Those Saturday morning staples, ‘The Smurfs”, have finally made their DVD debut. Season One, Vol. 1 has the first nine episodes featuring 19 stories of the original blue man group, remastered and in their unedited versions, with the original open (not the lame one used in syndication all these years).

Upon further review, the show holds up well 26 years later. However, beneath the cheerful ‘La-La-lalalala’ surface, I’ve discovered a number of disturbing themes. This was truly a mushroom village in crisis.

Read more and watch a Smurf-a-rific clip after the jump.

First there was the rampant xenophobia.

It’s a good thing the Smurfs’ village was hidden from sight, because it hid the real ugly truth about the little blue guys. Tolerance was a huge problem.

If you stood out in the crowd in the slightest bit, you were shunned. Just ask Clumsy, Baker, Lazy, Grouchy, Painter and especially poor Vanity Smurf. It happened to each of them during the first season alone.

Vanity was practically chased out of the mushroom village in one early episode by the more ‘straightforward’ Smurfs for being ‘different.’

“All in the Family” may get all the press for having TV’s first gay character, but “The Smurfs” depict one of the first examples of teen homophobia in television history and no one noticed! (OK, the young Smurfs were about 100 years old, but that’s like being a teenager in their village).

Many say The Smurfs, with their sense of community, getting by with the basics of life, one ruler (‘Are we there yet, Papa Smurf?’), are a metaphor for communism. I say they’re more symbolic of a cult than an ideology.

Think about it. They were isolated from the outside world, to the point they harvested their own food (smurfberries!), they distrusted anyone who wasn’t blue and 3-apples high (‘You’re behaving just like humans!’) and individual identity was suppressed to the point of invisibility. C’mon. The village may as well have been in Idaho.

The cultish behavior became obvious to me while watching one particularly unsettling episode, “King Smurf.” Brainy Smurf incites civil war in the village when he declares himself King Smurf while Papa Smurf’s away. Soon, it’s a 3-apples-high version of ‘Lord of the Flies’ …Smurf vs. Smurf, to the death!

Good grief. How did my parents let me watch this without adult supervision??

It’s not until Papa Smurf steps in do things improve. But Papa Smurf is actually to blame for most of the village’s problems because he leaves his young Smurfs to fend for themselves, while he spends most of his day in the lab mixing frog’s hair with glowberries.

Looking at the series today, from a wiser, more adult perspective, it’s obvious the Smurfs were typical latchkey kids, and Papa Smurf was the classic absentee, inattentive parent.

At the end of practically every episode, the suck-up Brainy says something annoying and gets tossed out of the village.

But it should have been Papa Smurf who should have been bounced on his white-haired head. Dude, what in your 542-year-old life led you to believe these Smurfs could get by without adult supervision??

Then there’s the episode that marked the beginning of the end of The Smurfs – Episode #2, The Smurfette. As Donnie Darko explained to his ignorant friend, Smurfette was originally a Gargamel creation meant to betray the Smurfs. I hadn’t seen this episode since I was 10 years old, and only remembered her being relentlessly happy and always needy, in a quaint, old-fashioned way, even for 1981.

I, like many unsuspecting youngsters (and all those poor love-crazed Smurfs) was blinded by her newly-created blonde hair, her squeaky ‘who me?’ voice and charming mannerisms. But again, time has opened my eyes to her devious ways.

It’s clear now that it was all an act. Smurfette was a sleeper agent all along! She never stopped working Gargamel’s agenda. Her true mission wasn’t to lead him and Azrael to the village, it was to corrupt the village from within. By ultimately playing with the emotions (and libidos) of the female companionship-deprived Smurfs and pitting them against each other in a contest to see who could win her hand, she would chip away little by little at the ‘All for Smurf, and Smurf for all’ creed of the village. That’s how the evil wizard would get his revenge. All it would take is a little time.

Don’t believe me? Watch the DVDs and see for yourself, that things weren’t as Smurfy as they appeared in those Saturday mornings of yesteryear.