Abbott Had the Right Idea: The VHS Roots of the Monster Comedy Before Minions & Monsters
When Comedy Crashed the Monster Movies
The tradition of playing Universal Monsters for laughs goes back further than most people realise
The Minions have always felt slightly monstrous. Yellow, goggle-eyed, speaking in a language nobody quite understands, devoted to the most chaotic interpretation of any instruction. So when word got out that Illumination was sending them into the Universal Monsters universe, my first reaction was relief. Obviously. Of course that is where they were headed.
The Despicable Me franchise arrived on home video at a moment when animation was leaning hard into physical-media collectors. The Minions standalone film from 2015 sold enormous numbers on disc and it holds up. The sight gags reward a second viewing, and the physical transfer is warmer than you might expect from a film that age.
The Universal Monsters side has a much longer tape history, and the shop has always kept a solid run of them. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Wolf Man. These were among the earliest VHS releases. They are also short, which surprises people. Dracula runs about 75 minutes. You can watch three in an evening without any planning.
What the new film reaches back toward is a specific tradition: the comedy-horror crossover. Universal itself established it in 1948 with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which remains one of the funniest films either man made. Bud Abbott plays it straight, genuinely terrified, while Lou Costello mugs through a script that somehow manages to honour the monsters while making them ridiculous.
What We'd Pull for You This Weekend
Both sides of the crossover have terrific tape-era back catalogues
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is the tape to start with this week, full stop. Universal released it on VHS more than once, and a decent copy turns up here regularly. At 83 minutes it is paced like a proper thriller and then drops everything in the final act. The balance is hard to pull off and they pulled it off completely.
Young Frankenstein from 1974 belongs on the same shelf. Mel Brooks shot it in black and white on many of the original Universal sets. Gene Wilder's performance is precise and committed in a way that elevates every joke around it. The CBS/Fox VHS release looks exactly as it should: grainy, atmospheric, correct. Format suits subject matter almost perfectly here.
For the Minions side, Minions: The Rise of Gru holds up well and gives you the full arc of how these characters developed. Kids who grew up on those films are now in their early twenties, which means renting them again as adults lands differently. There is more going on in those films than the marketing ever quite suggested.
The comedy-horror overlap produced some underrated work beyond the big names. Once Bitten from 1985, with Jim Carrey in an early role, is goofier than it has any right to be. Monster Squad from 1987 takes its monsters seriously while centring a group of kids who treat horror as homework. Both came out on VHS and both have a specific late-eighties quality that holds.
What these films share is a belief that monsters do not stop being scary just because someone is also making you laugh. Abbott and Costello figured that out first, and Mel Brooks made it into art. The Minions, at their best, have something of the same energy: funny precisely because they behave as if nothing is funny.
We will have the relevant tapes pulled near the front of the shop this weekend. If you are heading out to see Minions & Monsters, come in after and tell us what you thought. And if you have never watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, let this be the prompt. There are worse ways to spend a summer evening.
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