Before it Was Trendy, Vol. 2: Little Toy Blues

Today, the second in my ongoing series of posts laying claim to the relatively few things that I liked before they were in style:

Don’t worry, I won’t be using “smurf” as a
verb or an adjective. Ever.

Smurfs. They may not be on my mind much anymore, but in 1979 it was another story. My family spent that summer motoring around Europe in a Volkswagen Westfalia camper; how exactly my parents were able to tolerate sleeping in a VW bus (like this one, except in beige instead of pea green) with boys aged eight and ten for three months is a question I can’t answer.

Visiting some family friends in the seaside town of Lund, Sweden, the little blue guys caught my attention in the toy collection of the younger son. I was told that they were called “smølfs.” I had never seen anything like them, but apparently my Swedish counterpart already considered them passé. In fact, he quickly offered the handful of them that he had to me, declaring that he was “fed up with them” (or at least, that’s how his father translated what he said). I might have wondered why he was so eager to get rid of them, but I was too young to have developed that kind of cynicism. I felt like I had won the toy lottery.

I began collecting them as we continued traveling from country to country. The main obstacle was that each European language had its own translation of “smølf,” which made inquiring about them in different countries’ toy stores a tricky exercise in phonetic learning. To this day, one of the few phrases of German that I know is, “Haben sie schlümpfe?” I was ultmately faced with the choice of which language’s name for the stubby blue guys I would adopt for my own use. After careful consideration I decided that the original Swedish/Danish “smølf” seemed most correct. When I proclaimed my official decision to my parents, my Dad was silent for a moment before a mischeivous grin spread across his face. “So Derek,” he said to me, “what do you call it when a smølf paints a picture?” I said fed him the reqired “I don’t know,” and he delivered the punchline: “Smølfart.” He and my brother giggled gleefully, and I spent a rueful moment considering that “schlümpfe” might have been less vulnerable to punning.

At any rate, after our return from Europe it was at least another year or two before my little cerulean gnomes began appearing in U.S. toy emporiums under the anglicized name “smurfs.” The word in and of itself was fine with me. The problem was all of the peripheral details and backstory that came along with it. It was vastly different than the mythology I had set up for them on my own, which is to say that it was just plain wrong. The commercially-distributed story of Smurfs captured neither the facts nor the spirit of the delightlfully conceptualized Pan-European Smølfenhagen that I had created around them. First of all, there were the names: Papa Smurf? WTF?? Come on, the guy in the red pants and cap with the white beard is named George. George! That’s not such a stretch, is it? He looks like a George. And they call him Papa Smurf??? It’s just so… banal. So unimaginitive. Some adult got paid to come up with that? Come on. They all have regular names. Just first names, but unique names all the same. Kevin. Steve. Mitch. The ultimate insult was… Smurfette. Oh, man. So explain this one to me: there’s only one girl smurf, and the best name they can give her is Smurfette? Nice going. Of course, this assumes you can even get around the primary violation of having there be a girl smurf. Remember, I’m a kid in my late single-digit years. Know your audience, smurf-makers. Girls are gross.

If I’d have been in charge, smurfs would have been saved from this rampant lameness. The TV cartoon would have been something closer to Super Friends than the retch-inducing forerunner of Teletubbies that it was. No Papa Smurfs, no Mushroom houses, no “that’s smurfy!”, and NO girl smurf. And, whoever made up that gay-ass “la la la” song would face an international war crimes tribunal for crimes against humanity. Alas, it was not to be. There was money to be made in the dumbing down of smurf lore – apparently, three- and four-year-olds’ allowances by that time provided for more discretionary income than it had when I was that age six years prior. Who knew? It was fun while it lasted. My smurfs now reside in a plastic bag, bundled away with other memorabilia in the back of one of the closets at my parents’ house in Northern California. I guess my Mom figured that one day my own children (who are, ah… still in the pre-production stage) might want to play with them. Either that, or maybe something called eBay might one day exist, and I would become suddenly rich by selling them to an eight-year-old-kid in Sweden.