The Adventures of Tintin: Season One

Coinciding with the arrival of Steven Spielberg's motion-capture Hollywood feature film The Adventures of Tintin, this release of the first season of the same-titled early '90s animated series is based on Belgian author Hergé's beloved graphic novels about the globetrotting adventures of a boy journalist and his faithful dog, Snowy. A co-production of French and Canadian studios, broadcast in the U.S. on HBO, this series represents the most faithful screen version of the sprawling epics (which were much longer and more novelistic than traditional comic books), right down to reproducing some of the original panels. Despite lackluster performances by the English-language voice actors (including Colin O'Meara as Tintin and David Fox as Capt. Haddock) and the obvious limitations of the era's TV animation, the show's first year offers good adaptations of seven original stories—“The Crab with the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn,” “Red Rackham's Treasure,” “Cigars of the Pharaoh,” “The Blue Lotus,” “The Black Island,” and “The Calculus Affair”—most of which are presented in double half-hour episodes. Compiling all 13 segments of the 1991 debut season, this is recommended. (S. Axmaker)