The narrative that is the history of early animated children’s cinema and television is one populated with ghosts. The majority of those films and shows which reach release tend to be entirely forgotten. This forgetting happens for a number of reasons: original reels were frequently destroyed once a film had had its run; television broadcast tapes were routinely wiped to be re-used; often the ‘lost’ TV show or film in question can often be so formulaic and uninteresting, and the animation used so crude and ugly, as to fall outside the field of interest of even the most ardent pop-culture archivist; or, most commonly of all, what Professor Lowell Thomas calls ‘the casual yet mind-bummingly poisonous racism’1 which pervades these childlike cartoons makes for an embarrassing cultural ancestry.
The list of cartoons which have perpetuate a message of overt or implied racism is seemingly endless: The Adventures Of Steamboat Toby The Racially Pure Sausage; Aryan Claus: Viking Santa; Felix The Cat Meets The Evil Chinaman; Mickey And Minnie’s Flaming Cross Antics; Plantation Capers (a cartoon series about the adventures of an idiotically cheery yet savage slave and his more learned fiddle-playing dormouse friend, the setting of which - a landowner’s cotton field - so restricted the scope of the pair’s ‘adventures’ that all twenty-four episodes are utterly indistinguishable from one another); famously, in his earliest appearances, Porky Pig was not merely a anthropomorphic pig who danced around in a dinner jacket and stuttered amusingly but also one who ran a successful slave-trade enterprise through a regime of casually observed brutality: he carried a blunderbuss with him at all times, off-screen acts perpetrated against unspecified female slaves were heavily hinted at, and his catchphrase was ‘Guh-guh-guh-give him forty strokes with the lash!’ The learned Professor Thomas is clear as to why the origins of these often much-loved characters are so rarely recalled: ‘The first time I watched Bugs Bunny in ‘Lynching Larks’, my eyes literally cried. They cried blood, soil, oil, urine, tears but mostly they cried shame: no-one wants to be reminded that the things they celebrate, a cornerstone of their popular culture no less, have their roots in something so boke-inducingly unpalatable. Seriously, it’s like trying to swallow a live slug or something.’2
Among academics, however, the most notorious example of an animation rife with outright bigotry is none other than The Smurfs. Almost all of us now probably think of the Smurfs in their more modern incarnation: a woodland family of kind and friendly blue-skinned creatures whose adventures in and around their community instil the virtues of cooperation and politeness in their 1980’s child-audience. Prior to this, however, they featured in a black and white comic strip in a weekly Belgium newspaper. And before this ‘The Smurfs’ were the subject of a number of pre-talkie era animation features in which, rather than cutesy, gnome-like creatures, they were in fact a vicious band of vampire Klansmen.
The pictures themselves - the brainchild of Kurt C Montgomery, the then elderly head of the powerful Hollywood branch of the KKK (which listed notables such as producer Douglass C Crotchbottom and media tycoon Buckshaw C Bifkin in its ranks) - were an attempt to use the increasingly popular medium of animation to promote its message of white supremacy in as acceptable a way possible. The addition of a vampire context is unusual and no doubt stems from the popularity of screen adaptations of Dracula. However, watching The Smurfs films, it’s clear the producers brought only a sketchy knowledge of Bram Stoker’s creation’s popularity and had almost certainly never read the novel or watched any of the Dracula films: rather than representing vampirism as the traditionally spectral, sophisticated phenomena we’re accustomed to, it shows it as mindless, animal violence. As Otis Bunchlock points out: ‘every single Smurfs film features a horrifyingly ‘blood orgy’ scene, each so protracted and deft in its animation they almost seem to hint at a hidden knowledge of surrealism.’3
Although there remains a clear line between the original Smurfs and the ones we now call our own, the differences are marked: rather than the uniform blue skin and white caps we’ve grown accustomed to, the original Smurfs all wore identical white robes and pointed hoods with swastikas and Klan crosses emblazoned on them, . KKK cinema archivist (and, as I’m legally required to refer to her as, ‘totally proven non-racist’) Grendel Himmler hits on something when she says: ‘The fact that it was impossible to tell any of the characters apart - save for when they yanked their hoods back to feast on the blood of their screaming prey, revealing hideously swollen blue faces - was probably part of the reason the original animated series never made it past the five ‘episode’ mark.’4
The list of major characters, many of whom bear the same names as their latter counterparts, is as follows:
Papa Smurf: rather than being the genial paterfamilias of the Smurfs, Papa Smurf is instead an ancient and stern-browed wizard who, on occasion, appears able to call up on an unspecified Viking deity to control the weather, something he uses to persecute neighbouring minority groups and, on one occasion, in what we would nowadays term an act of ‘pissing about’, to impress a female Smurf at a beer hall dance.
