How the Smurfs enchanted a generation of Arab children

Clumsy, Hefty and Brainy in Smurfs: The Lost Village. Sony Pictures

As a youngster growing up in Kuwait, Syria and Jordan, those cutesy little blue creatures known as the Smurfs pretty much ruled my TV viewing.

I can confidently say I was not alone in this – most Arab children who grew up in the region in the 1980s can still hum the show’s theme song.

The Smurfs are an iconic cultural institution in the Middle East, where a generation of children watched every episode of the cartoon TV series, read every Smurf book, owned as many figurines as we could find and purchase with our meagre pocket money, and wasted many an afternoon doodling Smurfs on our folders and notebooks.

The brainchild of Pierre Culliford (better known as Peyo), the Smurfs were introduced in 1958 as a comic strip in Belgian magazine Le Journal de Spirou. It was adapted into an animated TV show in the United States in 1981, which ran for eight seasons and won numerous Emmy awards. Internationally, The Smurfs became one of the most successful and beloved cartoons in television history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the Arab world.

Here, the show was dubbed in classical Arabic, rather than the conversational Arabic that is unique in dialect to each Arab country. In fact, I credit the Smurfs and our obsession with them as youngsters as the reason why many of us understand classical Arabic at all.

The show was staple afternoon entertainment for children across the region. We didn’t have that many options when it came to cartoons, and took what we could get. If it meant buckling down and having to work to understand what they were saying, then so be it. The fact that we learnt classical Arabic by default, by watching the show, certainly did not hurt.

Imagine my surprise when, as a teenager living in Canada, I came across an English-language episode of The Smurfs, and discovered that this was the original and not, as we had always believed, the Arabic version. Even though we, as Arabs, had adopted the Smurfs into our everyday language and into our pop-culture references, Arabic was just one of 30 languages the show was dubbed into.

To the Smurf generation of the 1980s, references to the creatures and their world became part of our code for everyday life.

Freshmen at universities became known as “Sanafer”, the Arabic word for Smurf. Nerds or goody two-shoes at school were nicknamed “Sanfur Shater” or Brainy Smurf.

Good looking girls would have to contend with shouts of “Sanfura”, the local name for Smurfette, and many a teacher or professor was labelled “Baba Sanfur” – Papa Smurf – behind his back.

Anyone exceedingly naive was labelled a “sanfur” in honour of the creatures’ characteristic of extreme innocence.

These terms and more like them made their way into Arabic speech across the region.

This weekend, the third Smurf movie, The Lost Village, was released. Unlike the previous two big-screen adventures, which mixed live action with animated Smurfs, this one was all- animated. Aside from the 3-D computer animation rather than hand-drawn 2-D, it was as close to the original TV shows as it possibly could be – and dubbed in classical Arabic to boot.

For nostalgia’s sake, I decided to revisit my tiny blue friends, and take my 4 1/2-year-old daughter along, hoping that she, too, might fall in love with the innocent, happy, blue creatures.

I was pleased to see that the popularity of the Smurfs had not waned; a packed cinema was a good indication of that.

And thankfully, they remain as magical as ever. Watching the Smurfs with grown-up eyes was sweetly nostalgic. From the familiarity of the opening theme song to the enchanting illustrations and feel-good, uplifting life lessons, The Lost Village did not disappoint either of us.

I am now searching out episodes of the TV show to watch with my daughter, and I secretly hope she picks up a stronger foundation of Arabic while enjoying the innocent antics of the little, blue creatures. That way, we will have come full circle.