Goomba from Super Mario

Oddjob from Goldfinger.

.

.

VS

.

.

.

First, I apparently can’t read a calendar.  The henchman post that went up yesterday was supposed to be today.  So I switched the one that was turning up tomorrow to Friday and now I have a gap.  This topic is being stitched together after a comment brought up ‘Minions’.  It was really about the yellow guys, but it got me thinking about how a minion would differ from a henchman.

The truth is that they have a lot in common.  Both work for a ‘bigger’ villain for one reason or another.  They usually follow orders to various levels of effectiveness.  Minions and henchmen seem to be in endless supply. They get taken out very easily and you rarely know their names.  Both get overlooked fairly often unless they are a specialized henchman like Oddjob.  Those can be considered agents or gimmick henchmen or whatever that puts them above the regular goon.  Yet, it is weird to call a basic thug working for a villain a minion.  The word doesn’t sit as well as henchman when it comes to certain genres.

One big difference is that minions don’t have to be human.  Henchman denotes being some kind of humanoid.  A minion can be summoned monsters, goblins, koopas, enslaved zombies, or even animals.  Part of this is because ‘man’ or ‘men’ is in the other word, so our minds might jump to human.  One thing that comes to mind is the final villain of ‘Castlevania: Lament of Innocence’.  You fight the Grim Reaper and one of his attacks is to yell ‘MINIONS!’, which summons ghostly skulls to attack.  I remember hearing goblins described as minions while elves got the henchmen title.  So there is definitely a physical appearance factor here.

Yet in response to the original comment, I mentioned a second difference that might play a bigger role.  Minions are typically simple creatures that follow orders without question because that is what they do.  There is no sense of autonomy with them because that’s simply not how they were designed.  Many minions aren’t even recruited like a henchman might be.  There’s a mentality of having volunteered and retaining some free will when it comes to henchmen.  A Stormtrooper follows orders because of training, but there is always a chance that they could go against those orders.  You don’t normally get that sense with a minion unless the one in question is being pushed to a different role.  That ability to defy a master is an important factor since it means there is always a chance that a henchman will turn.  Then again, you tend to see a single henchman for just enough time to see them die.

And because people would be upset if I didn’t put them in the post:

Despicable Me Minion Translator (Yahoo Image Search)