Young Smurf: is shown as enjoying the traditional pursuits of an everyday Klan youth: early morning military callisthenics, saluting his elders, drunkenly tormenting the weaker members of his social group, and spitting at himself in the mirror whilst crying late at night.
Smurfette: is shown as a fecund paragon of womanhood, presiding in full Klan-wear over an implausibly enormous brood of muscular babies, her vast bust the only thing which distinguishes her from the rest of the Smurf family.
Gargamel: rather than the villainous wizard he became in the later Smurfs, Gargamel is instead an ancient and enchanted oak tree which alerts the Smurfs to the presence of nearby black people by secreting blood whenever they’re come within a certain radius. The Smurfs greedily drink of this blood which in turn, it would appear, then furnishes them with their powers to sail silently though the night skies.
Smurfberries - instead of being delicious sarsaparilla fruits so coveted by the Smurf family, ‘smurfberries’ were originally crudely stitched flesh-sacs filled with reserves of drained-off blood
The five episodes which made up the series of films is as follows:
Where The Smurf Things Are- Young Smurf goes astray, encounters danger, returns to the village. To celebrate they kill a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.
A Wolf In Smurf’s Clothing - A wolf emerges from a neighbouring forest and threatens the community’s livestock. After rallying together, they see the wolf off and celebrate by killing a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.
A Lesson Smurfed - Young Smurf cheats during a spelling test. After lying to cover it up he is consumed by guilt and eventually confesses everything to Papa Smurf who, satisfied a lesson has been learned (or ‘smurfed’), forgives him. They celebrate by killing a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.
Sporting Smurfs - Young Smurf steals a football from a friend, Papa Smurf finds out and chastises both he and his friend, teaching them the value of sharing. They then kill a slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.
Smurf Surprise! - The Smurfs drift through the quiet sky early on Christmas morning, eventually descending on a small gospel gathering by the neighbouring cottonfields and massacre those gathered. They then celebrate their successful goring by killing the sole surviving slave from the neighbouring cottonfields.
Without fail, at a different point in each of these episodes the producers cut in the final scenes from The Birth Of A Nation.
Although the pictures were only a moderate commercial success, an interesting coda is a marketing agreement with cereal empire Kellogs which came whilst the films were being screened: Smurfs branded groceries which came to dominate the US breakfast market for a brief period. The ghoulishly undead faces of the Smurfs were replaced with the friendlier, more child-friendly cartoons we’ve now become so familiar with. Although the Smurfs were eventually dropped by Kelloggs when organised racism fell out of public favour, the characters themselves remained popular enough to be made into the weekly cartoon series for the Belgian public we now think of as being the originator of The Smurfs.
Such brutal bigotry never again permeated animation to such an unashamedly overt degree, although its effects were still being felt well into the 1970s: in the first few episodes of The Flintstones, for instance, Fred is pitted against a humanoid beatnik tomato called Jerry - a grotesque amalgam of all the stereotypical black, beatnik and left-wing nightmare fantasies of the right; in the now lost pilot episode of Scooby Doo the character of Shaggy, rather than the now iconic cowardly hippie, was depicted as a communist vegetarian who had infiltrated the mystery solving gang and made constant attempts at ridding them of their freedom. A more bizarre example is one of the later episodes of The Jetsons in which George Jetson finds a young Vietnamese refugee attempting to squat in his house and is forced to try to get rid of him in time for his boss, Mr Spaceley, coming for dinner: the final scene in which a large silver serving lid is pulled away to reveal the young Vietnamese boy, roasted with an apple wedged into his mouth, at which the family laugh for the remaining nine minutes of the cartoon until the credit sequence starts, is one of the most unintentionally chilling scenes a Cartoon Network audience is likely to witness.
Some original Smurfs branded cereal packaging from the 1920's. Supplied by SundaeG1rl.1 Thomas, Lowell - Citizen Klan: White Supremacy In Animation: From Snow White Power To Josie And The Pussyvolk (University of Nowherechester Press) p.175.
2 Ibid. p. 382.
3 Bunchlock, Otis - Screen Heil!: A Seemingly Pointless And Overly In-Depth Study On Racial Violence In Early Cinema (2002, Academic-To-The-Max Press)
4 Himmler, Grendel - Our Incredibly Glorious Ancestors: An Impartial History Of The Heroic Ku Klux Klan (1994, Cultural History Excuses Press), p. 83.
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