And now for something completely different: "Tintin" office pool

Orionblamblam said:
In any event, I would've lost my bet:
Domestic Total as of Jan. 2, 2012: $50,841,000

Fascinating. Inasmuch as I love Tintin and grew up with that character (like so many kids around the world) I never would have predicted such a resounding box office success in the US. I believe the name "Spielberg" attached to it must have had some power of attraction to it.
 
Michel Van said:
Hergé was good friend with Léon Degrelle Head of REX


Bullshit.
Léon Degrelle was indeed an infantile Nazi and went to fight with the Germans on the Eastern Front. Many years later this guy claimed that Hergé's Tintin-character was based on his personality
Saying Hergé was a good friend of someone dispisable like Degrelle, is like saying every European was a Nazi in the 1930s-1940s.
It is not because one's work is published in a newspaper or magazine, that one supports or a sympathises actions later commited by f.e. an editor of this newspaper or magzine.




All those who quote so eagerly Hergé's early work to portray him as a racist or even a fascist, should maybe be rememberd of the Tintin-album "The Blue Lotus" ("Le Lotus Bleu" en français), published in 1936 (!), in which Tintin becomes good friends with a young Chinese boy and in which Hergé ridicules imperialists (so quite contrary to what is claimed about the "Titin in Congo"-album) and the Japanese occupiers as well (didn't Japan have a fascist regime at the time, and weren't they allies of the Germans in a certain WW II ?).
 
Dreamfighter said:
All those who quote so eagerly Hergé's early work to portray him as a racist or even a fascist, should maybe be rememberd of the Tintin-album "The Blue Lotus" ("Le Lotus Bleu" en français), published in 1936 (!), in which Tintin becomes good friends with a young Chinese boy and in which Hergé ridicules imperialists (so quite contrary to what is claimed about the "Titin in Congo"-album) and the Japanese occupiers as well (didn't Japan have a fascist regime at the time, and weren't they allies of the Germans in a certain WW II ?).

Haven't read any of 'em, but I'll point out that the Orient has long been viewed rather differently in the West than Africa has. So it would hardly be surprising for a 1930's European to portray Asians as at least civilized and worthy of some respect, while portraying sub-Saharan Africans as savages. Look just a little further back, to Jules Verne: he liked to think of himself as some social progressive feller... but damn near all of him Heros had a subserviant lickspittle (Passepartout, Conseil, all of the nameless & faceless drones supporting Nemo, so on), and Verne seemed oblivious to the inconsistency.
 
Yes, I agree with you on that.


Like Stargazer explained, the album "Tintin in Congo" is much reflective of the general view in the West about Afrika in those days: a savage and retarded Dark Afrika.
But what Hergé does in "The Blue Lotus", is choosing the side of the Chinese (depicted as hungry, poor peasants) and ridiculising the "civilized" Japanese occupiers (and the industrials from the West looking for opportunities to exploit those Chinese).


In later albums, Tintin is more politically neutral, and if not, he takes on the battle against dictatorships. Like f.e. in the album "The Calculus Affair" ("L'Affaire Tournesol), in which the regime and leaders of the fictional state Borduria are depicted as fascistic and bad.
(Some claim the Bordurian regime in the book is inspired on the Soviet Union, though I and many others are convinced it is based on Nazi-Germany)
 
Dreamfighter said:
But what Hergé does in "The Blue Lotus", is choosing the side of the Chinese (depicted as hungry, poor peasants) and ridiculising the "civilized" Japanese occupiers (and the industrials from the West looking for opportunities to exploit those Chinese).

Well, that's an easy one too. Who was colonizing Africa in the 1930's? Europeans, including French and Belgians. For a European of the time, this may have seemed entirely proper. But the *Japanese* colonizing someone? That may have been seen as improper, since the Japanese were "lesser" people (or a "lesser" culture). Thus the Japanese doing *exactly* the same thing as the Belgians might have been seen entirely differently based on built in biases. Thus an "anti-fascist" message against Japanese imperialism might not have been truly "anti-fascist" so much as "anti-someone-other-than-us."

(Some claim the Bordurian regime in the book is inspired on the Soviet Union, though I and many others are convinced it is based on Nazi-Germany)

Not like there was any really important difference. Apart from swapping some names around, and a *slight* increase in racism on the part of the Nazis, there wasn't really a whole lot of difference between fascism and communism, or between the murderous genocidal Hitler and the genocidal murderous Stalin.
 
Orionblamblam said:
Dreamfighter said:
But what Hergé does in "The Blue Lotus", is choosing the side of the Chinese (depicted as hungry, poor peasants) and ridiculising the "civilized" Japanese occupiers (and the industrials from the West looking for opportunities to exploit those Chinese).

