In a Seattle high school hallway in 1995, a girl in head-to-toe pink stares at a sea of dark flannel, nose rings and black hoodies. When she mistakes the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill for a swimwear brand and wonders aloud why nobody has added rhinestones to Nirvana’s smiley-face logo, the queen bee snaps back: “Pink isn’t a personality.” The scene, from Amazon’s new series Elle, captures the culture clash at the heart of a prequel that transplants the famously upbeat Elle Woods into the grey, grunge-obsessed Pacific Northwest long before she ever set foot in Harvard Law School.

That series, which streams on Prime Video from 1 July, arrives alongside another franchise extension that also looks backward: Minions & Monsters, the seventh film in the Despicable Me universe. Directed by Pierre Coffin, the animated feature drops the yellow creatures into 1920s Old Hollywood, where they accidentally become silent-film stars before unleashing real monsters on the world. Coffin, who also voices the Minions, has described the film as a love letter to the golden age of cinema, drawing on the physical comedy of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, the surreal elasticity of Tex Avery cartoons, and the real-life migration of Eastern European filmmakers who built the studio system. In an interview with the Italian news agency Adnkronos, Coffin noted that figures like Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder arrived in America fleeing the Nazis, and that the character of a studio boss voiced by Christoph Waltz is a nod to that history.

Both projects are steeped in the textures of their chosen eras. Elle deploys a soundtrack that includes Garbage’s Only Happy When It Rains as its theme, and its plot turns on a father’s botched celebrity nose job forcing the family to lie low. Minions & Monsters, meanwhile, revels in the visual language of silent cinema, a medium Coffin argues the Minions instinctively understand because it relies on rhythm, movement and expressiveness rather than spoken English. The Minions’ own invented language—a spontaneous blend of English, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese, created by Coffin during recording sessions—has become a global phenomenon precisely because it requires no translation, a point highlighted in Latin American coverage of the film’s release.

Critical reception to Elle has been sharply divided. Australian reviewers have called it “outrageously good” and “a charmer,” with particular praise for newcomer Lexi Minetree’s uncanny channelling of Reese Witherspoon’s original performance. British critics, however, have been less kind: one described the series as “dull and deluded,” another as so bland it “should be illegal.” This split mirrors a broader tension around prequels that reimagine beloved characters’ teenage years—a format that, as one Australian critic noted, runs counter-intuitive to the original film’s message yet can still deliver a “well-executed” comedy if viewers are willing to treat it as a soft reboot. In Southeast Asia, film previews have grouped Elle with a wave of July releases that also includes a live-action Moana and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, suggesting audiences are being offered a month of familiar stories retold.

What unites these two very different properties is a bet that the past, carefully reconstructed, can feel as vivid as anything new. In one, a teenager learns that at a grunge gig, people leave their coats out in the open on a trust system, and her entire worldview shifts. In the other, a horde of yellow creatures discovers that the silent era’s physical comedy is a perfect fit for their chaotic energy. Both images linger as reminders that nostalgia, when it works, is less about looking back than about finding a new language for old joys.