Trivia / Empath: The Luckiest Smurf

• Creator Backlash: Author Vic George does regret writing "The Innocence Of A Smurf" because it made Empath (and the Smurfs in general) look like a killer.
• Follow the Leader: It inspired the creation of Hero: The Guardian Smurf, which is this series with Goku from Dragon Ball Z as a Smurf.
• Missing Episode: The original 2000 version of the Empath novel was never preserved. Averted with the revised version (including Tapper and Duncan), as it is the only available copy of the novel online.
• Throw It In!: Originally, Duncan and Tapper weren't in the novel. But following the 2011 Smurfs movie, the author added them in to expand the story.
• What Could Have Been: When work began on the novel, it was originally intended to be in comic book format in 1986. It was changed to become a novel in 1993 (which the author felt the work of a comic book would be more time-consuming than words), which was later completed in 2000. Several years later, an Empath story, "Smurfed Behind: The Departure", was entirely done in the style of an online comic book.