Well, that's an easy one too. Who was colonizing Africa in the 1930's? Europeans, including French and Belgians. For a European of the time, this may have seemed entirely proper. But the *Japanese* colonizing someone? That may have been seen as improper, since the Japanese were "lesser" people (or a "lesser" culture). Thus the Japanese doing *exactly* the same thing as the Belgians might have been seen entirely differently based on built in biases. Thus an "anti-fascist" message against Japanese imperialism might not have been truly "anti-fascist" so much as "anti-someone-other-than-us."


Belgians and French indeed colonized Africa, starting in the 19th century. In the 1930's, this was indeed still regarded as "normal" by Europeans, as I and also Stargazer tried to point out in our replies.
But to average Europeans there wasn't much difference in their knowledge about Japan and China, or these countries' cultures. Hergé's criticism on the Japanese occupation of (a part) of China did not originate from an "anti-someone-other-than-us"-idea, but was one of the first signs of Hergé's change of mindset about political and social matters. Why did he chose side of the underdevelopped, starving and occupied Chinese? No, not because he regarded the Japanese as an inferior race. In fact, it were the Japanese who considered Westerners as inferior and did not allow foreigners into their country, unless they could use them.
One should know that the young Chinese guy, who Tintin meets in the album "The blue Lotus", is a real person: Zhang Chongren (sometimes written Chang Chong-Chen). Back in the 1930's, Zhang was studying for a while in Belgium, and Hergé got to meet him. Zhang provided Hergé (the pseudonym "Hergé" comes from his real name; Remi Georges) with a lot of background information about China and contributed a lot to Hergé's changing view on society and polictics. Though Zhang returned to China even before the release of the book, he and Hergé remained friends for life. Hergé honours in the 1950s this friendship with another album in which Zhang plays an important part; "Tintin in Tibet".
Their short reunion in reallife in Brussels in 1981, 2 years before Hergé's death, made worldwide news (though this might have gotten less attention in the US ? )



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOWiSSG8xGk





Orionblamblam said:
(Some claim the Bordurian regime in the book is inspired on the Soviet Union, though I and many others are convinced it is based on Nazi-Germany)

Not like there was any really important difference. Apart from swapping some names around, and a *slight* increase in racism on the part of the Nazis, there wasn't really a whole lot of difference between fascism and communism, or between the murderous genocidal Hitler and the genocidal murderous Stalin.


It may seem so today, or to non-Europeans, but here it does matter. It mostly matters to Belgians themselves, as more then a few were persuaded in the 1940's to go fight with Nazi-Germany's Wehrmacht & Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front, against the Soviet-Union. And in more then a few cases, they were persuaded to do this by Catholic clergy: "to stop the rise of evil communism".
So, whether the fictional Bordurian regime in Hergé's work is based on Nazi-Germany or rather on the Soviet-Union & communism, is not unimportant here.
 
Btw, I haven't yet seen the movie myself, but I suppose the ones who did and/or have read "The Secret of the Unicorn" will recognize this fellow ;)
 

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Dreamfighter, you have brilliantly, yet impartially exposed the facts and for this I thank you. If you like Tintin as I'm sure you do, please do yourself a favor and go watch the movie. Don't wait for the DVD, you need to be immersed in this one, and nothing does it like a big wide movie screen. Also it was one of those times when I thought 3D really worked in an efficient yet unobtrusive way. It enhances the action but there is never any showing off such as stuff coming out of the screen and the likes.
 
Thx for deep inside look of the matter, Dreamfighter

do you know the book "Tintin Mon Copain" Tin tin my friend, by Léon Degrelle ?
a very annoying in the extreme lecture
It show early work and early version of Tin tin, but there some dispute this are the real Hergé drawings
or the work of Paul Jamin alias Jam, who copycat Hergé drawings style already in 1930s

Hergé declare in a interview for newspaper "La Libre Belqique" on 30 Dencember 1975
I have to confess, that I discover Comic strips thank to ... Léon Degrelle!
he was as Journalist in coverage to Mexico, and send the report to "Vingtième Siècle"*
Next to this personnel chronicle coverage, it contain also local newspaper
in them were americans Comic strips, so i discover my first comics

* a Belgian newspaper that was published from 1895 and 1940. were Hergé publish his frist Tin Tin
 
That Hergé did publish his first works in ultra-conservative Catholic magazines is a fact.
That he may have adhered to all or part of their views at the time is possible.
That he stuck to them in the future is simply not coherent with the rest of his work.

