The Smurfs/Headscratchers

• WTF is up with the opening sequence? It seems to show Harmless Villain Gargamel destroying a large chunk of the world.
  • It's the Smurfs' impression of him?
  • Is it really accurate to classify Gargamel as a Harmless Villain? The examples given for that trope strongly imply a villain that is hard to take seriously, not just one with an unbroken track record of failure. Gargamel's plans may be doomed but they're rarely if ever laughable on their face.
  • Each season of the Smurfs cartoon show during its original run (1981-1990) had its own opening sequence, usually ending with a Smurf hanging around the title logo. The opening sequence you're talking about is probably that from Season 4, which in edited form became the main opening sequence for the syndicated show Smurfs Adventures.
  • Also the scenes from that introduction come from the cartoon special "The Smurfic Games", where Gargamel invokes the power of a magical amulet to create such massive destruction.
• If you choked a smurf, what color would it turn? (What?! Somebody had to say it!)
  • {{Bisected 8 I've}} had a go at answering that question myself: I came to the conclusion that their colouration must be down to the presence of copper based Haemocyanin rather than the "normal" haemoglobin present in red blooded creatures. When this is deoxygenated it becoems colourless. Therefore a suffocated smurf will develop a palour.
  • Jossed, in a few episodes Smurfs are shown blushing red.
    • Wouldn't that make it purple then?
    • Actually in one episode, Brainy turned red from getting a sunburn.
  • "Choke a Smurf? Is that what you kids are calling it nowadays?"
  • An old advert for The Smurfs had a voice-over asking, "Why are Smurfs blue?" and one yelling back, "We're not, we're GREEN! Adjust your TV!" so, I guess if this is true, then they would turn blue.

• Do smurfs reproduce asexually or magically or something? Because there definitely weren't any female smurfs before Smurfette.
  • It has to be magically since to be biologically possible, a One-Gender Race would have to be female. Any more specific details are still a mystery.
  • They're associated with mushrooms, so I would guess spores.
  • They don't. They were all artificially created by either the beardy wizard (forgot his name) or Gargamel.
  • A Delivery Stork brings a baby smurf to the village on nights of a blue moon.
    • Most likely the only way, given that the story that introduces Wild Smurf has that Smurf lost in the forest on the night he was delivered to Papa Smurf.
  • So they just drop their pants in the dark, and boom, baby?
    • It's all nonsexual!!!
• The above raises the question: if the Smurfs are naturally a One-Gender Race, as all indications appear, why would they be attracted to a female?
  • Smurfette was created by Gragamel to cause trouble, perhaps he just made her that way.
  • They aren't. Smurfette is a boy Smurf in drag. However the title of the girliest smurf still belongs to Vanity Smurf...
  • Men just can't resist boobs.
    • What boobs?
    • The Mermaid Smurfette PVC figurine is naked and shows she has boobs indeed.
    • PV Cs aren't exactly canonical cartoon characters.
  • Just good old nature.
  • Handy's attracted to a female mermaid, as well; they are apparently capable of feeling attracted to females (and the reverse is true for Smurfette, judging by "Smurfily Ever After" and "Wild About Smurfette) even if they are biologically incapable of reproducing sexually (which we, technically, don't know for sure), possibly like a sterile member of any sexually-reproducing species.
• Last year, Warner Home Video released two DVD sets of the first season of The Smurfs. But now they've decided to instead switch to putting the show out in crummy single-disc releases that only obsessive collectors would buy. If you don't think that's ridiculous, read what VP Amit Desai said in the press release for the next release: "The first two DVD releases of The Smurfs have performed exceptionally well. [...] Our goal is to release as much Smurfs material on DVD as we can to keep consumers happy." Wait - so if those first two sets sold so well and they want to put as much of the show on DVD as possible, THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY SWITCHING TO RELEASING IT IN CRAPPY SINGLE-DISC EPISODE COMPILATIONS INSTEAD OF CONTINUING WITH THE SEASONAL SETS?!?
  • Money, Dear Boy. "We found out that Smurfs sell. Holy crap, how can we milk the cow more that that? Single episode CD? Let's go!"
    • Except the last single-disc volume was released in November 2009. I'm typing this in November 2010.
• While in Belgium I visited their comic art museum, which had a 50 year retrospective (!!) on the Smurfs. Among the facts listed in there was that the Smurfs were always portrayed as loving Sasparilla in the comic books, but that Peyo intentionally drew Sasparilla wrong because the actual plant is poisonous and he didn't want children to eat it.
  • ...So?
    • I'm not 100% sure, but that may be the only "Headscratchers" entry on this site that contained its own answer.
• It just bugs me that no matter how many new Smurfs they added, there were always 101. Did they practice ritual sacrifice to keep their numbers?
  • In the original comics, they were 99 at the beginnging. The 100th Smurf is Vanity Smurf's reflection come to life.
  • At least they aren't Pokémon, not that that stops them from being the most Merchandise-Driven bunch of blue communists you'll ever love.
  • I prefer to think of them as being Schrodinger's Gun, the "new" smurfs were always there, we just hadn't seen them in an episode yet. For sanity's sake, grandpa and the little kid smurfs were in the official census but in an outlying cabin.
    • The show actually explained both of them — Grandpa Smurf was a wanderer who went all around the world and eventually returned to the village, so he wasn't there for the earlier episodes. The Smurflings, however, used to be normal and fairly non-descript adult Smurfs who were de-aged thanks to falling into one of Father Time's clocks. (The adult Nat Smurf even has small supporting roles in a few episodes before his de-aging.)
