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"Made in Belgium :: Books"
"The Best Belgian Autors and Books about Belgium"
Search online for books, book reviews and summary,
novels and romans, discount on magazines subscriptions
Many history books, order and buy online at discount prices.
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"Peyo - Smurfs : Biography and Books"
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The Smurfs (originally in French; Les Schtroumpfs) are comic strip figures created by Pierre Culliford (better known as Peyo) in 1958. Right from the start, the characters proved to be a huge success and now, 50 years later, the Smurfs are even more popular than ever.
The fictional creatures are male, very short (just ‘three apples tall’), with blue skin, white trousers with a hole for their short tails and a white hat. They live in mushroom-shaped houses in a forest of medieval Europe. Almost all the characters look essentially the same, but have some additional accessory that identifies each one's personality (Handy Smurf with a pencil over his ear, Hefty Smurf has a heart tattooed on his arm, Vanity Smurf with a flower in his bonnet, etc). The Smurfs speak a very strange language, in which some words or parts of a word are replaced by the word ‘smurf’. All Smurfs but Papa, Baby, Nanny and Grandpa are said to be at least 100 years old. Papa Smurf with his white beard is the oldest of all: ‘I had just turned 542 when the chanterelle mushrooms came up last June!’ He said that in 1958 when the creatures first appeared in ‘Le Journal de Spirou’.
Peyo wrote a comics serial in Le Journal de Spirou called Johan and Peewit. On 23 October 1958, he introduced a new set of secondary characters to the comic strip. These characters proved to be a huge success and the Smurfs became an independent comic strip in 1959. The word ‘Schtroumpf’ is an invented word. It came to Peyo as he had lunch with colleague André Franquin and struggled to find a word that slipped away from him. The magazine was always published in two languages (French in the magazine Spirou and Dutch in Robbedoes). Schtroumpf was translated in Dutch as ‘Smurf’.
Father Abraham (Pierre Kartner), a Dutch singer, released the first Smurf single ‘Smurfenlied’ (Smurf Song) in the late 1970s. This worldwide hit single consisted of a dialogue between the singer and a couple of Smurfs. Subsequent albums included Smurfing Sing Song, The Smurfs All Star Show, Christmas in Smurfland, and more.
In 1976, the film ‘La Flûte à six schtroumpfs’ was released. In 1981, the cartoon duo Hanna & Barbera (known of Tom & Jerry and the Flintstones) made a TV series of the Smurfs of 256 episodes for the NBC network in the USA. Stuart R. Ross, an American media maker would release an English language dubbed version of the 1976 film in 1983, titled ‘The Smurfs and the Magic Flute’. Now, Paramount Pictures working on computer animated Smurf films, the first to be released in November 2008 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Smurfs.
The Smurfs remained successful for 50 years largely because of their basic appeal and the simple storylines of bold adventure. Even though Peyo died in 1992, the studio continues to create new stories and these are adapted from mini-tales to pop songs and on to the exciting world of multimedia. Smurf material is now available on video, on CD-Rom and CD-i.
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