Tintin spent some of his career fighting dictators, to the point of actually supporting the guerilleros of General Alcazar in their struggle against Colonel Tapioca's militarized and corrupt regime. Tintin defends a camp of gypsies against public resent (and Haddock even hosts them in Marlinspike's garden, if I'm not mistaken). Tintin fights against prejudice and always takes the side of the weakest. Tintin befriends Americans, Chinese, Scots, Arabs, Slavs, Amazone Indians...

Some have argued that later in his life, Hergé may have made a political turn to the left. Perhaps not. He retained a strong moral standard in his own life and his work (his psychologist once urged him to "kill the demon of perfection in him"). But at least he distanciated himself for the Catholic right very early. He hated having to redraw some panels at the editors' request, and begged Catholic publishers to stop asking him for religious pictures. Also, his street ragamuffins Quick & Flupke all love to play practical jokes on the authority; the dog Snowy shows an irrepressible attraction to alcohol... Not exactly political correctness...
 
Thanks, Stargazer, I hope it still playes in theaters here, I have to check.
I didn't have the opportunity yet to go see it and I would be dissapointed to miss out on seeing the movie. I've heard both positive and negative comments about it, so I'm quite curious to find out for myself.

Also thanks for pointing out additional info & facts about Hergé & Tintin.
In the last completed Titin-album, "Tintin and the Picaros" (1976), Hergé indeed brings to the attention of his readers certain Southern Amercian regimes of the era.
In this album, the South American dictator "general Tapioca" and his army are advised by the former-Bordurian "colonel Sponsz", most probably, a wink from Hergé to the fact that former Nazis had found refuge in South America after WW II.
And like you say, Tintin gets involved with the guerilleros to overtrow the regime, though I think Tintin & Haddock are rather sucked into the conflict by accidence, because of Tintin having met with "general Alcazar" in previous adventures.
When Tintin first meets General Alcazar in the (early) album "The Broken Ear", General Alcazar is not a guerillero but the head of state.
By introducing Tintin into the fight against Tapioca by accidence, Hergé tries to hold a more neutral standpoint imo. Also, at the end of the album, I think he points out that the regime-changes in South America didn't allways bring the changes hoped for and/or that history repeats itself, by depicting General Alcazar's patrolling soldiers against a "Favella"-like background on the album's last page, just like General Tapioca's soldiers earlier in the book.





Michel Van said:
Thx for deep inside look of the matter, Dreamfighter

do you know the book "Tintin Mon Copain" Tin tin my friend, by Léon Degrelle ?
a very annoying in the extreme lecture
It show early work and early version of Tin tin, but there some dispute this are the real Hergé drawings
or the work of Paul Jamin alias Jam, who copycat Hergé drawings style already in 1930s


Yes, I know the book by Léon Degrelle, but I haven't read it through, too an ennoying lecture indeed. I've read some topics about Degrelle's book, and I followed up work by the famous belgian journalist Maurice De Wilde on the person of Degrelle.
Imo, Léon Degrelle was an idiotic megalomanian fascist. Degrelle claiming that Tintin's character is acutally based on his personality is the greatest nonsense. Perhaps Hergé got some inspiration for some of Tintin's early adventures from reading travel-reports sent to the newspaper by Degrelle when Degrelle was still a journalist, that's all.



Michel Van said:
Hergé declare in a interview for newspaper "La Libre Belqique" on 30 Dencember 1975
I have to confess, that I discover Comic strips thank to ... Léon Degrelle!
he was as Journalist in coverage to Mexico, and send the report to "Vingtième Siècle"*
Next to this personnel chronicle coverage, it contain also local newspaper
in them were americans Comic strips, so i discover my first comics

* a Belgian newspaper that was published from 1895 and 1940. were Hergé publish his frist Tin Tin



Yes, but that says it all:
Before WW II, Degrelle was working as a journalist for this particular newspaper, as was Hergé working for it as an illustrator. And Hergé got in contact with cartoons & comics for the first time - which were still unknown in the 1920s in Europe - by Degrelle sending travel-articles plus newspaper-extracts containing comics back home to Belgium.
So, without Degrelle, Hergé would probably have not known that soon what comics exactly were about. And it is possible that Hergé got some inspiration for creating the travelling reporter Tintin from travel-reports by Degrelle, when he was still abroad as a journalist.
Conclusion can be that Degrelle also did - without intent - at least something not evil during his lifetime.
 
I don't even think Degrelle was that much influential in inspiring Tintin at all.

