INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

UK Town Of Minions To Remove Welcome Sign Due to ‘Selfie’ Risks

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 01:41 PST, Oct 3, 2015

A village in Cornwall, England by the name of Minions has had to take down its welcoming sign because too many drivers are stopping to take selfies next to it.

The welcome sign was a gift from Universal Studios and features characters from the popular Minions movie welcoming people to the village and asking drivers to please drive carefully.

According to the BBC, the film company couldn’t resist giving the village the sign when they found out it was a namesake of the popular Minions spin-off from that other popular movie, Despicable Me. They gifted the town with the sign to celebrate the release of the movie.

The only problem with the sign is that too many people are now stopping on the road to take selfies next to it, which is dangerous for the traffic traveling on the entrance road to Minions. As a result, the Cornwall Council has decided it best to take down the sign and return it, saying it was only intended to be a temporary attraction in the first place.

Linkinhorne Parish Council chairman Carl Hearn stressed that too many cars were stopping on the 30 mph road to take photos, causing traffic jams. There was also the risk that children might wander off onto the busy road. He said they were just trying to keep residents in the village as safe as they can.

“It’s really the fact that you don’t necessarily want people having children in the road.”

Now they say the sign, which was paid for by the film company, will be removed and returned to Universal Studios from whence it came. However, it turns out some residents are not too happy to lose the sign, as it has boosted both tourism and business in the small Cornwall village.

The Mirror Online quotes Gary Stone, the owner of the village’s only pub, as saying he really wants the sign to stay as it had “put Minions on the map.” According to Stone, Minions has enjoyed its busiest summer ever, mainly due to the fun, bright and colorful welcoming sign.

According to a spokesman for Universal Studios, they were delighted the Minions welcoming sign had caused such a stir in the village for both residents and tourists, but that they were sorry to hear it had to be removed. They expressed “hope that a happy solution will be found to benefit the community.”

This wasn’t the first English town to have a Minions experience. The Inquisitr noted a while back that another town had a rather strange, Minion-related incident. Residents woke up one morning to discover all the garbage bins in the streets had been painted to look like the popular Minions characters.

No one knows who did it, but it seems residents find them funny, have now dubbed them “Binions” and they are going to keep the bins exactly as they are.

The Inquisitr also reported recently on another Minions-related incident in Dublin, Ireland where a giant, inflated Minion quite literally stopped traffic on a busy road. It turned out the inflated Minion had been badly tethered at a nearby funfair. It had escaped and taken to the streets, ending up lying right across the highway nearby. Naturally, everyone jumped out of their cars, camera or phone in hand to capture the moment.

[Photo by Sonny Abesamis Minion toys CC BY 2.0]

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