Tuesday, January 15, 2008

You gotta be smurfin' me! 50 years?


I remember the 1981 debut in the US, but I had no idea they were that old. Ever wonder why there was only one Smurfette? I did. I had Smurf sheets on my bed, which were purchased as a joke after the neighbor's boy had them. I used to babysit for him and saw his Smurf sheets. They were kind of cute, and I remarked about the sheets, so my mother bought me a set for my bed. I often wondered why the Smurfs were blue. Perhaps they had no lungs.
Smurfs celebrate 50th birthday
By Alexandra Stadnyk, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The Smurfs - led by Papa Smurf and Smurfette - kicked off a year of 50th birthday celebrations Monday with Smurfberry cake and sasparilla juice.

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 and 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.

Their debut on U.S. television in 1981 launched their global rise to stardom and made the Smurfs a household name. 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.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My son kept talking about "merses." I finally realized he was trying to say "Smurf!"