    • That's true. Sometimes a Smurf got a profession, something happened that changed his life - like with Journalist Smurf or Explorer Smurf. Then they'd just get a new hat.
  • Let's see. Going by cartoon continuity (since the events of the comic are somewhat different) there were originally 98 Smurfs in the village, including Papa Smurf. Then Gargamel creates Smurfette, and the number increases to 99 — we know this because Papa counts all the Smurfs in the episode The Hundredth Smurf and concludes that they're 99. In the same episode, Vanity's reflection comes to life and after some time spent as a backwards Smurf is reflected and becomes the titular hundredth Smurf. The Smurfs stay an even hundred for a while until Baby Smurf appears, bringing the number up to 101. After some time Nat, Snappy and Slouchy get themselves de-aged and become Smurflings, but that doesn't alter the actual number of Smurfs any — but when Sassette is introduced she's once again magically created as a new Smurf and increases the number to 102. Later, Grandpa Smurf, who's a notorious wanderer, returns to the village and moves in for good, and then there are 103 Smurfs. Then, Wild Smurf is discovered; a Smurfling who got lost and was presumed dead for many years but was in reality raised by wild squirrels — with him the number becomes 104. Finally, there's Grandpa's old flame Nanny Smurf, the last "extra" Smurf character to be introduced in the show, making the final number of Smurfs 105. Which is the number that's presented in the later days of the franchise. Other Smurfs who are "introduced" over the course of the cartoon have in reality been there all along, they just haven't gotten any individual on-screen attention yet and have only appeared as anonymous Smurfs in crowd scenes. Whew!
  • Add one more in the original comics; Smurfette already existed during "The Hundredth Smurf", but she didn't live in the village, so she wasn't there when Papa Smurf counted the Smurfs. That would be the only significant difference.
• Are Smurfs really blue? Or was... Angry Smurf's commercial canon, and they're actually orange, and we all need to fix the color settings on our TVs ?
  • Uh, he said they were green, not orange.
    • They were always blue. See the original comics.
  • The commerical is NOT Word of God.
• The first time Gargamel appeared, it was established (in the original Belgian comics, at least) that he needed a smurf as an ingredient in an alchemy process in order to create gold. A couple of comics later, Gargamel is shown to be able to create live smurfs, as he made the Smurfette. From that point on, why would he even bother to try to capture smurfs? He could just make a batch, transform them into gold, use the money to built his own smurf/gold factory and become the richest sorcerer alive.
  • Unless the amount of gold he may produce from that process is worth more than the price of the ingredients he'll need to make new smurfs, that system won't work at all; he'll eventually run out of gold/smurf ingredients.
    • He wasn't plaining to turn the Smurfs INTO gold, he wanted them to make a Philosopher's Stone to turn BASE METALS into gold. Once he made the stone, he wouldn't need more Smurfs, just more base metals.
  • Or Smurfette doesn't have the same Philosopher's Stone qualities that allow the normal murfs to be used in the creation of gold.
  • Gargamel couldn't make a real Smurf, just something that resembled a female Smurf. In the cartoon show, it took Papa Smurf's magic in order to make Smurfette a real Smurf.
  • Of course, Gargamel did have at one time a cloning machine which enabled him to take one single Smurf and make up to five clones of him, giving him six Smurfs right there.
    • From what I remember, the cloning machine ended up making six Gargamels too, and the six argued over magic potions until they made a huge explosion which wiped out the five clones, after which Gargamel swore never to try cloning again because he couldn't handle another incident like that.
  • In addition to the fact that Smurfette wasn't a "real" Smurf from the start and probably wouldn't have worked for mking gold, Gargamel's motivations for capturing the Smurfs varies a bit. He does want to use them to make gold, but he also wants to eat them because apparently they taste good — but the main motivation for his continued pursuit of the Smurfs seems to be that It's Personal. He's been thwarted, defeated and humiliated by the Smurfs so many times now that he wants revenge; in very many episodes he begins schemes that are meant to totally destroy the Smurfs and would render them useless for eating or gold-making... but by now he seems to wiew killing them all, or at least causing the rest of them grief by killing some of them, as a decent consolation prize, even if he doesn't profit from it.
    • Cut Lex Luthor a Check.
• For a communist society, it strikes me as odd that they still haven't executed Jokey Smurf. Yeah, yeah, I know "Kid's show".
  • The Scapegoat makes everybody else look better by comparison.
  • The Smurf Village is more of a family society than a communist one, and when Papa Smurf was away and King Smurf made the Village to have real (but unfair) laws, Jokey was promptly put in jail.
  • In a comic book story, Papa Smurf did get Jokey to stop playing his pranks for a while, but then he saw that his little Smurfs got bored from the lack of pranks, so he allowed Jokey to play them once again.
• The Movie states that Smurfs are from Belgium, the original home of the comic, so why is their homeland depicted as mountainous?
  • It seemed to me that they were from Belgian mythology, but hailed from some sort of alternate realm where magic worked much more easily than in our world. Think of how some creatures in Greek mythology came from Greek mythology, but were reputed to come from places like Gibraltar or Egypt or Hades (which is technically under one of the edge regions of the Grecian region), and not Greece itself. NPH's character did say that the book said they were from Belgian mythology, and not Belgium, unless I'm recalling it incorrectly.
• Movie question. Ok, so there are about five little blue creatures yelling, running around, and climbing tall objects, with extremely unrobotic movements...And everyone goes after them thinking they're toys. How?
  • Weirdness Censor. They can't really be little blue people, and we are in a toy store, ergo they're toys.