Universal Clears Minions Music for Olympic Skate (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Why has this Spanish figure skater's own routine been driving him bananas? It's got nothing to do with it being too despicable, but rather some copyright issues. Due to a last-minute crisis over music licensing, it looked as though Tomás Llorenz Sabaté would not be able to perform his Minions-inspired routine at the Winter Olympics. Sabaté, who has performed his Minions program throughout the current figure skating season, wearing a yellow t-shirt and their famous blue dungarees, found out this week that the music hadn't been cleared by Universal Studios. The music for his routine features a Minions cover of the Universal jingle that plays before movies and the Pharrell song Freedom from Despicable Me 3. But, in a great mohawk turn of events, Sabaté said that Universal had granted him permission to use the music at the Winter Olympics. It wasn't until 2014 that the International Skating Union allowed skaters to perform to songs with lyrics in an attempt to attract a younger audience. But a 2022 lawsuit involving two American figure skaters has since worried others about what music they can or can't dance to, with a complicated copyright clearance system making things even more confusing.