Six Adventures of Tintin : Volume I

Rating:
Summary: Six Adventures of Tin Tin
Review: Stories include: Black Island, Secret of Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure, Destination Moon, Explorers on Moon, Tintin in Tibet. The BBC has pulled out all the stops to provide top actors having fun with the Tintin stories, plus great sound effects and appropriately exciting or scary background music. The voices are quite different from the video taped stories, and so offer a completely new interpretation. And whereas the video tapes focus on visual presentation and pretty much treat the audio as a given (fair enough), these audio tapes fully exploit the possibilities of sound. Tintin is played absolutely straight, but the other characters are somewhat camped up, to provide entertaining parodies of themselves (for instance, the East European baddies have accents worthy of a Bond movie). Be aware that the accents are all very British or are British versions of foreign accents; but very clear recordings would make them easy to follow for most non-British English speaking listeners, I'd say. The stories follow the books more or less; the title 'unabridged' may mislead, as to compress the stories to a half hour each, much has been chopped out - consequently the stories rattle along at a fast clip. What have been added are touches of humour absent from the originals, such as an evil doctor describing Tintin as having signs of mental disorder which include 'infantilism, delusions of grandeur, a dog lover, and plus fours'. I bought these tapes for my 6 year old daughter, but we both enjoy them equally though in different ways: she for the plot and the escapism of the stories, me for the subtleties of the interpretation and the humour. These tapes are a steal at this price. Next stop: volume 2 for me.

Rating:
Summary: BBC Recordings Add New Dimension To Tintin
Review: Stories include: Black Island, Secret of Unicorn, Red Rackham's Treasure, Destination Moon, Explorers on Moon, Tintin in Tibet. The BBC has pulled out all the stops to provide top actors having fun with the Tintin stories, plus great sound effects and appropriately exciting or scary background music. The voices are quite different from the video taped stories, and so offer a completely new interpretation. And whereas the video tapes focus on visual presentation and pretty much treat the audio as a given (fair enough), these audio tapes fully exploit the possibilities of sound. Tintin is played absolutely straight, but the other characters are somewhat camped up, to provide entertaining parodies of themselves (for instance, the East European baddies have accents worthy of a Bond movie). Be aware that the accents are all very British or are British versions of foreign accents; but very clear recordings would make them easy to follow for most non-British English speaking listeners, I'd say. The stories follow the books more or less; the title 'unabridged' may mislead, as to compress the stories to a half hour each, much has been chopped out - consequently the stories rattle along at a fast clip. What have been added are touches of humour absent from the originals, such as an evil doctor describing Tintin as having signs of mental disorder which include 'infantilism, delusions of grandeur, a dog lover, and plus fours'. I bought these tapes for my 6 year old daughter, but we both enjoy them equally though in different ways: she for the plot and the escapism of the stories, me for the subtleties of the interpretation and the humour. These tapes are a steal at this price. Next stop: volume 2 for me.

Rating:
Summary: Six Adventures of Tin Tin
Review: These audio cassettes are wonderful. The actors do a terrific job bringing Tin Tin to life. My eight-year-old son loves listening to them while he plays or cleans his room or is in the car. It's like old-fashioned radio and far better than watching the TV.