Written by Jennifer
March 18, 2009
It's all so smurftacular that you could easily believe you'd died and gone to the 80s.
Somehow just having a Smurfs DVD in my possession threatens to send me into a fit of giggles. I certainly never imagined the show being broken into seasons, and I never once thought of the individual cartoons as Smurfisodes. I thought of it as a great thing to watch on Saturday mornings when my dad was off fishing and my mom was sleeping in. I'd sit on the heat duct with my nightgown pulled over my legs and eat whatever the heck I wanted for breakfast. Sometimes it was Grape Nuts. Sometimes it was Doritos. Those were the days.
The Smurfs, for those not in the know, are little blue men who live in mushroom-shaped houses. Smurf Village is populated by 97 male Smurfs, one Smurfette, and everyone answers to the exceedingly wise Papa Smurf (easily distinguished by his jaunty red outfit and Santa Claus beard). Much like The Seven Dwarfs, the Smurfs are named after their personalities. Brainy, for example, is a complete know-it-all. Vanity can't stop looking in a mirror. Harmony is very musical. Lazy is quite lazy. After a point, the names become somewhat less clever, even though they describe skills that are just as smurfy as any of the others (I'm thinking of you, Baker Smurf).
When not engaging in smurfy antics, the Smurfs are often smurfed after by the evil wizard Gargamel and his cat Azrael. It seems the little buggers are forever crossing his path, but he just can't seem to locate Smurf Village. It's not clear what exactly he has against them, though the intro explains that the Smurfs are good and Garamel is bad, and Gargamel can be seen shaking his fists at the sky and shouting, "Ooh, I hate Smurfs!" I always had the sense that he was going to throw them in a cauldron and cook them. Regardless, nothing ever seems to go right for Gargamel, even when he tries something really tricky, like throwing on a blonde wig to disguise himself as a woman.
The Season 1 DVD comes with 19 cartoons, as well as a little Smurf music video and The Smurfs' Springtime Special. It's all so smurftacular that you could easily believe you'd died and gone to the 80s. Now that we're all older and know the f-word, it's hard not to crack up listening to the dialogue. Every other word is "smurf", and after awhile, it's kind of like Jimmy Kimmel's "Week in Unnecessary Censorship"—your mind just fills in the blanks to hilarious effect.
Even when your mind isn't filling in the blanks to hilarious effect, some of the puns are so corny that it just about kills you. While being attacked by a "smurfivorous" plant, Papa Smurf feeds it a stick and tells it to "stick to this." Then Hefty walks in, calls the plant a "gone crazy daisy," and Papa Smurf suggests that they go "straight for the root of the matter" by cutting the plant off at -wait for it- the roots. With writing this witty, it's shocking that the show isn't still on the air, but I guess it's unfair to expect genius to operate at this level forever.
As Saturday morning cartoons go The Smurfs were rock solid, but I don't think it's the smurfy adventures that will bring viewers back. We'll revisit The Smurfs and share them with the children in our lives because they take us back to Saturday mornings past—carefree days of eating Doritos while sitting cozily on the heat duct. They remind us of the tiny Smurf figures we collected at drugstores and toy stores, the plush Smurfs that sat on the beds of our friends, and the little Smurf storybooks we got for our fifth birthdays. I'll never forget the trio of Smurf books my little neighbor gave me in Kindergarten, and the Season 1 DVD includes the episodes that inspired two of them: "Smurphony in C" and "The Smurf's Apprentice." You might feel a little silly watching them, but the Smurfs will be more than happy to take you back to simpler times.
