How I wish they would do this here…France is releasing a magnificent model Unicorn ship that looks EXACTLY like the one from the album! Check it out!

The downside is that this won’t all be released at once…it’s to be released every couple of pieces by every couple of pieces each week for months in the kiosks. So if you are fortunate enough to live by one of these kiosks, you’ll get a steal on the first piece and a little figurine, but after a couple weeks every group of pieces will cost about 11 to 15 euros. And hopefully you have enough skill building model ships to paint the thing just exactly right when you’re done buying them all. But it sure would be awesome to collect…

While it’ll cost you your left arm to buy all the parts, you could paint it and then turn around and sell it for hundreds. I remember when they used to sell Tintin’s cars at the kiosk. I only got the first 2 (the least expensive). The blue jeep from ”Destination Moon” only cost 5 euros. I’ll never part with it, but I wish I had bought more to sell, because I just saw the same car on ebay for 50 euros. It’s a dangerous time to be making investments with the economy the way it is, but Tintin never seems to go out of style or lose it’s value. A really cool, custom made, unofficial model is being sold here for 469.99 euros. If you have the money to buy Moulinsart’s model, I recommend you do so.

Those of you who frequently read this site will know that I tend to bring out the positive things in life and especially about anything related to Tintin as much as possible…life is tough enough as it is to focus on the cloud instead of the silver lining. That being said, I must admit that there are times when the cloud is pretty big, and as much focus as you put on the lining, no honest review would be complete without mentioning the cloud. These plush toys have just been spotted on an hispanic forum. We’re not sure whether the product is official or not, but after seeing the end result, I don’t think I want it either way…

I’ve had no luck finding out anything about who’s making this, but they look pretty official. They also look pretty bad. Anybody want to complain that Tintin looks fetal and half way between a human and a cartoon? I would totally disagree with you there, because I think Weta did an excellent job and found the perfect hybrid between people and cartoons to represent Hergé’s work. However, if you were to argue that this Tintin looked fetal and half way between a Tintin and a baby doll, I would have to agree. Snowy looks the best of the 3. He’s adorable! But…he looks like a puppy. Granted, the makers were probably going for a childish look, but you just can’t make some of these characters look babyish without looking ridiculous. Haddock is in my opinion the worst of the three. The terrible nose and the whole blank expression on his face wouldn’t make me want to play with him…I see a bunch of these lying around for years at the back of a ”Toys R Us” somewhere…

I’ll try to end this on a positive note…the next merchandise I’ll post about will definitely be more exciting than this. At least the makers of these plush toys tried, and I’m sure there are a good many toddlers that won’t really care that these dolls look as weird as I think they do. They may have more play value than collector’s value. It’s very difficult to make a plush toy off of any human character look right, and I’ve never really been impressed with any toys like these I’ve seen based off of movie characters. Unfortunately, these are no exception.

Thanks for finding these, guys! Here are two beautiful shots from the film. They pretty much speak for themselves, but I guess I’ll say a few things about them too…

Here’s at least part of the ”evidence” the Thom(p)sons are to take charge of in the that part of the trailer. Be sure to notice the blood stains on the newspaper that I think Barnaby left after he was shot. As always, the Thom(p)sons look fabulous…and I really like that angle of Tintin’s hair. I think one of my favorite things about this shot is the detailed map of Europe from back in the 50′s…Weta spared no effort in designing Tintin’s flat!

Here’s a great shot of Haddock. Fans will recognise the setting from our first look at Captain Haddock…we’re on the Karaboudjan, not long after we will fist see Haddock on the big screen. How he gets his head in a bird cage we don’t know, but while it’s not in the albums it certainly wouldn’t have been beyond Captain Haddock’s bad luck…One thing that clearly IS a tribute to the albums is the advertisement for ”Loch Lomond” hanging on the wall…once again Weta has paid attention to the little details of what’s just hanging in the background. Haddock used to love that brand…Underneath it appears to say ”Freedom and whisky gand thegither’ ”…Some of the pictures we’ve seen of Haddock make him long almost older than the Haddock from the albums, but this scene looks like it brings out the younger Haddock.

Source: http://alexmedela.com/2011/08/nuevas-fotos-de-las-aventuras-de-tin-tin/

Sharp-eyed regular readers will noticed that the web site has undergone a bit of revamp. The improved layout will give Stephen’s excellent blog posts the stylish setting they deserve.

Inevitably with these things there will be some rough corners that need sorting out. If you spot anything that looks wrong or simply broken, please comment below. When you do, please include information on which web browser you are using (including version number) and the URL where the problem can be found. The more detail you give the easier it will be to fix the problem.

