History Headscratchers / Tintin

** Parrots are pretty messy animals to have as pets, so he probably wasn't looking forward to all the poop and feathers to clean every day. They tend to bite often if they have a bad attitude. And it's been implied often that Haddock's idea of a good time is doing an overall quiet, relaxing activity (walking in the park, reading, drinking by himself, smoking). Parrots are pretty noisy, so being gifted with a 24/7 noise machine is the complete opposite of "fun" for him.

** Parrots are pretty messy animals to have as pets, so he probably wasn't looking to all the poop and feathers to clean every day. They tend to bite often if they have a bad attitude. And it's been implied often that Haddock's idea of a good time is doing an overall quiet, relaxing activity (walking in the park, reading, drinking by himself, smoking). Parrots are pretty noisy, so being gifted with a 24/7 noise machine is the complete opposite of "fun" for him.

* In the earlier albums featuring Alcazar, he is in a perpetual struggle for power with Tapioca, "both men claiming leadership of the country with comedic frequency" (from TheOtherWiki). But in ''Picaros'', it is clearly stated as a San Theodoros tradition that, upon a coup, the defeated leader be executed. How come neither of them is dead?

** What kind of name is it, you ask? Answer: A Swedish one. There are people in Sweden named Tintin, though they're not that many. (And it's not certain how many of them are named after a certain popular comics hero.)

** It doesn't happen quite that often, just three times: In "The Cigars of the Pharaoh", "The Blue Lotus" and "The Black Island". The first of those is also their first meeting with Tintin, so they've no reason to give him the benefit of a doubt. The second, they're just following Dawson's orders, and claim they don't actually believe Tintin's guilty -- but they probably assume he'll be tried fairly and acquitted anyway if he just comes quietly. The third time... well, okay, they're being really dense, but no one's ever accused the Thompsons of being smart.

* It seems like every other book Tintin is either arrested or narrowly escapes arrest by the Thompsons after being framed by the VillainOfTheWeek. It seems like even they would have noticed a pattern by now, yet they blithely follow their orders every time with only the odd comment about "such a shame". Even Tintin never points it out. Why?

