This week, on the Major Spoilers Podcast your hosts take a look at the controversial The Purple Smurf.
The Black Smurfs (English title The Purple Smurfs) is the first album of the original French-language Smurfs comic series created by Belgian artist Peyo, first published in 1963. In a little mushroom village live the Smurfs, diminutive blue-skinned humanoid creatures. One day, one of them gets stung by a purple fly that turns his skin purple, reduces his vocabulary to the single word “gnap!”, and causes him to go berserk. He bounces around and bites other Smurfs on their tail, which turns them into purple Smurfs as well. Soon, almost everyone in the village has become a purple Smurf, and Papa Smurf, the leader, tries to find a cure and cease the tail-biting epidemic.
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7 Comments
The Purple Smurfs has basically the same story as 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, World War Z, The Walking Dead, or pretty much most zombie stories for the last 45 years — and Peyo came up with it 5 years before Night of the Living Dead.
Peyo needs to be recognized as the zombie pioneer he was.
GNAP! Oh man, that was my most favoritest Smurfs episode ever!
Looking forward to the podcast! This is a classic book and I’m really interested in what our major spoilers crew has to say about it.
On a different note, did the Major Spoilers crew ever review or comment on the Tintin books?
We did Cigars of the Pharohs a long time ago…
… and I’ve reviewed The Secret of the Unicorns on the site, as well as the Spielberg movie.
I may be too picky, but being a French Canadian (cue in Matthew’s nerd voice), I read that in the original French language…and the Smurfs did not turn purple, but black. Could it be our politically correct day and age that makes them purple, or is it because Americans cannot accept a “black” Smurf?
It really does baffle me…my mind does not see anything related to race here, but I still cannot understand the change in color (or it’s just something I missed and it’s all explained somewhere…).
Can someone help a poor Mokin??
Overly sensitive PC culture in America… fuck yeah?