Paint Dots on Smurfs, why are they there?

Archived post from Tuesday, June 07, 2005

It is the age old smurfy question, there has been much discussion as to why there are paint dots on smurfs. Many people knew that they were to signify the different countries where the smurfs were made or painted, but few people knew why the earlier smurfs did not bear paint dots.

When I was a child growing up in the UK I vaguely remembered a story about smurfs containing lead paint. I searched all over the internet for information about this, and few people remembered anything. I quizzed my parents who I can remember warning me not to put smurfs in my mouth, as a child I remember they specifically mentioned the ones without the paint dots as being a problem. 25 years down the road they couldn't remember anything about this story!

The only information I managed to uncover was that Jonathan King's "Lick a smurp for Christmas (all fall down..)" record was inspired by the lead paint scare of the late 1970s so this at least gave me a date to work with. The song charted 16 Dec 1978 at position no: 58 in the UK Music Charts and stayed in the Charts for just 4 weeks. The record label was Petrol GAS!

Recently I have been speaking to the man who introduced the smurfs to the UK in the late 70s. He was a personal friend of Peyo and travelled the world with him. He was also present at the opening of the various factories in Sri Lanka, Portugal etc.

Finally I have some answers and here is what happened..

A group of people in the marketing department of National Benzole decided to outsource some smurf figurines to be made in Hong Kong, just 4 or 5 lines. It was later discovered that these had been produced without adhering to the necessary quality standards so they were deemed possibly unsafe and there was a lot of media coverage at the time which actually gave the smurfs even more publicity! This Hong Kong factory was not a part of Schleich. Paint dots were then introduced so that they could identify the ones with paint dots as having passed Quality Control tests and they were also given different colours according to the different countries.

So paint dots were introduced as a direct result of the lead paint scare of the late 1970s, so that people could be sure which smurfs had passed strict QA standards. The smurfs without paint dots would have been manufactured before the lead paint scare and there are possibly a few out there from the dodgy Hong Kong batch, although which ones they were we will possibly never know!

This is an archive of our old Kitty's Cavern Smurfs Blog