Researchers have dug out an 1897-1898 set of two albums titled "Tintin-Lutin" about the misadventures of a very unruly little boy who plays a lot of practical jokes on people (much like the later Abdallah in Tintin but makes amends and promises to always be nice in the end). Surprise surprise... he's got the same puff and a dog... It is very likely that these albums were read by Hergé as a kid, and that consciously or unconsciously, they inspired the name of the character. (see attachment 1)

Also, in his La vie exemplaire de Jijé (a comic book about the life of another leading comic artist of the 1950s), the late Yves Chaland told the story of how Hergé once was shocked to discover Jijé's Jojo character, on the grounds that it was to him no more than a copy of Tintin. After sending Jijé a letter of protest, the latter responded with only three doodles: on the left, the famous Bécassine, a heroine of the 1900s, in the middle the same without her hat, and on the right, the same again with a puff instead, resulting in no other than Tintin himself. The story goes that the matter was never mentioned again... (see attachment 2)
 

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Thanks for posting those pics! I haven't seen those before and I'm not sure whether or not I ever heard of the 1898-Tintin/Lutin...
You seem to have some great stuff about Tintin, like some of those aircraft-cards you showed. ;)


I too am pretty sure Degrelle had no influence at all on the creation of Tintin, I just don't want to totally exclude the possibility that Tintin's profession as a travelling reporter and his early adventures (certainly not his looks) might have found some slight inspiration in Degrelle's travel-reports as a journalist in the pre-WW II era. But then every other journalist from Le Vingtième Siècle could have claimed as well he/she was a source of inspiration ::)



And now for something rather silly, which I made quite recently ;D :
 

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Well, there is more: Tintin was also the name of a interplanetary adventurer (young boy's adventures) authored by Marcel Priollet (under the pseudonym of R.M. Nizerolles). Excentric adventures with unusual color covers. "Tintin, the Young Parisien". No less than 108 weekly stories were issued. This collectible serials was very well known at the time. Tintin, travelled to the stratosphere, the moon and the planets...
 

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For modellers ...
smiley.gif
 

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For modellers ...
 

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For modellers ... :)
 

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Great, Justo! I must say I'm quite puzzled over aircraft #005 in the last set... What on earth is this??
 
It's a Percival Prentice, but there's no side view...


cheers,
Robin.
 
:)
 

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:) :) :) Moon!
 

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Nice Artwork, Justo !

also big THX to Stargazer2006 for new info about Tin Tin Origin
 
For everyone's enjoyment, here's the whole 15 British aircraft illustrations taken from the 60-picture set on World War Two aircraft.
 

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My enjoyment, anyway. Very nice.
 
@justo: I overlooked this one. Is it some development of the Avia B.135? What's the engine?
index.php
 
It is a semi-fictional subject based on the Syldavian night fighters of "Destination Moon" p 17, drawing 2.
Together with the Cessna Spymaster, illustrated on same page, they are part of a study on the airplanes drawn by Hergé, that do not exactly correspond with real models.
The attached French text is intended to connect both worlds, with reasonable and realistic explanations, respecting Moulinsart publishers rules on fictional works, related to the Tintin universe.
 

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Nice what-if, then. Keep up the good work.
 
For what it's worth, seven years later the box office boils down to:
Domestic: $77,591,831 20.7%
+ Foreign: $296,402,120 79.3%
= Worldwide: $373,993,951

The question always was "how well does this big budget Hollywood movie do in the US," because the studio gets a higher percentage of the take from US box office than from elsewhere... IIRC, the studio gets half of the US, a quarter of the foreign. So the studio would have gotten about $38.8M + $74.1M = $112.9 M. The budget was a whopping $135 million, and in general movies are assumed to spend as much on marketing as on production, so the movie probably cost the studio something like $270M. So by standard Hollywood accounting, it lost something like $157M. Of course, Hollywood accounting is more akin to black magic and outright lies, so who can say. And of course DVD and BluRay sales can make a bomb into a success later.

But *now* the question is becoming less "how well does it do in the US" and more "how well does it do in China." So if there's a sequel, expect it to be tweaked accordingly, either with overall plot changes (like with Transformers: Extinction), or with major portions that can swap in and out for the different markets (like one of the later Iron Man movies that had scenes shot specifically for the Chinese release). Somehow I suspect any plot elements that have Japan colonizing China will be juuuuuuuuuust a little different...
 
congratulation, Justo Miranda
this is excellent work and very hilarious

on Orionblamblam remark

Seems $373,993,951 is not enough to get a Sequel, seven years past and nothing happen
YUPPIE !
Because i still hate that movie, i try several time to watch but i change channel or watch Netflix instead...
 
Michel Van said:
Seems $373,993,951 is not enough to get a Sequel,

$374 million is a lot of money, but not much of a return on a $135M investment... especially with the skewed national results.

I'm still waiting for that sequel to "John Carter." I think I'll be waiting for a while.
 

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