Jonathan Winters

As the folks at Moviefone.com point out, blue is the hot color for movies these days, especially if your name is James Cameron. Well, it's not going to be a sequel to 'Avatar' or another Cameron pic or even an updating of 'The Blue Lagoon,' but Neil Patrick Harris has agreed to be in 'Smurfs: The Movie.' (Not to be confused with 'Smurfs: The Opera.')

Actually, Neil will be all voice for the role. Sony's concept for the big screen version of 'Smurfs,' the popular '80s Saturday morning cartoon series, is live action mixed with animation, under the direction of 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua' auteur Raja Gosnell.

Exactly which of the smurfs Neil will play remains shrouded in mystery. I suspect he's getting his pick, as long as it's not Papa Smurf. That role's already been claimed by Jonathan Winters.

Sometimes cartoons that are better suited to an older audience find themselves lost in the oblivion of Saturday morning children's fare. The most recent example of this I can think of is Freakazoid! which packed far too many pop cultural references into a single episode for any young person to really comprehend it. Before that, however, there was The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley, based on the spastic, stiff-haired character created by Martin Short.

 

If I may be so bold, the cartoon was in some ways better than the live-action version of Short's character. The surreal world Short created around Grimley was given a more vibrant life when animated, and other touches such as a singing pet mouse gave the show an oddball quality that would portend the absurd humor of Adult Swim and other recent animated fare.

The show featured Short as the voice of Ed, as well as many of his friends from SCTV such as Joe Flaherty (who played children's show host Count Floyd in a live-action segment) and Catherine O'Hara. Jonathan Winters and Andrea Martin also worked on the show. The series began in 1988 and was off the air in 1989. The combination of being shown on Saturday mornings, and an attempt at humor that wouldn't gain wide acceptance until a few years later pretty much spelled doom for the series from the very beginning. Those of us who were lucky enough to catch it, however, got to at least spend a few moments with one of the strangest, most inexplicable animated shows of the late 1980s.