As `sell-thru’ video takes off in South Africa, the complete Tintin series has been released on video. Charl Blignaut spent 20 hours in front of his TV
Everyone has their favourite Tintin moment. Permanently etched in my memory are those huge red and white mushrooms in The Shooting Star exploding into life on a small rocky island amid several giant spiders poised to attack just moments before the darling of all international boy scouts pulls off another death-defying air rescue …
I’m certainly not alone. Since his first adventure in 1929, Herg’s Tintin, the dashing young roving reporter with a quiff and a highly- strung poodle, has sold over 120- million books in 45 languages to avid readers in over 50 countries.
Now, in 1998, Ellipse Programmes with Nelvana Limited and Sony Music have managed to pull off Tintin’s most daring feat to date: they have translated all 21 books to video. And they have done so in a way that will almost certainly satisfy even the most demanding Tintin fan – frame-by-frame, word-by-word, scene-by-scene, the video adventures of Tintin are an exact rendering of the books. Save, perhaps, the unexpected shrillness of Snowy’s bark, I emerged from my TV set close on 20 hours later feeling like I had just re-read the entire Tintin collection in book form.
Herg would be pleased. Tintin’s emergence as a video star would almost certainly have been part of the grand scheme of this groundbreaking Belgian cartoonist. While, in recent years, much has – falsely – been made of Herg’s alleged Nazi sympathies, many have overlooked his place in the grander scheme of pop art.
Based on his own travel experiences as a boy scout, Herg developed Tintin by adding a cute hairstyle and a yapping dog to his one-off cartoon strip hero Totor, and sent him along to the Castle of Moulinsart where he was to meet the nutty Professor Calculus for the first time. Public demand and circumstance dictated the rest. Soon enough Tintin was off to the Congo, meeting a drunken sea captain called Haddock and saving him from being a prisoner on his own ship, along the way. By the time Calculus persuades our hero, his dog and the whisky- drenched Haddock to pop by the moon and back, the bumbling Thompson Twins have also entered the picture, at first deeply suspicious of Tintin, later to inspire the name of an Eighties pop group.
It was thanks to the scarcity of paper during the war that Tintin’s adventures were compressed into book form and that is how they were presented from that day forward – until the video version came along, with a series of CD-Roms to follow next year.
The upsurge of interest in Tintin saw Herg pre-empt Andy Warhol by almost three decades, opening his Herg Studios in 1950. Employing a team of 12 assistants, Herg insisted on creating each new character himself, but let his factory hands do the hard work, right up until his death in 1983.
Today Tintin is a one-man multi-media industry. The books, videos and CD-Roms aside, there is also a string of international stores, Tintin’s image stamped on everything from T-shirts and coffee mugs to beach towels and diaries. Even those Nazi rumours took a bruising when Attack International, a band of artistic British communists, released Breaking Free in 1989: the adventures of Tintin as a communist agitator.
In an era where Beavis and Butthead have trashed even Bart Simpson in the rudeness stakes, Tintin is one of the last vestiges of innocence left in toons. His bright-eyed, bushy-tailed heroism has remained intact while everything around him has changed. Hell, in 1930, Herge was instructed to give Tintin a profession – as investigative reporter – because his lack of employment was considered a negative influence on impressionable young readers. You try telling Beavis and Butthead to get a job.