridors with vault-like doors, radiation decontamination room with conveyor-belt showers, fluffy towels, and anti-radiation gas-pumps, retractable anti-satellite antenna, interrogation room with cool, shadow-casting, circular skylight. Rank 7

More Illogical than Usual Design Flaws: The easily accessible air ducts in Doctor No's lair periodically flood with water for no apparent reason (reactor coolant?). Parts of them also heat up (from the nuclear reactor?). Maybe it's just me, but I prefer not to have hot reactor cooling water spewing out of my air-conditioning ducts!

Also, Doctor No has foolishly located his entire control room inside the nuclear reactor chamber, so that the operators actually had to wear radiation suits, even when operating the missile control equipment that had nothing to do with the reactor. I just can't see how this is a good idea.

Rank: -8


LAIR-O-MATIC SCORE: 6.2

This is the definitive lair, but not the best. Most all the essential features are here (and many of them originate here), but many lack the scope and refinement that will follow.

Still, this movie is a must-see for any lairophile. We give it a gloved thumbs-up