French cartoons in America

Why have Asterix and Obelix not found a huge audience in the United States?

Cartoon fans have asked this question for decades. How many conferences have we sat through listening to number crunchers dissect audience surveys?

How many times has it been suggested that deep down inside American kids don’t t trust French cartoons? How many mothers have worried about the exact contents of the magic potion that gives the protagonists the prodigious strength to defeat an endless array of Roman legions? Who has not wished for a little magic potion just to get through a long day? Don’t Americans want the small Gallic village to survive? Are they not impressed with Obelix’ capacity to eat? Who does not want to try the ancient French recipe for wild boar on a spit? All these questions have buzzed around campus seminars and studio lots for decades.

Now a new essay just published in the Annals of Alternative Media History by Buster Hinds, a young assistant professor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, Mendocino County, has put forward a sharply defined historical thesis: Americans have really always sided with the Romans against the hard-to-capture Gallic warriors.

In the Cold War environment that produced Asterix and Obelix, American audiences clearly preferred for the Roman legions to subdue that one last French village holding out against the Empire. Rather than identifying with the plucky Frenchmen who repeatedly foiled the Roman attempts at conquering the last independent village in what was then called Gaul, Americans could not help but side with Caesar in his unrelenting determination to mop-up France.

Who could not see the analogy between the Viet Cong and Asterix, the fiery little warrior who ran circles around the better trained and better armed Romans. Who did not detect the resemblance between Getafix, the village druid, and Ho Chi Min?

Was it not more than a coincidence that the first Asterix and Obelix film was released in 1967, just as the Vietnam offensive was building up to its greatest strength?

Was it no coincidence that the first comic book was released in 1959 the year Charles de Gaulle became President of France?

Yes, the American viewer, even those of the tenderest age, and certainly those discerning parents ever on the look-out for subversive political messages, recognized implicitly that Asterix and Obelix was more than a celebration of Gallic pride, it was a covert jab at Roman, i.e. American hegemony.