Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation; Everett Collection

The Smurfs have done what Tintin and other European comic strip characters never could. They’ve conquered North America. The Smurfs movie comes out July 29, and since it has famous blue characters saying things like “you smurfed with the wrong girl,” nobody’s expecting it to get good reviews. But the studio, Sony, does expect it to make some money: Smurfs have been bankable here since 1980, when the Belgian comics were adapted into a TV cartoon. Other French-language comics have trouble crossing the sea. The producer of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming Tintin, also based on a Belgian comic, admitted to the press that it’s a risk because Tintin “is known so well in Europe and virtually not at all here.” But veteran TV screenwriter Marc Zicree told Maclean’s that when he told a young American about writing for the Smurfs cartoon in the ’80s, “I was like Moses coming down off the mountain.”

It’s easy to see that the Smurfs, created (as Les Schtroumpfs) in 1958, have become part of North American culture in a way that, say, Asterix can’t match. On June 25, for the anniversary of the birth of Smurfs creator Peyo, Sony sponsored “Global Smurfs Day,” a worldwide gathering of people who painted their faces blue and wore white hats just like his creations. There have been Smurfs parodies on shows like Family Guy, Robot Chicken and Saturday Night Live; North American college students used to have a drinking game where they took a drink every time a character in the show said “Smurf” in place of a normal word. Eric Leroy, who is curating an exhibition devoted to Peyo and the Smurfs at the Arcurial gallery in Paris, told Maclean’s “the children of the world identify with the Smurfs.”

This worldwide popularity is mostly thanks to the cartoon, still in reruns on channels like Teletoon Retro. Though some of the shows were adaptations of Peyo stories, Zicree says the writers started to “bring an American boisterousness” to the franchise, creating new stories with a non-European slant: “I was a big science fiction geek,” he recalls, “so I wrote one about an alien who visits the Smurf village and impersonates a Smurf.” That North American take on the Smurfs has come to define them even on Peyo’s home turf. “In Europe,” Leroy explains, “the comics are popular—25 million copies—but the TV show is more popular today.”

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