As a kid I collected smurfs. In fact, I got so into collecting smurfs that my mom bought the display case from the local stationary store one Christmas. I needed it more than the store.
It started when my brother came back from Germany after a year abroad and brought me this card carrying smurf.
It was was actually packaged with playing cards that had all the various smurf characters, but I lost those long ago. Soon after he gave me that smurf they started showing up in our local stationary store, and soon enough became one of those toy phenomenons of the early 80s. Not as frenzy-inducing as the Cabbage Patch Kids, but enough to get their own Saturday Morning cartoon.
There were basically two kinds of smurfs you could buy at the store. Stock figures like the lantern bearer and the wooden mallet wielder pictured above. And if you wanted to go next level, you could get a Super Smurf, which came with various accessories. For example, the below tricycle riding, gardening, and disc throwing smurfs were all Super Smurfs.
They came in their own boxes (unlike the stock smurfs) with the various plastic pieces to be assembled.
I loved the Super Smurfs, and I had a good amount of them, but the problem was that inevitably in the 40 years of moves and relocations (I’ve always kept my smurf collection close) these pieces would either break or get lost.
So, quite recently I got one of those Bambu A1 printers that are ridiculously priced at 369 euros, and baby have we come a long way from Makerbot’s Cupcake printer. This thing was easy to assemble and really easy to use. I’m still feeling my way around modelling and printing, so I figured trying to print small, fairly straightforward pieces for my 1970s and 80s Super Smurfs would be a fun way to cut my teeth. Boy was I right.
Image of the original, all intact Hockey Super Smurf
In honor of the Women’s and Men’s US Hockey teams that both took the gold here in Italy a couple of months ago,* I figured the Hockey Super Smurf would be a good first attempt. The image above of the intact original shows the stick as brown with a puck attached to the end of it. The goal is white and the netting quite tight. I searched the thing-a-verse because I’m not at the stage of paying for models, and found a stick, net, and puck that I could work with.
These prints used next to no material, so they were awesome to experiment with. Bambu has its own application for modifying and printing, so I started playing with that. The stick needed to be 55% scale of the original and I added .25 thickness so the stick fit cleanly in the smurf’s gloves. The net worked at 50% scale, but I needed to add a support so it printed cleanly. Finally, the puck was at 10% scale and worked a treat.
I need to fine tune the goal and add tighter netting and perhaps make it a tad taller and wider, but you get the idea. A smurf that couldn’t stand up straight for decades after losing the plastic accessories has found new life on the living room book shelf.
This provided me with a tremendous amount of joy. I’m surprised other collectors haven’t modelled these already and shared them with others, so I wonder if that might be yet another calling I have to heed 🙂
_________________________________
*Talk all the shit you want about America, those creeps can skate!
That’s pretty wild. Are the fumes on the new printers any better? I really worried about some people breathing that stuff 8 hrs a day.
I’ve got a pirate smurf somewhere.
I can barely smell it. It is down in my basement next to my desk and I have to say it seems pretty innocuous. Next step is printing buildings for the next diorama.