Not that innocent

The Smurfs are back – with a new movie out next week – but beware the dangerously subversive and sinister influence of these blue creatures. DONALD CLARKEinvestigates

PARENTS BEWARE. The Smurfs are communists or fascists or militant misogynists. Or something. Mind you, as Roland Barthes would undoubtedly have agreed, everything means something else. The incomparable SpongeBob SquarePantscontains copious references to deviant sexuality. Tinky Winky is gay. Captain Pugwash's ship was staffed by walking double entendres. The Magic Roundaboutis all about drugs. You know the sort of thing.

Whenever such a story emerges, one is tempted to blame the rise of postmodernism, the menace of the internet and various other contemporary curses. But, as the list above demonstrates, these conversations have been going on for decades. This writer remembers, at some point in the early 1970s, a family friend ranting about an apparent outbreak of licentiousness in near-forgotten kiddie show The Woodentops. After a few too many gins, our pal would wonder loudly why Mrs Woodentop spent so much time alone with the gardener. (This was not, remember, too long after the Lady Chatterley Trial.)

The Smurfs story has, however, been given added legitimacy by the publication of a semi-serious, quasi-academic tome entitled Little Blue Book. In this controversial screed, Antoine Buéno, lecturer at some characteristically snooty French academy, claims that the Smurf community offers an "archetype of totalitarian society imbued with Stalinism and Nazism". While the blue creatures lurked harmlessly in the forest like a benign North Korea, their subversive influence held few dangers for the greater world.

Next week, however, we see the release of the first Smurfs movie. And the creatures are taking themselves to the cathedral of mammon that is Manhattan. Not since Ché Guevara addressed the UN, has the US been so in peril from a Marxist charm offensive.

The notion that the Smurf stories – best remembered from a 1980s TV series – might have worrying political undertones is not a new one. Maniacs long ago noticed that the creatures, created by Belgian cartoonist Pierre Culliford back in 1958, live in something a little like an agricultural collective. Every person is allocated a job that corresponds to his (not her, as we shall see) abilities. Hefty Smurf, making like Boxer in Animal Farm,lifts weighty trees and hauls building supplies about the place. Chef Smurf serves up the food. Painter Smurf dabs the exteriors. One senses that demarcation disputes happen rarely in this workers' utopia.

In one episode of the TV series, Papa Smurf – the community’s Stalin figure – takes savage revenge on Greedy Smurf, the baker, for hoarding food during a terrible smurfberry famine. The avaricious counter-revolutionary is attacked in his home and hammered with planks of wood. The subsequent show-trial was not depicted.

Like the citizens of Mao’s China, the Smurfs dress more or less identically. Occasional workwear appears. But, for the most part, they confine themselves to white pants and a nifty floppy hat. Only Papa Smurf is allowed to break free from sartorial conformity. Wearing red pants, red hat and bushy white facial hair, he positively stinks of Stalinist allusions.

One American critic even went so far as to suggest that “Smurf” is an acronym for “small men under red forces”.

Then there’s the community’s arch enemy, Gargamel. Alone among the characters, he lusts for money. For decades the sinister loner has plotted to capture the Smurfs as part of a (somewhat obscure) plan to turn base materials into gold. Need we go on? All this is a bit of harmless fun.

But Buéno has taken the matter further. He notes that in one Smurf book, The Black Smurfs, Culliford had a magical insect sting the heroes and turn their skin a shade of black. They immediately lose all sense of order and begin bellowing gibberish. "It's roughly the way Africans were viewed by white colonisers in the 19th century," the French academic muses.

There’s more. “Gargamel is ugly, dirty, with a hooked nose [and] is fascinated by gold,” he notes. So, the original comic and subsequent series are, apparently, also vigorously anti-Semitic.

We haven’t even got to the contentious issue of Smurfette. As Smurfistas will know, the blonde-haired distaff Smurf is the only female in this strange community. Gargamel created her (please keep up) as way of infiltrating the Smurf community, but she was subsequently re-educated in the Smurfista doctrines by Papa Smurf and his apparatchiks. It is worth pondering Gargamel’s summoning spell in its genuinely disturbing entirety. “Sugar and spice but nothing nice... A dram of crocodile tears... A peck of bird brain... The tip of an adder’s tongue... Half a pack of lies, white, of course... The slyness of a cat... The vanity of a peacock... The chatter of a magpie... The guile of a vixen and the disposition of a shrew... And, of course, the hardest stone for her heart...” You don’t have to be a demented semiotician to detect a smidgeon of misogyny in that incantation. Buéno also sees her as a worrying vision of Aryan perfection.

It's difficult to know quite how seriously to take this. Putting on our hoity-toity hat, we should note that comic books and cartoons have often dealt in queasy racial stereotypes. You may not care that the housekeeper in Tom and Jerryis a gross caricature of an African-American servant, but you would find it hard to deny that such stereotyping is taking place. An early Tintin book, Tintin in the Congo, has rightly been criticised for its horrific depiction of black people and for its apparent warmness towards Belgium's notoriously brutal governance of that sometime colony. No conspiracy theories are at work here.

The long-running deconstruction of the Smurf universe does, however, involve a greater degree of creative re-imagining. Examining Buéno’s responses to the inevitable controversy – the internet has been buzzing – one gets a hint of that mischievous, post-structuralist playfulness that revels in reading everything into nothing. He argues that “popular works, however innocent they seem, have much to say about our society”.

But life would hardly be worth living if we weren't able to read malign or subversive intent into the most innocent of popular diversions. It was a terrible moment when John Ryan, creator of Captain Pugwash, sued the Guardianfor repeating the urban legend that his animated series featured characters named Master Bates, Seaman Staines, and Roger the Cabin Boy.

If the late Mr Ryan’s lawyers allow it, I will continue to believe the lie.

The Smurfsis on general release from August 10