Do today’s children even know who The Smurfs are?  Created by Belgian comic strip illustrator Peyo in 1958, the tiny blue skinned creatures with white hats live in mushroom shaped houses in an invisible village in a hidden valley surrounded by mountains and forests. Predominantly male (though in the film version there’s only one female, Smurfette), their elderly white-whiskered leader is red-hatted Papa Smurf, they all have names that reflect either their personality or their trade, only eat smurfberries and use the word ‘smurf’ to mean practically anything.

Big in Belgium, they inexplicably became hugely popular in America and the UK in the late 70s and early 80s with the arrival of the animated TV series. So big that, in 1978 Father Abraham & The Smurfs were at #2 in the British charts for what felt like forever with The Smurf Song.

Mercifully, the phenomenon proved fairly short-lived, the TV series being cancelled in 1989. However, Smurf video games remained popular up to 2002, there were two more Top 10 UK singles in 1996 and, to date, Smurf figurines have sold around 300 million, with new ones added to the collection every year.

The arrival of two new Smurf video games last year,should have sounded the warning bells of a revival, and now here comes the first Smurfs movie to combine animation and live action. Basically it’s Alvin and the Chipmunks, but blue.

Happily preparing to celebrate the Blue Moon Festival, Smurf life is thrown into disarray when Clumsy (voiced by Anton Yelchin) accidentally leads incompetent wicked wizard Gargamel (Hank Azaria) and his cat Azrael to the village. Gargamel hates Smurfs and wants to extract their essence to make himself all-powerful.

Fleeing as the village is destroyed, Clumsy takes the wrong path and, along with Papa Smurf (Jonathan Winters, the voice of Granpa Smurf in the TV series), Grouchy, Brainy, Gutsy and Smurfette (pop star Katy Perry making her film debut), finds himself trapped on a cliff. To escape Gargamel, they allow themselves to be sucked into the vortex created by the blue moon, and wind up in New York City.

Further mishaps lead to them winding up living in the apartment of Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris), a nice guy advertising executive facing a looming marketing campaign deadline for his diva cosmetics company boss, Odile, and his pregnant wife, Grace (Jayma Mays from Glee), while Papa Smurf tries to find a way to reopen the vortex that will take them home.

Unfortunately, Gargamel and Azrael have followed them to New York, determined to capture them and distil their ‘smurfness’.

Naturally, much comic chaos follows, including an obligatory musical number and the inevitable sequence in a department store where the Smurfs are mistaken for new toys, before the final magic showdown to rescue Papa Smurf who’s being held prisoner.

Pitched at 9 year olds and under who’ll be enjoying the silly slapstick and lines like ‘OK, who Smurfed!  too much to even notice the message about friendship, family and fatherhood, this is wildly undemanding and uninspired fodder  packed with parent pestering product placement.

There’s some in jokes for the grown ups, but while Azaria is a treat as the scene-stealing cackling panto style villain (with the cat a close runner-up), the reaction of anyone of an age that runs into double figures may well turn the air blue too. Bad news then that it’s apparently the first of a planned trilogy.  Still, it could be worse. At least there’s not a Mr Blobby movie!

Released on Sony Home Entertainment as a double play edition with both Blu-ray  and DVD, the former features several extras, the phrase ‘extended scenes’ particularly forbidding.