Shmoo - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Frank Sinatra, who was frequently spoofed by Al Capp in Li'l Abner, has a line in the MGM musical On the Town (1949) about cops "multiplyin' like shmoos!" In the 1990 movie Book of Love, the character Crutch wins a stuffed shmoo at a carnival. In the M*A*S*H TV episode "Who Knew?," Colonel Potter (played by Harry Morgan) displays an inflatable shmoo toy in his office that he purchased for his grandson.

• The Shmoo is also occasionally referenced in modern science fiction. In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, an alien species known as the Bandersnatch, also edible and intelligent, is described as being "smooth as a shmoo." In the novel The Forge of God by Greg Bear, "Shmoo" is the name humans give to the race of robots that visits Earth, due to their similar shape.

• Some overlapping similarities exist between shmoos and tribbles—the multitudinous alien creatures featured in a 1967 TV episode from the original Star Trek. Like shmoos, tribbles also reproduced at such an alarming rate, they threatened ecological disaster. However, David Gerrold—who wrote "The Trouble With Tribbles"—drew his inspiration from an actual event: Australia's environmentally destructive rabbit overpopulation. Also from 1967, the characters Gleep and Gloop—two protoplastic creatures from the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning animated cartoon series The Herculoids—were clearly inspired by (and are sometimes mistaken for) shmoos.

• French artists Etienne Chambaud and David Jourdan have written "Economie de l'abondance ou La courte vie et les jours heureux," a new adventure of Jacques le fataliste et son maître from Diderot, based on the discovery by Jacques of the Shmoo.

• In the 2006 film Lucky Number Slevin, the character known only as "The Boss" (played by Morgan Freeman) refers to the Shmoo, recounting its original features as a source of plenty (in a monologue taken from an old Li'l Abner comic).

• The Marxist political philosopher Gerald Cohen used the story of the Shmoo to illustrate his objections to capitalism in an episode of Opinions.