A shmoo is a cartoon creature, created and first drawn by the cartoonist Al Capp in his newspaper comic strip Li'l Abner. The shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs, but no arms.

Shmoos are delicious, and are so eager to be eaten that if they are looked at by someone who is hungry they will gladly jump into a frying pan, after which it tastes like chicken, or into a roasting pan, after which it tastes like beef.

Shmoos feed on air and breed very rapidly.

The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining that people watching them feel no need to go to movies or turn on television to relieve their boredom.

Because of these facts, the leaders of government and big business spend great amounts of energy trying to exterminate the shmoo as a dangerous threat to civilization as we know it.

A small colony of shmoos live in the Valley of the Shmoon near Dogpatch; some occasionally escape, causing havoc.

Later uses of the character

The Shmoo gained its own animated series in the late 1970s, as part of the animated series Fred and Barney Meet the Shmoo (which consisted of reruns of an earlier Flintstones series mixed with the Shmoo's own cartoons; the two characters didn't actually "meet").

The two sets of characters did meet, however, in the early 1980s Flintstones spinoff The Flintstone Comedy Show . The Shmoo appeared in the segment Bedrock Cops as a police officer alongside part-time officers Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble; however, this Shmoo had little relationship to the L'il Abner character other than appearance.

Other uses of the name "Shmoo"

• In the semiconductor memory-testing field, a shmoo plot is a graphical display of the response of a memory to varying voltages and refresh rates. The shapes of some responses can be irregular enough to resemble Al Capp's shmoo.

• Shmoos are also projections from yeast in response to mating pheromones.

• A Shmoo is a member of the security practitioners' group the Shmoo Group.

External links

• Shmoos at Lil-Abner.com