The Smurfs

The Smurfs (in the original French: Les Schtroumpfs; Dutch: De Smurfen) is a Belgian comic book franchise, centered around a fictional colony of blue humanoid creatures about 15.7 centimeters tall, who inhabit mushroom-shaped houses in the forest. The Smurfs were created by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo in the cartoon The Flute of the Six Smurfs (La Flûte à Six Schtroumpfs), from his series Johan and Pirlouit, for the weekly Le Journal de Spirou on October 23, 1958. Such was the success of these small blue creatures, equivalent to benign gnomes or goblins, that the following year they began to star in his own comic book series, as well as movies, cartoon series, and video games.

There are over 100 smurf characters, and their names are based on adjectives that emphasize their characteristics, like "Jokey Smurf," who plays pranks on the other smurfs. The Smurfs wear Phrygian caps, which came to represent freedom during the modern era.

Statue of an Australian artist's smurf Steve Collis

Name

The original name of the Smurfs in French is Schtroumpfs. During a meal in 1957, Peyo would have asked his friend, the cartoonist André Franquin, to pass him a salt shaker but, forgetting the word, he would have called it schtroumpf ("Pass me... the schtroumpf!"). It has been suggested that the French word may have derived from the German word stroumpf which in German soldiers' slang meant & #34;idiot." In Dutch, and by extension in English, the word has been translated as "Smurf."

Their Spanish name came from Miguel Agustí, editor-in-chief of Strong magazine, where they were first published in Spanish in 1969. For more than a month, he was looking for a name that could be conjugated until he remembered the character of Patufet, an emblematic figure of Catalan folklore (and the name of a famous pre-war children's magazine in Catalan). would remain in the following Spanish versions (except TBO, where they appeared briefly in the mid-70s renamed Los Tebeítos).

Trajectory

The Smurfs made their appearance, as strict secondaries, in the episode La Flûte à Six schtroumpfs, published in numbers 1047 to 1086 of the weekly Le Journal de Spirou, From the series Johan and Pirluit. In this episode, Pirlouit finds a magic flute that is later stolen from him and, needing to get another one, the magician Homnibus sends the two friends to an unknown land, the Cursed Country, where the Smurfs live.

In La Guerre des Sept Fontaines (1959), Peyo reintroduced the Smurfs in a prudent, albeit anecdotal, way. The Smurfs were very successful and with The Black Smurfs they inaugurated in July of that year a collection of mini-stories included with "Le Journal de Spirou":

In January 1960, La Flûte à Six Trous was released as an album under the title "La Flûte à Six Schtroumpfs" ("The Flute of the Six Smurfs"), proof of market trends. Peyo thought he could do without them in the next episode of Johan and Pirlouit, L'Anneau des Castellac, started in August of that year, but the experiment was not satisfactory, since the sales of the episodes "with smurfs" they outnumbered those of "without smurfs," as the editor pointed out.

In the twelfth episode of Johan and Pirlouit, Le Pays Maudit (1964), the Smurfs are omnipresent in the story, from start to finish. They had become so popular that they would cause the almost total disappearance of "Johan et Pirlouit", due to the lack of time for its creator to dedicate himself entirely to it.

However, it was not until 1963, with the cartoon Smurfphony in C, that the Smurfs began to appear serialized in "Spirou", as well as in advertising albums.

The new installments of the series then stopped appearing in the magazine "Spirou", but in November 1989 a new magazine was launched, Schtroumpf!, aimed at the most little ones.

After Peyo's death in 1992, the series continued with his son Thierry Culliford writing the scripts:

In Spain, his comics appeared translated into Spanish in the magazines "Strong" (1969-1971), "TBO" (1974-1975), "Zipi y Zape", "Zipi y Zape Especial" and "Super Zipi y Zape" (1979-1980), "Thumbs Up" (1981-1982) or "Fuera Borda" (1984-1985). In album format they have been published successively by Argos (1969-1971), Bruguera (1979-1983), Grijalbo (1983-1985), Ediciones B (1991-1992), Planeta-DeAgostini (2006- 2007) and currently Norma. In Argentina, it is currently being published by Editorial Merci

In 2008, various events were organized to mark its 50th anniversary, including a retrospective exhibition at the Belgian BD Center entitled L'Union fait la Schtroumpf.

Plot

The Smurfs are a secret community of little blue beings that live in mushrooms or mushrooms deep in the forest, during the Middle Ages. They do not use proper names to address each other, and they all have the same size, appearance and clothing (a pair of pants and a white Phrygian hat, which are red only for Grand Smurf or Papa Smurf that leads them), but among them they do seem to be distinguished; Despite this, there is a series of recurring characters, who are distinguished by their virtues or defects, by their hobbies or by some other peculiarity, and are called by it: we have the Gafotas Smurf (Brainy Smurf in Latin America), the Jokey Smurf, Brave Smurf, Smurfette, Greedy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf, Handy Smurf, Vanity Smurf, Poet Smurf, Simple Smurf, Lazy Smurf, Labrador Smurf, Sporty Smurf...

