Purple Smurfs

There are two things in particular that I remember scaring the living shit out of me when I was a kid.

First, the end of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers's "Don't Come Around Here No More" video.

When you're 8 years old, seeing Alice turned into a cake, sliced into pieces, and eaten by Tom Petty--while she's conscious and watching--is some pretty fucked up shit to come across when you're just channel surfing for cartoons on a Saturday morning.

But speaking of cartoons, a couple of years before that, I saw something that really freaked me out. Something that chilled me to my little bones. Something involving, of all things, Smurfs.

If you couldn't bring yourself to sit through an episode of The Smurfs, the plot is this: After being forced to get up off his blue ass and do some manual labor by an annoyed Papa Smurf, Lazy Smurf gets bitten on the tail by a fly, which infects him with a 28 Days Later-type of virus that turns him into a purple, rage-filled psycho. He then goes around biting other Smurfs, infecting them with the same disease, until only Papa Smurf is left to find a cure.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the episode was basically a zombie movie for little kids. And of course, the scariest thing about zombies isn't getting killed and/or eaten, it's getting turned into a zombie yourself. (Or in this case, purple.) Hence, my freaking out. I can't remember if there were tears. I'm pretty sure there weren't. But can I say for sure? No.

Incidentally, the moral at the end of this episode--I guess all Smurfs episodes probably included some sort of lesson--was that Papa Smurf decided to accept his Smurfs the way they were, even if it meant letting Lazy be, well...lazy. That doesn't seem like an especially good lesson to teach kids, and if anything, I would think the moral should have been "Don't set up your village near flies that can infect you with a horrible zombie disease," but what do I know? I'm no Papa Smurf.

Anyway, watching it now, I obviously feel silly that I was ever scared of an episode of The Smurfs. (Although, a quick check of the Internet reveals that I'm far from the only person who was traumatized by it.) It's hard to feel overly terrified by tiny purple, creatures who run around shouting "G'nap g'nap!" So that's one childhood fear stricken from the list.

The Tom Petty video still kind of bugs me, though.