When I was visiting my family in 2003 I told them how I was a big Tintin fan. And it turned out that they had three Tintin videos (cartoon). If you haven’t heard of them let me tell you about it. There was cartoon animated Tintin TV show in the 1990s. I don’t know where it was on or even in what country it was (probably more than one). I read that that TV show used to be on Canadian TV. So the videos are each one episode of the TV series, and each video is based on a Tintin book (I think when they used up all the books they started making up their own). I had known about it a long time before going to Spain because I’ve seen them for sale in English on the Internet and have always wanted to see one, but they were all too expensive to afford!
So I watched the three Tintin videos which were, The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Shooting Star, and Explorers on the Moon. Of course they were in Spanish. I know some Spanish, but not enough to understand whole videos, so it’s a good thing I already know the story very well.
I have always wanted to know how the videos were, and I wasn’t disappointed -- they were really good! It was well animated and the cartoons looked just like the ones in the Tintin books -- it was so cool because it was like watching the book come to life (in Spanish?)! (To the right are scenes from the TV show.) And the voices were good too. They chose a voice perfectly fitting Tintin (like I would imagine he sounds). The Thompson’s voices also fit them well. Captain’s voice isn’t so much how I would imagine but it works. Professor Calculus should have a different voice I think. And Snowy doesn’t speak, but he is so cute!
Another great thing is that the videos are true to the books. They barely change 
anything. The drawings look like they’re straight out of the book. I’m not sure how word-for-word it is, but from what I understand of Spanish it seems like it is. But the thing is that to make it fit into a TV show they cut some things out. The Crab with the Golden Claws, and Explorers on the Moon were around 50 minutes long, but The Shooting Star was shorter -- like 25 minutes long only. They cut many scenes out of there. They cut out a whole bunch of pages -- where they stopped to get fuel for their ship and met Captain’s friend Captain Chester. They added dramatic scenes in a dream Tintin had about the end of the world happening.
And in The Crab with the Golden Claws in the beginning the cut out where Tintin meets the Thompsons in a market and replaces it with an added scene that shows the bad guys. In Explorers on the Moon where Captain goes outside of the rocket in outer space and Tintin has to go and rescue him they make it more difficult and dramatic where Captain practically lands on the asteroid. And the cut out the part where they’re unloading stuff onto the moon and exploring the caves on the moon.
They had cut parts out but at least they didn’t change things. They completely stuck to the story and almost every detail is the same. It was so interesting watching the book come to life with sounds, movement, music, and angles. And because my uncle had bought a certain Sunday newspaper they offer the Tintin videos cheap and he bought them. Here any Tintin video or DVD is expensive! In Europe all the Tintin stuff is easier to find and sold for a reasonable price. They’re lucky, too bad it’s not like that here in the United States!
<-- That's a picture of how the Tintin TV show anounced "The Adventures of Tintin" at the begining of the video.
By the way, if you're interested Tintin.com sells Tintin DVDs. ;-)
