Smurfs Up, Down and All Around in Iowa City Collector’s Home

IOWA CITY - While many women her age are giving up collections, Erda Jo Thomas, 78, continues to see blue, as in Smurf blue. For, in about 20 years, she's amassed a collection of more than 2,000 figures and items of the worldwide popular cartoon figures. And Erda Jo's not quitting now.

"The brand new ones are on order. Every year they make eight new figures as a set."

A bedroom in her Iowa City home is the land of the Smurfs, with 2-inch figures lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in glass-enclosed bookcases surrounded by stuffed dolls, 1970s toys in boxes and a smattering of mushroom-shaped Smurf homes.

"I'm not a druggie," Erda Jo jokes. "This is my drug of choice."

She's definitely a Smurf fanatic, belonging to both the United States and European collector clubs. She has given local talks about the small blue characters created by Belgian artist Peyo in 1958 and first produced a year later in French and Dutch speaking countries.

The mischievous beings who love having fun and speak a weird language, first appeared in short films in 1965 in Europe. A decade later Belgian TV produced a full-length feature based on "The Magic Flute." And in 1981, Hanna-Barbera produced a Smurfs cartoon show for NBC that would grew to 256 episodes still seen on TV around the world.

Erda Jo, born Erma Joan Thomas in Iowa City where she graduated from City High in 1952, became a nurse at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics for 32 years. Before she retired, she collected Tarzan stuff, from books and movies to dolls. After she sold most of that collection for $1,000, she collected Disney items for a while.

"One day I discovered Smurfs in a consignment store here," she says. "I could get ten for a dollar."

Now they're worth $15, $40, even $65 each.

By 1998 she had so many Smurfs all around her home that Jan Lindenberger of Colorado called to feature her collection in the book, "More Smurf Collectibles."

Jan spent two days taking pictures. Erda Jo received six copies of the book and a connection to Smurfs collectors around the country.

Ask how many different Smurfs there are and she laughs. "Who knows."

You've got Smurf and Smurfette. Papa Smurf, Mama Smurf, Baby Smurf. They ride scooters, eat ice cream, deliver pizza, race boats, play volleyball, wear Indian headdresses, jump rope ...

They appear on drinking glasses, backpacks, T-shirts, underwear ...

They seem to be everywhere. Last year's "The Smurfs" movie was so popular another comes out in 2013. They front theme parks. Typing "Smurfs" on e-bay gets you more than 6,000 hits. They've become such big business, fakes (unauthorized versions) are made around the world that even a trained eye has trouble distinguishing from licensed ones.

"I've got fakes up the ying yang," Erda Jo says, explaining that some of them are so good they can still be worth the same as a genuine one.

Joking that she has entered her second childhood (Erda Jo has never been married), she feels a special kinship to other collectors including a good friend whom she's visited a half-dozen times in Ripon, Wisc.

"I have nothing compared to her," Erda Jo says. "I told her when I die to come and get my collection."