Saturday Morning

Oh, bloody heck. A Smurfs movie?

Look, the Smurfs were about my least favourite show as a child. The Smurfs were our punishment viewing for waking up so early that the good shows weren’t on yet. The Smurfs were so hopelessly silly that as words like “retarded” and “lame” have been appropriately purged from my repertoire of acceptable insulting epithets, they have been replaced with the adjective “smurfy”.

Very, very smurfy.



What bugged me most about the Smurfs wasn’t the sub-Hanna-Barbara animation. It wasn’t the bizarre seven-dwarves-on-acid thing where each character was allowed one character trait only. It wasn’t even the vile Smurfette, and the show’s notion that to be a mere female is to be so overwhelmingly different that the girl didn’t even get a character trait. Instead, she got eyelashes and a simper.

(It wasn’t even that episode wherein a purple fly bit a Smurf, turning him into a purple zombie Smurf that marched around saying nothing but “Gnat! Gnat!”, biting other Smurfs and purple-zombifying them. This episode of the usually saccharine show scared me so badly at the age of four that, even right now, I cannot even make myself search for a clip on youtube.)

No, it was the shamefully mean-spirited treatment of the villains that turned me off the little blue weirdos. Bad guys on children’s shows are usually comical and pathetic to the point of earning some sympathy, but Gargamel the wizard and his cat Azrael were subjected to so much mockery, abuse, and schadenfreude that I was positively rooting for him to stomp out Smurf Village once and for all.

Hey, that sounds like a Smurfs movie I’d totally go see.