Vic George
Smurf
Member # 37
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posted 01-15-2004 12:14 AM
One of my favorite childhood books which still resonates in my imagination to this day is "Oliver Twist", which although written in the early 1800s based around the England of that time, I felt like I could relate to its main character in the sense of being in a residential school for 5 years having no sense whatsoever of when I was ever going to get out of that place, and also because Oliver gets picked on by some jerk of an older kid and retaliates against him, which in turn draws the adults to punish Oliver even as his tormentor twists the story to where Oliver attacks him for no good reason. I felt like I wanted to run away from the residential school just as Oliver eventually did from the workhouse he was imprisoned in, although I can't imagine wanting to be with a group of oddly-dressed youthful pickpocketers with a nefarious father figure-type mastermind like what Oliver found himself to be with in the streets of London.
The strangest thing about this story as I kept reading through it was that, because Star Wars was fresh in my mind, I was reinterpreting the goings-on in this story as a space opera of sorts, with Mr. Bumble as being part of the evil "parochial empire" and Fagin and company were a band of space pirates and Mr. Brownlow as some sort of rich settler on a planet vaguely resembling the English countryside of the 1800s and, of course, Oliver being a young Luke Skywalker of sorts being thrown from one situation to another, travelling from spaceship to planet to spaceship, trying to find a family that would love him. To say nothing about Monks having a hideout on a planet that makes me think of Dagobah.
As far as how this relates to the topic of Smurfs, the episode that first introduced us to Clockwork Smurf and King Gerard had a character who was named "Mrs. Sowerberry" or something similar who was talking to Gerard's evil aunt Imperia about how sick Gerard was becoming. The Mrs. Sowerberry of Oliver Twist was the undertaker's wife, who was far from the benevolent soul that her near-namesake in the Smurf cartoon episode exhibited. When I first heard this episode playing on my TV-radio when I was young, I thought it was a very strange jump from a Smurf adventure to what sounded like a variation of Oliver Twist, with then Prince Gerard substituted for the London-era orphan.
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-- VIC GEORGE, Westfield, MA, USA
Posts: 222 | From: Westfield, MA, USA | Registered: Jul 1999
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