I shall now hand back blogging duties to the ever-dedicated Stephen.

- Chris

Months ago we briefly mentioned that Gamelof was creating a separate game from Ubisoft’s videogames based on ”The Adventures Of Tintin”, this time for the iPhone and iPad (I assume it’ll run on other smart phones too…). Here’s our first look at the game:

In my opinion, this is the best looking shot of the three we’ve seen. Keeping in mind that this is for Smart Phones, this looks pretty good!  Stormy weather, sand blowing off the dunes, parts of the seaplane all over the place…seems pretty accurate. While this may be a minor detail, I’m not sure what to make of the characters sizes…even with the space between them, Tintin looks a little bit too tall…but in the end, even I don’t honestly care about that…

This is a kind of funny angle…but at least it looks good. Whoever designed the kitchen clearly put some effort into it, and Snowy doesn’t look half bad either.

It looks like the game will also be a platform, quickly ready to ”point out” where you need to go in case you’re not sure.  This must be somewhere deep in the Karaboudjan…but to me it kind of looks like the droid factory from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones…

Jokes aside, a few lucky guys recently got to try this game and gave it a positive review, saying it’s easily one of the better games coming out for iPads and iPhones. The game is primarily a stealth game, so Tintin and Snowy will use their wits to sneak around and go unnoticed rather than clobber everybody they see. I have no idea how much this’ll cost, but it will probably be fairly cheap compared to the Ubisoft games. I’ll definitely have fun trying it out and writing up a personal review for you all. Best thing about it for me is that since I’m in the US, this may be the only game I’ll be able to play while the movie comes out in Europe, since most everything won’t come out until December here. Unless of course they won’t let the US download or something, but hopefully they’ll be nice and won’t do that.

Thanks to Britto we have some more pictures to add to our last few from yesterday. There was a day that Tintin movie fans would practically live off of a handful of stills to not explode (and we all remember the years of not seeing anything at all…). Now we’re looking at bread bags, videogames and sticker books. We knew these were coming a long time ago, but here are the real covers.

Ok, did I sound like I was tired of movie art? No way…”Full-color movie art inside” still excites me…

There’s a shot of Thomson’s face looking right at us. He seems much happier than most of the other times we’ve seen him (I think it’s the eyes that completes the look by the way…). But that makes total sense to those of us who know what’s pictured here…way to put spoilers on the cover of the book!…

”In a BOAT?”…Aaaah…classic scene…

Here’s a different cover for the book we saw yesterday. I’ll admit, I only noticed the bald guy in the back with the letters out of the way…

I used to love these books! If ever there was a place for fans to collect images from the movie…each one of those pages is probably entirely covered by an image of one of the beautiful locations in the film, and there are pictures of over 100 characters/whatever they may be.

Last but not least, a novel based on the film. If ever there were a place to get spoilers, that’s it. I’m perfectly comfortable just waiting until the movie comes out and not knowing the story in THAT much detail, thank you…but maybe your kid would like it. And if you collect Tintin books, I think this is only the second Tintin novel ever to be sold.

We’ve already covered some German ”learn to read” books that we found on Amazon, but their covers so far only had the shots from Empire. Some similar English books will also be available, with brand new images. Lets check them out:

Here’s another look at the Tintin we saw in our last post, and another shot of the Karaboudjan’s interior.

These images are brand new. I wonder what Tintin is reading? Brussels looks cool in the background…in fact it really looks like that part is a photo.

Wow, that’s kind of a funny face for Snowy…meanwhile Haddock is doing his best at looking dramatic…Tintin is again very focused.

I really don’t know anything about how good the actual books are, but I support anything that teaches kids to read, and if it has Tintin in it, even better. Tintin could suddenly become the hero of millions of little kids, and it’d be nice if some kids who would otherwise be bored by some of the new ”learn to read” books coming out these days would get an interest in reading because of it.

Wow, there have been lots of screenshots this week! But these are the only ones so far to have two screens…introducing our first look at the 3DS version of ”The Adventures Of Tintin”.

My first impression: the top screen looks just about as good as the rest of the videos we’ve seen. The bottom screen does not…It looks like Captain Haddock just met Microsoft Paint…I’m personally not a big fan of movie games that take the incredible looking characters from an animated movie and change it to kind of cheap looking cartoonish concept art a step under what we see on Cartoon Network. But this doesn’t look like the whole game will be that way…just the bottom screen. It reminds you of your objective and shows you stats, data, etc. Looks a bit too infantile for my taste.

