10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows
9. The Smurfs Are White Supremacists
If you were a kid in the eighties in the US, you watched the Smurfs. Recently described as like ‘kiddie cocaine’, the show was adapted from the phenomenally successful comic strips created by legendary artist Pierre ‘Peyo’ Culliford.
That was thirty-five years ago, and for nearly as long, American fans have theorised as to the nature of Smurf society, explored its parallels to communism, debated whether the series depicted socialist propaganda and whether ‘smurf’ stood for ‘Socialist Men Under a Red Father’. The debate became so prevalent in pop culture that it surfaced in Richard Linklater’s Slacker in 1991, and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko in 2001.
The question as to whether the Smurfs were Nazis was a far more sinister twist on the old conversation, however. Proponents of the theory would point out that the show’s antagonist, evil wizard Gargamel, was a blatantly offensive Semitic stereotype, complete with belted robe, hooked nose and avaricious love of gold; he also owned a cat named Azrael (a Jewish name for the angel of death) and kept a mezuzah, a Jewish religious artifact, by the door.
For a while, the obvious comparison was to white supremacist faction the Ku Klux Klan, with the Smurfs’ pointed white headgear and tribalistic ways. Smurfs even turn black-skinned when falling ill after being bitten by an exotic fly, becoming aggressive and subnormally intelligent.
The KKK aspect of the theory loses traction when you remember that Peyo was Belgian, not American - but then Europe has its own muddled traditions of white supremacy, neo-fascist and socialist traditions that can be compared to the cartoon manifestation of an anti-semitic communist society in The Smurfs.
With the massive popularity of the TV show over nine years in the 1980s, a whole new generation in the US was exposed to this propaganda tool for disenfranchised white folk fearful of people of colour and the supposed influence of the Jews over a fallen capitalist society.
Or, you know, not. Sometimes a show about little blue people is just a show about little blue people.