In a sound studio, the Argentine director Andy Muschietti leaned into a microphone and began to speak not as himself, but as Max, a monacled silent-film director. The voice that emerged was not the crisp, faintly menacing German-accented English of Christoph Waltz, who originated the role in the English-language version of “Minions & Monsters”. Instead, Muschietti, best known for the two-part horror adaptation of Stephen King’s “It”, reached for something closer to home: the theatrical, almost sung diction of the tango legend Carlos Gardel, mixed with the street slang of Buenos Aires lunfardo. “I like tango a lot and I like Gardel a lot, and I’m fascinated by that tone, that way of speaking,” he explained in an interview with the Argentine daily Clarín. He also drew on a childhood memory: Pucho, the henchman from the classic Argentine cartoon “Hijitus”, who himself was a parody of that same old-fashioned porteño delivery. The result was a small, strange act of cultural translation buried inside one of the world’s most relentlessly globalised entertainment franchises.

The film itself is a prequel, set in the Hollywood of the 1920s, forty-eight years before the events of 2015’s “Minions”. The yellow, pill-shaped creatures stumble onto a movie set and, through a series of silent-film slapstick routines indebted to Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, become accidental stars. The director Pierre Coffin, who has voiced the Minions since their debut in 2010 and here makes his solo directing debut within the franchise, described the picture as “a love letter to the golden age of Hollywood”. In an interview with the Italian news agency Adnkronos, he noted that the era was built by Eastern European émigrés—figures like Ernst Lubitsch and Michael Curtiz, who fled the Nazis—and that the character of Max, voiced by Waltz and then Muschietti, is an amalgam of those real-life pioneers. The setting, then, is not merely decorative; it is a mirror of the film’s own production logic, in which a French director, an Austrian actor, and an Argentine filmmaker collaborate on a US studio animation destined for simultaneous release in more than 240 territories.

This is the machinery of the contemporary prequel, a format that has moved from occasional creative exception to industrial default. The Spanish newspaper El Día, in a piece on the new series “Elle”—a 1990s high-school prequel to “Legally Blonde”—called the phenomenon “precuelitis”: a systematic mining of established intellectual property that offers “virgin terrain with known characters”. The logic is economic. A beloved character, the argument runs, is a safer bet than an original story. “Game of Thrones” has spawned multiple prequel series; Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” retreated thousands of years into Middle-earth’s Second Age; and now Prime Video adds a teenage Elle Woods to its catalogue. “Minions & Monsters” is the seventh film in the “Despicable Me” universe and the third spin-off centred on the Minions alone. Its second season was confirmed before the first episode aired—a business model, as El Día noted, not a gesture of modesty.

For audiences, the experience is one of layered recognition. In Latin America, the dubbed version will carry Muschietti’s lunfardo inflections, a detail that will likely register as a private joke for Argentine viewers and a curious texture for others. The film’s visual references—to Charlie Chaplin, Tex Avery cartoons, even a nod to “E.T.”—are designed to reward adults while the slapstick carries the children. Coffin told Adnkronos that he wanted to give grown-ups “a dive into the past”, because “the children won’t care: they’ll just see beautiful images”. The Minions themselves, speaking their gibberish “Minionese” that incorporates fragments of real languages, have always been vessels for this kind of double address. Now, in a Hollywood of the imagination, they are also silent-film stars, their physical comedy requiring no translation at all.

What lingers is the image of those wordless yellow creatures, products of a French animation studio, filtered through an Argentine director’s memory of a 1970s cartoon villain’s sidekick, speaking in the cadence of a tango singer who died in 1935. It is a reminder that even the most frictionless global product is assembled from local fragments, and that the past, in the hands of the prequel machine, is never simply the past—it is a resource to be dubbed, accented, and repackaged for a world that knows the characters before it knows their story.