So everybody knows the Smurfs. Little blue guys, made a cartoon that was everywhere in the '80s, decorated pasta cans during that decade, lately known for a couple of CGI cash-grab movies with Barney Stinson. Not too smurfing interesting, right? But did you know that these characters (who made their first appearance in the French/Belgian comics magazine "Spirou" 56 years ago on October 23, 1958) have been interpreted as allegorical of topics ranging from economics to linguistics to gender hierarchies?

So the Smurfs have that deal where they just substitute "smurf" for every other word in the cartoon to make kids laugh. It's enough to make you want to smurf somebody after the first few minutes. But in their original comics incarnation, this tic was put to more clever use. There's a story from 1972 where the Smurfs from the North call a certain object a "bottle smurfer," while those from the South call it a "smurf opener." This is considered a parody of the tension between French and Dutch speakers in Belgian communities, and is actually a pretty hilarious joke in my opinion.

Then there's Smurfette…the only girl Smurf. What's up with that? In the comics, Smurfette is created by Gargamel from clay to disrupt the all-male Smurf society by rending the Smurfs with jealousy. The only problem? She's ugly. Papa Smurf takes pity by changing her appearance, and she then self-exiles herself from the Smurf village to avoid disrupting the social order. Heavy stuff. (This was all a little much for the 1981 cartoon, where they just brought her back.)

But speaking of heavy, how about this? The Smurfs have no known currency. When they want food, they just go grab some Smurfberries or maybe get a free pie from the chef Smurf. (My memory isn't the clearest on the details here.) They all live in identical houses. And they all seem to have assigned jobs, that for many of them are described right in their names. (There's no way somebody named "Handy Smurf" is going to be allowed to go into teaching.) Get it? The Smurfs are a socialist utopia, something that hasn't been lost on commentators over the years.

This can all get carried too far. When a French sociologist described the Smurf society as a totalitarian and racist utopia, the head of Studio Peyo, which owns the characters, pushed back hard. But it's clear that these stories have had a little more bite to them over the years than often recognized, especially in their original comics incarnation. The cartoon version excised many of these elements completely, which were already oblique to begin with. But knowing that the Smurfs have a little more in their history than going around eating berries and saying the same word over and over makes them a little more smurfing interesting, after all.

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