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October 11, 2005

That's smurferific!

Smurficide, as reported in the UK by the Telegraph.

Gargamel finally found out where the village was and launched a good old fashioned airstrike, replete with BLU-82 'mushroom cutters'.

The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters' village is annihilated by warplanes.

It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand-in-hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom-shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky. Tiny Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs.

Unsurprisingly, it makes small children who see it cry. It was toned down from the original concept, in which smurfs are variously dismembered and decapitated by the blasts (which would be one way of settling the question of whether they're blue all the way through). Fifteen year olds will just think its cool.

The object, is, of course to make people think. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the use of warplanes and aerial bombing in the popular imagination is pretty closely tied to the US.

I'm thinking Papa Smurf knew. Or he needed a bigger defense budget. And that is was the US, they'd go after Barney the Dinosaur because that's where the oil comes from. That the Belgians may cry over cartoons of dead blue things, but weren't too cut up about Rwanda circa 1994, or massacres in any other ex-colony.

And also "Charlie don't smurf."

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at October 11, 2005 09:41 AM

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