السنافر (Original dub)

It is the classic dub of the series, produced in Lebanon by Filmali studio, in association with 'Lebanon and the Mashriq' dubbing studio. It was broadcast on various television channels throughout the Arab world in the 80s and 90s, and was shown for a long time on the Spacetoon channel, from 2000 until at least 2010. For this dub, at least 100 episodes were dubbed in 6 seasons, and therefore, more than 200 stories.

Because the distribution of the episodes was very different from their international counterparts, in addition to the fact that some chapters were omitted, and other never were dubbed in their original broadcasting, in the mid-2000s, in an undetermined year, Venus Center made dubs of some chapters that the Lebanese studios didn't dubbed originally, which were only broadcast on that channel, episodes that aired at the same time with the originally dubbed episodes in Lebanon.

This dub has continued to be broadcast even in more recent times, in parallel to the modern Cartoon Network dub, on channels such as Alsaeedah TV (Yemen), taking advantage of old copies of the episodes broadcast decades ago.

Cast

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Adaptation

 * The name with which the word 'smurf' was adapted to the Arabic language was 'sanfur' (plural: 'alsanafir'), a word that, despite not having a meaning as such, has always been used to refer to these characters, and its possible origin hasn't been clarified, but there are several theories.
 * All character names receive a literal translation, as in all languages. But one exception is the main villains: Gargamel is called 'Sharshabil', and his cat Azrael is called 'Harhour', because the cat's name is taken from the name of the angel of death of the Jewish religion, which is also present in the Muslim religion. It is possible that the reference it was censored for childrens audiences.
 * Originally, an opening theme was composed for the series, which was exclusive for its broadcast in Lebanon in the 80s and 90s, while for other countries, a version of the American intro was produced, narrated by Alvira Younis. Currently, there are no records of this intro from its original Lebanese broadcast, although it would be recovered by Spacetoon, being used by this channel for all the episodes it broadcast.
 * This is one of the few cases in which the Spacetoon channel made almost no edits to this dub in the footage, since they only limited themselves to editing their own title cards episodes, while everything else remained intact.

Cast information

 * Samir Chamas and Ismail Nanoua would return in the Cartoon Network dubbing playing the main character, and the main antagonist, respectively: Papa Smurf and Gargamel.

Availability

 * Currently, it is very difficult to find recordings of the original broadcast of the program in 1980s, on national Arab television channels. This classic dubbing has been published on pages on the Internet for a long time, with fan-made title cards and credits, mainly by the user 'Qatari', and published on the now defunct download page SharingCode.com. All of these recordings use the audio from the Spacetoon broadcast, although they replace the Lebanese intro with the syndicated version, which is better known in the Arab world.