[5] The film is based on the 1958 comic book of the same name, originally a part of the Johan and Peewit series (created by Peyo in 1952), and notable as the first appearance of the smurfs in media.
The film was not produced by Hanna-Barbera, the creators of The Smurfs television series, but by Brussels' Belvision Studios and Éditions Dupuis.
[1] A presentation of independent film company Atlantic Releasing in the United States, The Smurfs and the Magic Flute grossed over US$19 million.
The king sends Peewit and the young knight Johan out to catch McCreep, who uses the flute to rob people of their money.
McCreep tells Flatbroke of his plan to go to an island to hire people for an army to raise war on the King's castle; two Smurfs had been listening to this.
With McCreep and Flatbroke being brought back to the castle and all the stolen money recovered, Peewit now has two magic flutes.
The film is based on La Flûte à six trous ("The Flute with Six Holes"),[7] which appeared in the Belgian weekly comic Spirou magazine in 1958/59.
Subsequent book publications renamed it as La Flûte à six Schtroumpfs ("The Flute of Six Smurfs"), which was also the French title of the film.
In 2008, a prequel Les Schtroumpfeurs de flûte ("The Flute Smurfers") was published, marking the 50th anniversary of the original story to introduce the Smurfs.
Peyo, the creator of the Smurfs, oversaw the production of La Flûte à six schtroumpfs at Brussels' Belvision in 1975.
[1] The film was based on Peyo's comic album of the same name, the ninth to feature his duo of characters, Johan and Peewit.
[8] The music score was written by Michel Legrand, a recent Oscar winner for Summer of '42 and the original Thomas Crown Affair.
A book adaptation of the film, by Anthea Bell, was published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton in 1979 (ISBN 0-340-24068-7).
The film was first dubbed and released in English in the United Kingdom by Target International and Roehall Pictures in 1979, but it was not until the success of Hanna-Barbera's The Smurfs cartoon that Flute began to gain widespread attention: in the early 1980s, Stuart R. Ross, head of First Performance Pictures Corporation, and also the North American rightsholder to the Smurfs characters themselves, acquired the American rights to the film for US$1,000,000.
[1] The North American release of Flute, courtesy of Ross' First Performance and Atlantic, despite not doing well critically grossed US$11 million out of a maximum 432 venues, the highest on record for a non-Disney production until The Care Bears Movie in 1985,[6][9] and was among Atlantic's all-time top five movies at the box office.
[10] Thanks to its success, Atlantic released several more animated features, many of which were distributed by their short-lived children's subsidiary, Clubhouse Pictures.
Prior to Flute, however, a black-and-white compilation feature, Les Aventures des Schtroumpfs, was released in Belgium in the mid-1960s, and had been forgotten by the time this film debuted in the UK in 1979 and the US in 1983.
Due to Arrow Films' ownership of the movie, the American dub has not been released on any platform since Televista's DVD.