Smurf Week Guide to NYC Debuts

For Smurf Week in New York, the current celebration of all things blue, New York City's tourism marketing group has released a map for tourists wishing to take Belgian cartoon character themed tours.

With great map comes great marketability: To promote the new Smurfs film, attractions as diverse as Central Park and the Skyscraper Museum are running special programs for fans of the characters.

It would be easy to think of a marketing ploy pegged to the release of a movie that will inevitably make a great deal of money as necessarily cynical, but this just isn't true.

New York has embraced the newly released Smurfs movie because it paints such a gritty, true to life picture of life on the streets in the five boroughs (sample line: "He couldn't make the payment with the vig, so I has to tell him 'Grandpa, I'm going to break your smurfing legs.'")

Actually, not so much. The movie is about Doogie Howser and that adorable, doe-eyed woman from Glee learning to love tiny mushroom-dwellers.

Still, as easy as it is to make fun of the movie, or the fact that during the premiere the people in Smurf suits were literally stumbling around because it was so hot- and it is easy - a lot of the events on the city map look pretty fun.

A Smurf-themed treasure hunt in the Botanical Gardens? Sounds great.

At least Mayor Bloomberg didn't decide to literally paint the city blue. Apparently the recession was worse in Spain.