Hello, my toy-dusty friends! Today’s topic is the classic story of King Smurf.
King Smurf commands our attention because it’s the highest selling book of all time. (If you don’t count books that sold more than King Smurf.)
Papa Smurf leaves the village for a lengthy amount of time to find an ingredient for a formula he’s working on. In his absence, the Smurfs elect a new leader. The winner of the election puts on a gold outfit and declares himself King, but the others are not having it.
King Smurf gives positions of power to the toughest Smurfs in exchange for them enforcing his rule.
First order of business? Force the Smurfs to make a palace!
Life goes on, but tensions rise when Jokey Smurf is thrown in jail for doing his trademark exploding present gag.
A rebel team forms!
They hold a secret meeting and plan to rescue Jokey.
The rebels succeed in rescuing Jokey and escape into the forest where they make a secret camp. Later, they strike again by putting anti-King Smurf messages up around the village.
King Smurf and his army go into the forest to find the rebels, but it backfires with more Smurfs leaving to join the rebels.
King Smurf’s next move is to build a wall around the village to keep the rebels out, AND to keep the rest of the Smurfs from leaving. Peyo, the author, lived in Belgium and wrote this and the other Smurf tales during the Cold War. It’s easy to see how the Berlin Wall may have had an influence on this story.
Of course the rebels don’t put up with that and they attack the village. An all out battle erupts, complete with throwing ripe tomatoes at each other.
To see all that happens, you will have to read the book! The version pictured above is the one I bought as a kid and is out of print. However, King Smurf is currently available in The Smurfs Anthology Volume 1, published by Papercutz. It’s a fantastic hardcover book that includes five other stories and is very much worth the $20 price tag.
However, this new edition has a different translation from the book I had as a kid. Compare the new translation with the picture of the same page posted above.
After Papa Smurf returns, he had this to say:
Anyway, my toy-dusty friends, King Smurf blew my mind when I first read this as a kid. I had seen some of the cartoons on TV, but this was quite different! (There is a cartoon version of this story that I hadn’t seen before reading the book. In that version, Brainy Smurf is King Smurf. I have to say, though, the book is much better!)
To finish the post off, here are two Smurf figures from my collection that were made from this story.
Until next time, this is Toydust signing off!
NEXT POST: A WRITING TIP
COMING TOMORROW!
I forgot how complex the smurf stories are!
Hi Sara! Thanks for your post! Do you have a favorite Smurf story?
I’ll have to reread the stories to find my favorite! However, Handy is my favorite smurf!
Papa is my favorite, but Handy is high on my list! Handy seemed to be featured more heavily in the cartoons than the books. He did have some minor appearances in some of the books though. Off the top of my smurf, here’s the ones I remember him being in:
“The Astrosmurf” (Astrosmurf borrows all of Handy’s tools to build his “spaceship.”)
“The Smurfs and the Howlibird” (It was Handy’s idea to adapt a crossbow into a rock-launching device to scare off the Howlibird.)
“Smurf of One and Smurf a Dozen of the Other” (Handy gets into an argument with another smurf about how to say the name of a tool. In the other two stories Handy looks like all the others, but in this one he wears a tool apron that distinguishes him from the rest.)
Thanks for your post, and I hope you enjoy rereading the smurf stories!