Her tongue intersperses normal human words with the word "smurf," used either as a noun, as an adjective (smurfy) or as a verb (smurf i>), and that always sounds the same to humans, but that they seem to distinguish without problems; for example, in the cartoon The Cursed Country (1964) a smurf runs away from home to ask Johan and Pirlouit for help against "a smurf that smurfs smurf", and a discussion trying to figure out what these words meant, which would later be revealed to be 'a fire-breathing dragon'.

In most of the comics starring them alone, their recurring and bitter enemies are the sorcerer Gargamel and his cat Azrael.

Animated series

The Smurfs became established in American pop culture (and from there to many other parts of the world) in 1981, when the Saturday morning cartoon series The Smurfs, produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions in association with SEPP International S.A.R.L, aired on NBC from September 12, 1981 to December 2, 1989 (reruns through August 25, 1990). The series continued to air on the US network until 1993, and on Cartoon Network until 2003. The Smurfs continues to air on the Boomerang channel throughout the United States. The series became a huge hit for NBC, spawning almost annual television specials. The Smurfs was nominated for multiple Daytime Emmy Awards and won Best Children's Entertainment Series in 1982-1983. The Smurfs television show enjoyed continued success until 1990, when, after nearly a decade of success, NBC canceled it due to declining ratings and plans to expand its Today morning show franchise to create an edition of the Saturdays, although they did not do so until 1992 (two years later). The drop in viewership was due to the network changing the show's format, resulting in the final season featuring regular time travel with only a few Smurfs.

The IGN website ranked The Smurfs at the 97th best animated series, calling it "cocaine for kids" for people who grew up during the 80s.

The Smurfs (2021 series)

On August 31, 2017, it was announced that IMPS and Dupuis Audiovisuel would be working on the new CGI-animated Smurfs television series. The series was scheduled for 2020 and is co-produced by Ketnet (Flanders), TF1 (France), KiKa (Germany), OUFTIVI (Wallonia), Peyo Productions and Dupuis Audiovisuel (the television branch of the comic book publisher).. The series consists of new stories, not adaptations of comics or other old stories.

Ideology

Peyo's work has given rise to disparate ideological interpretations, more or less well-founded.

Les Schtroumpfs noirs (1959), for example, has been denounced as racist.

It has even been claimed that Smurf society itself, with its praise of communitarianism and the supreme leader, constitutes an apology for communism. According to this interpretation, Gargamel and Azrael would be a clear caricature of the Jew and of capitalism.

In 2011, the Frenchman Antoine Buéno published The little blue book: critical and political analysis of the Smurf society, where he collected these ideas.

What is undoubtedly true is that Peyo reflected his vision of his surroundings in The Smurfs, daring to portray the linguistic division of his country in Schtroumpf vert et Vert Schtroumpf, already in 1972.

Adaptations to other media

Juzcar view, the "Smurf village"

• Les Aventures des Schtroumpfs (Piculate - 1965): In 1965 the pitufos claimed life in a Belgian film, Les aventures des Schtroumpfs, with Yvan Delporte scripts and Peyo himself, who sewed a great success locally.

• The Pitufos (TV - 1981-1989): Hanna-Barbera produced a television series between 1981 and 1990; The Pitufos (The Smurfs in the American original), one of the most extensive ones carried out by this animation study and one of the American animated series of which more episodes have been made, being only surpassed, among others, by The Picapiedra, Scooby Doo, The Simpsons and Arthur.

• In the 1980s Dutch singer Pierre Kartner "Father Abraham" released songs in Spanish and other languages about these characters. With a rabbi’s appearance he went on stage accompanied by smurf-shaped puppets and played with them musical dialogues. In Spain a disc was published. In Mexico Ring ring, The Great Book of Smurf Games, The Christmas of Smurfs by the Helix stamp is published.

• In 2011 premiere The Pitufos, a new film that combines the real image with the characters generated by computer. To promote it, the Malagueño people of Juzcar painted all their houses blue, keeping them this way since then by popular consultation.

• In 2013 the film Los Pitufos 2, a 3D film was released on Thursday, August 1, 2013. It is a sequel to the 2011 film Los Pitufos, produced by Sony Pictures Animation and distributed by Columbia Pictures and based on the series of homonymous comics created by Peyo in 1958.

• In 2017 the film by Los Pitufos was released, a film completely animated under the title Smurfs: The Lost Village is also produced by Sony Pictures Animation and distributed by Columbia Pictures.

• In 2021 a new 3D television series was released, which also featured the Pitufas of the animated film: The Lost Village whose series was released in Nickelodeon from September 2021.