The Smurfs Are 50
Even though the Smurfs really didn't hit it big until their television debut in 1981, they are actually turning 50 this year, and the celebration kicked off today.
The late cartoonist Pierre Culliford -- best known by his pen name, "Peyo" -- first introduced the tiny blue figures in a comic strip in October 1958. He called them Schtroumpf; they became known worldwide as the Smurfs. The Smurfs, forest dwellers who live in little white-capped mushroom homes, developed their own "Smurf" language in which nouns and verbs were interchanged. A Smurf is a Pitufo in Spanish, a Schlumpf in German, Nam Ching Ling to the Chinese, a Sumafa in Japan and Dardassim in Hebrew.
A Smurf to me is just a really good excuse to get wasted. With the exception of Fraggle Rock, there has never been a finer show to watch while totally plastered. This of course is not the show to watch in order to get plastered. The show to get plastered while watching is the Bob Newhart Show. I was really sad to see that Suzanne Pleshette passed away over the weekend, but every time she or any other person the show says "Bob," then everyone drinks a shot. Guaranteed to get you drunk. I loved when Suzanne made an appearance on the last Newhart show like the entire show had been a dream. That was classic.
Anyway, back to the Smurfs. To mark 50 years of Smurfdom, organizers are planning everything from a 3-D animation feature film expected to be released next year to new comic book collections and a remastered release of the popular 1980s television animated series, Peyo's family said.
Did they ever make Smurf cereal because I bet some kind of blue marshmallow thing would be good. Something to turn the milk blue. They seem like a marshmallow cereal rather than a chocolate cereal.
