JIMMY

Most people know of Jimmy Tsai in one of his roles as accountant, fantasy basketball commissioner, or purveyor of athletic sportswear. But what people do NOT know is that under the pseudonym Tequila Rush, Jimmy authored the “mockumography” Go! Opium Pandamonium! Go!: From the Opium Pipe to Saturday Morning Children’s Cartoons. It currently ranks #5,339,475 on the Amazon.com sales ranking list. Amongst Jimmy’s latest ventures is a website devoted to Asians and Asian-Ams in sports entitled beyondbadminton.com.

In keeping with the theme of my last guest post, I present yet another cartoon conundrum that you may have always wondered about in the back of your mind but never articulated aloud. This week’s mindblowing conundrum: if Smurfette was the only female Smurf in the entire Smurf universe (at least in the early days, before those bratty Smurflings showed up), how the f%$* did they reproduce?

Now, I know there are some random articles and discussions out there that already address this subject matter, some quite scientific in their reasoning and presentation. But I’m not going to use any hifghfalutin terms or scientific principals to discuss my theories; I’m going to talk about them in a language that we all understand: the language of cinema.

There is one important fact we must first acknowledge before moving on to the theories of how the Smurfs reproduced: traditional male and female sexual intercourse could not have possibly existed. Why? Well, for those ignorant in Smurf lore, the lone female member of the species, Smurfette, was actually created by the Smurfs’ mortal enemy, Gargamel (insert whatever note here on subtext: women are evil, women—though beautiful and sexy—are created by the devil, etc.). Obviously, Smurfs existed before Smurfette, so that means they reproduced by some other non-traditional means, and out the door go any theories involving gang-banging.

Here, then, are some theories of how the Smurf reproduced:

Theory 1: the Alien theory

This theory posits that Smurfs don’t actually reproduce so much as they incubate inside a host’s body and then explode out of the host body’s chest cavity during “birth.” Could the reason we don’t see that many humans in the Smurf world be due to the fact that humans and Smurfs are at war, not too unlike the space marines and the creatures from Aliens?

This theory also suggests that there is some sort of queen mother laying the Smurf eggs in the first place. The queen mother Smurf would have to exist before the other Smurfs, so by elementary, we can reasonably deduce the eldest Smurf to be the chief suspect:

Theory 2: the Gremlins theory

Another cute little critter from 80s that may provide some insight into the Smurfs’ reproductive tendencies is none other than Gizmo, the mogwai from Gremlins (incidentally, for all you readers that don’t know, the term “mogwai” is actually from a Cantonese or Chinese phrase, loosely translated as “monster” or “demon”). Gremlins don’t sexually reproduce so much as they just simply replicate when they come into contact with water. This could easily explain how the Smurfs existed without a female member of the species: there simply isn’t a male or female within the species itself. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this discounts the possibility of cross dressers, as evidenced here:

Theory 3: the Jurassic Park theory

If there’s one thing that Jurassic Park taught us is that “nature always finds a way.” The geniuses that designed Jurassic Park ensured that the dinosaurs couldn’t reproduce by only engineering males, but they didn’t take into account the amazing characteristic that some frogs (whose DNA they used to fill in missing gaps in the dinosaurs’ DNA sequence) spontaneously change gender in a single sex environment. Perhaps, then, this is the way that the Smurfs reproduced: one of the males simply changed into a female in order to fill the need. And anyone who watched a single episode of Smurfs knows who the most likely candidate for Smurf gender re-assignment is; it’s obviously this motherf$#%&@ right here (AKA Vanity Smurf):

See Jimmy’s past guest blogs here and here.