Tintin Casting Rumors Confirmed, People! Stop Worrying About It and Go Back to Work!

My ten year old self and my thirty-seven year old self are high fiving each other right now.

According to the really, really reliable Ain't It Cool News (really!), Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have been cast as the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson in the upcoming Tintin film.  With Steven Spielberg as the director, Peter Jackson producing, and Steven Moffat (Coupling, Jekyll, Doctor Who) writing the script, this looks to be a Tintin that even the staunch anti-Tintin League can get behind.

I know, right? You've been waiting for Tintin news too, haven't you? Haven't you? Hello?

I grew up in a village on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, well beyond the reach of cable TV and even movie theatres, so my childhood was spent with a couple of fuzzy television channels and a towering pile of books.

At some point I began to make my way through the Tintin books – graphic novels that existed long before the term 'graphic novel' appeared to dignify superhero comics.  Although not too well-known in the United States, Tintin has entertained millions of children around the world for the last eighty years (just to give you a sense of perspective, the first Tintin serial, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, appeared in 1929).  In every installment, intrepid journalist Tintin and his loyal terrier Snowy become embroiled in bizarre mysteries.  Along with characters such as the irascible Captain Haddock and the absent-minded Professor Calculus, Tintin has travelled to Latin America, to central Africa, and even as far as the moon.

The only bad news? The Tintin feature is going to be done in performance capture animation, which means that it will end up looking like the nightmare-inducing Polar Express at best, and at worst, Beowulf.  Did anyone see Beowulf? Remember that scene where a naked Ray Winstone fights Grendel in the mead hall? God that was awful.  I hope Robert Zemeckis bought something nice with my ten dollars.  Like a bunch of fresh daisies, or a pack of gourmet chewing gum, or a mallet.  Then he could smell good and enjoy fresh breath while he whacks himself repeatedly in the head.