JEAN MINEUR: A FRENCH CINEMA ICON

Not long ago, I watched a Karambolage episode on YouTube that taught me a lot more on a character I had only hitherto seen on social media. I had been to France more than once, but never watched a cinema show there, so obviously I knew nothing of Jean Mineur and all his lore before this:

With his rosy skin and nutbrown hair, he cannot be any more French. His name, Jean, calls to mind for instance Jean Valjean, it is like Jack, Juan, Gianni, Ivan, or Sean, the average male character of that nationality. His outfit and trademark ice pick as well as his surname mark him as a (child) miner from the Pas-de-Calais, the mining region in northern France (like Asturias, Cornwall, or Dalecarlia/Dalarna). Yet mineur means both miner and minor, someone who is underage, bringing child labour to mind.

Jean Mineur has appeared since the interbellum period on the silver screen, in both France and the Benelux countries, always before the cinema show and right after the trailers (except for a short hiatus in the 1980s). To some epic, dramatic music by René Cloërec, the little Northern French miner throws his ice pick at the centre of a target marked 1000, the number becoming 0001, the last digits of Mediavision's phone number in Paris (and also those of the real Jean Mineur in Heaven: his gravestone says EDEN 0001!).

But where did Jean Mineur come from?

Like Frankenstein, the character is named after his creator, a real-life publicist who came to Paris from the Pas-de-Calais. Created in the 1920s as a pretty ugly black-and-white middle-aged adult, to pay tribute to the real-life Jean Mineur's northern ancestry.

After the World War, the character got his rebranding as a technicolour child in 2D, wearing the outfit of a Pas-de-Calais miner, to make a more positive image and appear more to children (but now being Jean the Minor, and unfortunately evoking child labour).

Following his 1980s retirement, Jean Mineur returned to the cinemas in the 90s, as a 3D/CGI character (at a time when CGI was something very rare, the purlieu of vanguard studios like Pixar or DreamWorks!). Some French people find him cute or kawaii, others find him scary and even have a phobia of the character, in spite of all the merchandise (Jean Mineur dolls, plushies, keychains, etc: you name it). Mediavision even gives the annual Mineur d'Or (Golden Mineur), a golden statuette of Jean Mineur as award for Best Cinematic Advertising!

The character has also advertised a great deal of products and services on the silver screen (from soft drinks to spectacles/glasses to gasoline) and rubbed elbows with many French celebrities in his ads. Only before Star Wars films does he don a completely different outfit, a padawan's braid, Jedi kimono, and lightsaber, and become Jean Padawan. He has no other cosplay outfit, whether as a Hogwarts student (he would be a Gryffindor), a hobbit, or in any other fandom.