According to the site these are from, this is set in a small island around the British Isles. Could there be a bit of the Black Island in this movie too? It wouldn’t be the first time Weta created apes, THAT’s for sure…

Waaaaaht in the world? Who’s in the scuba suit? Haddock? It looks just like the one in Red Rackhams treasure…By the way, Allan’s looking kind of weird in that photo…

Yep…the Bird brothers somehow make it in the game…I have to admit I’m not impressed with how this looks. I’ve seen lots of other games with a system just like this, reading slides forever. I guess I shouldn’t expect too much from a 3DS game…

Anyway, what we’ve seen so far doesn’t really tell us much about how the game will look like in 3D. Maybe we’ll see more in the future.

source: www.tintimprtintim.com

I at least had never heard of Pitch, but apparently it’s a company that sells packaged breads and pastries in France. And they’ve partnered up with Tintin. The publicity for Tintin in France seems to be going well. Check out their themed site here.

Here are some screenshots:

There it is: the image of Tintin that was blurred on the Meccano sets. Here we have a dynamic, very, very focused Tintin…

Here we have Captain Haddock in EXACTLY the same pose in the WETA figurine, because WETA used this digital character’s pose as their mold. If you are in France, you can win a grand vacation to…Belgium, the land of comics. It truly is the home of Tintin, I recommend you go.

There’s Tintin on a motorcycle, the same one you will be able to buy a figure of him on. Again, Tintin is very focused…I’m not quite sure what to make of his face here…

In every bag you can get one of these stickers. Look at the egyptian theme…so far everything we have seen of the dessert has only looked like Morocco, not Egypt…but there are hyroglyphics on the wheel at the bottom and on the page in the back. Could a little bit of ”The Cigars of the Pharaoh” be in the film?

As always, the Thom(p)sons look AMAZING…it even looks like Thompson is half way through saying ”to be precise…” Here we can find some great new wallpaper sized images of Tintin for your computer! The most interesting is a real fun one of Tintin screaming.

I love his face! And I love how Snowy can’t watch…I seriously can’t wait to watch this whole scene…

Not much new to see here, but I like what I see.

The old Empire shot touched up. I’m curious as to how Tintin will get rid of his blue sweater. It makes sense that he’d take it off due to the heat, but it’s such a classic look…I wonder if he’ll wear it again after this scene.

Aaah…the beautiful old Tintin poster converted into a wallpaper. What a great idea!

I love screenshots. And posts on screenshots. So I was quite pleased when I found these.  Let’s check them out!

Like most of what these characters do in the game, it appears Tintin will only be able to do this in the game. Who cares HOW it works, Tintin being able to fly will be fun.

There’s a small chance that this COULD be Castafiore’s parrot…who knows? Please no long write ups on that idea though…

I love Marlinspike! Even after having been to the palace Marlinspike Hall was modeled off of, I still am looking forward to actually ”walking around in Marlinspike”. If you read my write up on the second trailer, I am now sure that what looked like the back of the mansion to me before is actually the front of it.

It seems whether you are in Marlinspik, Morocco or on the Karaboudjan, Tintin will always have a super tall ventilation shaft to slide down and pounce on somebody from. I can just see myself hanging there, waiting for the bad guy to be just within my reach…

You could debate about how some of the other shots were taken, but this one is clearly straight from gameplay. It´ll be cool if they use the platform style game to let Tintin shoot bullets in certain spots at just the right angle that then have to deflect off of something, destroy a pipe,etc. I for one will have lots of fun with that option.

One of the men working on the game recently told us we wouldn’t be killing people in this game, only knocking them out. So far that seems about right, at least for the most part. While many cartoons have little stars over their heads when a character is hurt, Hergé certainly used that idea and it´s great to see them in the game.

I love the graphics on the rocks and pillars. Sure, we cna admit they aren´t the graphics of Assassins Creed revelations or anything like that, but they still look great and will make for something fun to look at while we have fun playing the game.

The dust around Tintin´s feet is handled nicely as well. Will this be a clip, or one of those levels like the motorcycle level where we just keep moving forward?

It seems Tintin is about to become a bit of a MacGyver: anything around him can be used to knock someone out or get him out of danger, from bananas to bottles. On the other hand, the awesome level design looks like it will also have conveniently placed targets and things like that on the wall for Tintin to hit with whatever he finds…

The page says these pictures do not apply to the wii version of the game. Most of the time Wii games get a different treatment, but I haven’t heard anything about that and don’t know how much good it’d do on a platform game anyway.

Source: http://www.gamershell.com/all/the_adventures_of_tintin_the_game/