theMediaman.com

Curious what ever happened to the Smurfs Movie that came out shortly after the cartoon series took off, I checked it out on IMDB.

I knew that the Smurfs were a French creation before it was English, so I wasn’t surprised to see the film title was also originally in French (La Flûte à six schtroumpfs). However, I was surprised to see that the movie came out in 1976 - five full years before the cartoon series was produced, and seven years before being released in English.

Apparently more faithful to the source material, this kind of explains why there was no Gargamel, Azreal or Smurfette. It also explains why the smurfs are in the dark for the first half-hour of the movie.

I still remember seeing it at the Cineplex in Eaton centre, and again at a friend’s birthday party. I must have been about seven years old to see it in 1983, which would put it as one of the first movies I remember seeing (along with 1983’s “Never Say Never Again” and, of course, 1981’s “Empire Strikes Back”). In those days, blockbuster movies stayed in theatres longer than a weekend so it’s difficult to gauge exactly when I saw any of those films.

They might be sitting on the promotional value of the original, since there is a new Smurfs movie script in development, but they’ve been working on that for years. I don’t think we’ll see it in this decade. So where’s my DVD? Or high-definition transfer to HD-DVD?

With over 400 episodes, they are supposed to start releasing the seasons on DVD sometime this year.  However, we can probably skip the last one where they travel through time.