The Smurfs, Season One Volume Two. Out now. (*******7/10)
When I was a kid, I loved The Smurfs. I had smurf sheets, smurf curtains, little plastic smurfs and little stuffed smurfs. My favourite smurf was one that ran across our lawn outside our kitchen window. My mom, looking out the window, freaked out a little. You know that moment in cartoons where someone sees something bizarre, and goes to their liquor cabinet and pours all their booze down the sink because they think they are going crazy? It was like that. Mom grabbed the can of frozen juice from the freezer and read the ingredients to see if it contained PCP or LSD or any other three-letter drug that could possibly have produced this amazing hallucination. Because there was, really, a smurf hopping across the lawn. It turns out it was a squirrel that had found a tiny little stuffed smurf, grabbed it in it’s mouth, and run across the lawn. The sun reflecting off the squirrel made it virtually invisible, and lo and behold, there was a smurf. Being a small child, I was worried because the appearance of a real, live, hopping smurf surely signalled the arrival of Gargamel hot on that smurf’s tail. It was a frightening proposition for me. I didn’t want to face Gargamel as a six year old, I preferred to wait until I was a little more mature and could perhaps find a way to defeat the evil wizard.
Well now, at the age of thirty, I decided to confront Gargamel once and for all, and I rented Season One, Volume Two of The Smurfs, more for nostalgia than because I thought it would still be good. And through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, I still very much enjoyed The Smurfs. Season One, Volume Two contains the best episode of The Smurfs ever, the one where Lazy Smurf gets bitten by the purple fly, and he turns purple and hops around and says “GNAP”, and bites other smurfs on the tail, turning them into GNAP smurfs as well. Amazingly, I remembered the episode a lot differently than it actually is - the show does not actually show the smurfs biting each other on the butt. I suppose that would have violated the family-friendly ethos of the smurfs. It could have led to kids biting each other on the butt, and where would that have led society?
The one thing I was really hoping for was the option to watch the episodes in either English or French. The DVD didn’t have that choice, but it’s a great idea for future issues of Smurf DVDs. As I recall, most of the English smurf voices are high-pitched, little-kid voices. So when Gargamel appears, they scream “It’s Gargamel!” like a chorus of second-graders. In French, they all have deep adult voices, which lends a certain gravitas to the phrase “Oh non! C’est Gargamel!” The smurfs have cooler names in French too. “Jokey Smurf” is a silly name in English. “Schtroumph Farceur” just sounds so much cooler. Likewise “Schtroumph Bricoleur”, and many others.
I may well be giving this series more credit than it deserves, simply because of an innate bias that has existed since childhood. But I do believe that it is smurfin’ well worth your smurf to smurf up this smurf before it’s too smurf and you have smurfed all about smurf.