The Adventures of Tintin adapts one of the world's best-loved characters into a extremely faithful and entertaining animated television series. A Canadian production, the series vividly captures the intrepid reporter and his colorful friends (including his dog, Snowy, the blustery Captain Haddock, the brilliant but absent-minded Professor Calculus, and the detective twins Thompson and Thomson) as they travel the world on adventures that mix action, mystery, and humour.
The 10 discs feature two stories each:
01 -Tintin In America & In Cigars of the Pharoah, where Tintin goes to Egypt, though curiously he's old friends with Thompson and Thomson rather than meeting them for the first time.
02 - The Broken Ear & The Blue Lotus
03 - the Scotland-based mystery The Black Island and the political intrigue of King Ottokar's Sceptre
04 - The Shooting Star & The Crab with the Golden Claws, which introduces Captain Haddock and his rival, Allan. Yet another "quest" adventure but one with deep emotional impact.
05 - The Secret of the Unicorn was Herge's personal favorite, combining a puzzling mystery with a ripping pirate yarn about Haddock's seafaring ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock, and his fateful encounter with the fearsome pirate Red Rackham. Red Rackham's Treasure continues the Unicorn adventure with a modern-day treasure hunt and introduces Professor Calculus.
06 - the eerie two-parter Prisoners of the Sun, in which an ancient curse leads to a trip to Peru and The Seven Crystal Balls
07 - two of the later adventures, Land of Black Gold and The Calculus Affair, often considered Herge's crown jewel for its intricate plotting and characterization in a story that returns to Syldavia and its conflicts with its rival Borduria.
08 - the two-part space-travel epic, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon
09 - The Red Sea Sharks, another seafaring adventure & Tintin in Tibet follows Tintin into the Himalayas in search of his old friend Chang. Chang had been introduced in the early story The Blue Lotus. Herge's first masterpiece, it finds Tintin in China during wartime.
10 - The Castafiore Emerald keeps Tintin at home, but in the company of the irrepressible Bianca Castafiore and a fun locked-room mystery. Flight 714 is a far-out adventure that features many old friends and enemies in a kidnapping plot. Tintin and the Picaros is the final complete Tintin adventure, one that takes him back to San Theodoros and General Alcazar.
The animated series perfectly captures the look of the books (although The Broken Ear, the book of which had the roughest art, has been smoothed out to look like the rest of the series), and each 42-minute episode has enough time to re-create the books' character and wit, if not the exact layout and pacing.
Tintin fans will love reliving these adventures, and newcomers have a wonderful discovery awaiting them.
