Chopped Up Smurfs
Who LOVES Saturday mornings?
I am a member of the Smurf generation. As a little girl I LOVED Saturday mornings! I would wake up before the television had started broadcasting and turn on the t.v..
I would watch the fuzz for awhile, then when the color bars came on I would head to the kitchen and grab magnets off of the refrigerator. I’d take the magnets and rub them back and forth across those color bars.
The Star Spangled Banner came on and I would stand at attention with my hand over my heart. (Who remembers when television channels went off air and on air with a rousing rendition of the national anthem?! Me! Me!)
After this inspiring routine the Saturday morning cartoon marathon began!
As a kid I didn’t find anything strange about the Smurfs but as an adult I’ve begun to wonder why on Earth was there only one Smurfette? The gender ratio was way off there.
Was Papa Smurf actually the leader of a cult? When Lizard and I were first married we lived in an area literally surrounded by members of a spiritual commune. Then just before we moved a registered sex offender moved into the neighborhood.
The commune people believed that spaceships were going to come out of the mountains and that their leader was a reincarnate of Simon Peter, Charlemaigne, and Sitting Bull, among others. I always wondered why he was a reincarnate of only famous people?
It was hard to decide whether we preferred a kooky “old soul” as a neighbor or a person who had infringed against society in a horrible way…
But back to the joy of the Smurfs… I’m hoping the release of the Smurf movie will clear up some of these questions of odd Smurf behavior.
Saturday mornings these days are not like my childhood memories. Back then, I would give my parents hours of time while I communed one-on-one with the t.v.
That’s because they didn’t have a deluge of parenting resources telling them t.v. would rot their kid’s brains.
My daughters require that I get up and watch the t.v. with them on Saturday mornings. The side benefit is most of the time we don’t have to watch cartoons. Uno actually prefers to watch the documentary OETA-shows.
This morning she got wickedly excited because the sewing show is on. She’s also been known to shriek with joy at seeing that Chopped is on the Food Network.
What were your favorite Saturday morning traditions? What puzzled YOU about the Smurfs?