Shmoo
From Free net encyclopedia
- This article is about the cartoon creature. For other uses, see Shmoo (disambiguation)
A shmoo is a fictional cartoon creature, created and first drawn by the cartoonist Al Capp in his newspaper comic strip Li'l Abner. The shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs, but no arms. They reproduce asexually, and are very prolific. They require no sustenance other than air.
Shmoos are delicious, and are so eager to be eaten that if they are looked at by someone who is hungry they will die of ecstasy. If friend, they taste like chicken, If roasted, they taste like beef. They also produce eggs, milk, and butter (no churning labor needed.) Their fresh pelt is a perfect boot leather, or house timber depending on how thick it has been cut. Their eyes are ideal suspender buttons, and their whiskers are perfect toothpicks. Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining that people watching them feel no need to go to movies or turn on television to relieve their boredom.
Because of these facts, the leaders of government and big business spend great amounts of energy trying to exterminate the shmoo as a dangerous threat to civilization as we know it.
A small colony of shmoos live in the Valley of the Shmoon near Dogpatch; some occasionally escape, causing havoc.
Later uses of the character
The Shmoo gained its own animated series in the late 1970s, as part of the animated series Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo (which consisted of reruns of an earlier Flintstones series mixed with the Shmoo's own cartoons; the two pairs of characters didn't actually "meet"). The two pairs of characters did meet, however, in the early 1980s Flintstones spinoff The Flintstone Comedy Show. The Shmoo appeared in the segment Bedrock Cops as a police officer alongside part-time officers Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble; however, this Shmoo had little relationship to the L'il Abner character other than appearance.
Another Hanna-Barbera venture of the '70s included Shmoo as a title character, The New Shmoo, where he is pegged as the helpful, shape-shifting mascot of Mighty Mysteries Comics, a group of teens who solve Scooby-doo-like mysteries.
- Referenced in "Lucky Number Slevin" (2006), by the Boss played by Morgan Freeman
Other uses
- In economics a 'Shmoo' is a tangible thing/being that reproduces itself and is captured or bred as an economic activity (the original Shmoo reproduced without requiring any material sustenance), whereas the 'widget' is any unspecified good which is a tangible thing produced through labor (extracted, refined, manufactured, or assembled) from a finite material resource set.
- In biological laboratory research, "schmoo" is a term used to describe aroused yeast, which resemble the cartoon character.
- At Texas Instruments in the late 1970s, the term "schmoo plot" was used for a graph of supply voltage versus operating temperature of a batch of chips being characterized for conformance to specifications. When plotted as a continuous "blob", the area of correct operation often looked like the creature in the comics. The term is probably not standard in the semiconductor industry.