!!Books

!!2011 movie

* From the film -- so, in the scene where the Milanese Nightingale sings and breaks every glass in the building, why doesn't Sakharine's glasses break as well?
** Possibly his glasses were clear plastic or some other non-glass material, or somehow altered to survive shockwaves. He did have the opportunity to prepare for it.
** Yes, Sakharine's glasses were not actual glass (darker and irregularly shaped compared to all the other glass in the scene), which is what tipped Tin Tin off to Sakharine's plan.
* From that same scene in the film -- Is it even possible for Castafiore's singing to break the bullet proof glass that was protecting the model?
** Yes. it is, it was shown by ''Series/{{Mythbusters}}'' that this is possible, but only if, and I mean (IF) the singer [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10lWpHyN0Ok can sing that high.]]
** Not exactly. Mythbuster's results were the results of testing with your basic run-of-the-mill wine glass, which is built in one piece and is thus [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17tqXgvCN0E easy to deform]], versus bulletproof glass, which is built in a webbed structure and thus would be much stronger. So it's possible in theory, but the film over-simplifies it.
** There's also a point in one of the comics (Ottokar's Sceptre?) where Castafiore sings in a car and Tintin remarks something along the lines of "good job it's safety glass", If her voice can't break ''that'' how can it break the bullet proof glass?
* Also from the film: In the comic, Tintin and Haddock discover Rackham's treasure in the basement of Marlinspike hall after Haddock and Calculus have bought the place. But in the film, they ''haven't'' bought it, and Haddock even tells Nestor he can't afford it. So doesn't the treasure legally belong to Sakharine, then?
** Sakharine may have been stripped of the right to own it due to his criminal activities - who knows, after his arrest they may have discovered that he acquired the mansion, or the money to buy it, by illegal means. And the small treasure found by Tintin and Haddock in the basement may be enough to buy the mansion back (and considering its state of disrepair, it may be relatively cheap).
** Sakharine had been arrested, and due to several counts of attempted murder and kidnapping will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison and be stripped of his estates. The butler mentions how nice it would be to have a Haddock in charge of the place again.
** Even if the treasure does legally belong to Sakharine, they found a map which leads to more treasure in international waters, with which they could just buy the house. So either way, it works out.
* From the movie, Haddock figures out that Sakarine is really [[spoiler:a Rackham]] because he "remembers" that [[spoiler:Red Rackham]] looked exactly like him. Problem: how can he remember something like that when it was his ancestor, not him, that actually met [[spoiler:the original Rackham]]?
** Francis might have shown Haddock some sort of documentation of Rackham's appearance while he was alive, like an illustrated [[WantedPoster "wanted" poster]] or something. Alternatively, Francis is just ''really'' good at giving descriptions.
** The possibility of reincarnation was mentioned briefly by Haddock. Maybe he inherited Sir Francis' memories, too. That's why he's the only Haddock that survived- because he IS Sir Francis.
* As soon as the singer breaks the glass Sakharine immediately yells for everyone to grab Tintin since he's "obviously" trying to steal the boat. So in the whole flurry of the crowd to stop Tintin from taking it, nobody thinks of running to protect the boat itself? (where a single glance would tell them: "Hey, some hawk is trying to take the boat as well!")
** Sakharine is basically an esteemed person at the event whom everyone seems to respect. Considering they're all mostly hoity-toity types and servants, would you immediately go against him?
** Yeah, but that's not the problem. The problem is that everyone knew that someone was trying to steal the boat, but nobody tried to run to protect the boat itself, or even looked it.
*** Three words: BavarianFireDrill.
*** The way you're phrasing it is like "someone is trying to steal the boat! It could be anyone!" But that's ''not'' the impression everyone has - they have no worries about the boat until Sakharine calls out Tintin as a thief. They're not going to suddenly go on full alert like "oh no, thieves all around" just because of one troublemaker. Most of the people there probably don't even know the boat is special, since it's been in the guy's collection for some time now.
* The reason why Tintin would not sell the Unicorn model he bought to those desperate bidders in the book, ''The Secret of the Unicorn'' is because he got for Capt. Haddock as a gift and is too loyal to suddenly sell it for a quick buck. However, in the film, this happens before Tintin meets Capt. Haddock at all, so there is no real explanation in the film of why Tintin is so adamant to keeping the model when he could turn a quick profit.
** The film's version of Tintin is apparently very interested in ships, if his detailed knowledge and awed tone of voice when describing the Unicorn are anything to go by.
** The fact that Barnaby and Sakharine are so eager to get their hands on the model tips Tintin off that there's more to the ship than it seems.
** {{Word Of God}} says that Tintin is also naturally interested in interesting antiques. Anybody who's watched {{Antiques Roadshow}} knows that many old items and knick-knacks have good stories behind them, and Tintin, being a journalist, is always on the lookout for a good story as part of his natural drive.
* Why does the beat-up old freighter ''Karaboudjan'' have a catapult-launched seaplane? If the villain installed it, how is it part of his plan?
** So he can be CrazyPrepared. It served some use in hunting down stowaways.
** I'd hazard a guess that the future films are going to feature the plot (or part of the plot) of ''The Shooting Star'' which featured the research ship ''Aurora'', complete with seaplane, but they also plan for Haddock to get the ''Karaboudjan'' back.
* Captain Haddock is from a long line of English sea-dogs. So why does he have a broad Scots accent?
** I kind of tend to assume the accent is really just TranslationConvention and that he's really speaking French in-universe. In the comic, at least, we're explicitly told that Sir Francis served in the navy under King Louis XIV.
** Hergé based Tintin's hometown on Brussels. Marlinspike is about half of a château in France, but set in the environs of Brussels. However, in the English translation it all was transferred to England. The world of Tintin is thus a mix of Belgium, with bits of France and England.
* Let me get this straight: Haddock is sailing with a load of treasure, but pirates attack. Eventually he blows up his own ship, grabs a bit of the gold for himself, and somehow gets to shore (picked up by another ship? I don't know). He fathers 3 sons (or had fathered them already.) Then he creates 3 replicas of his ship, writes 3 cryptic scrolls, hides the scrolls in the ships and sets it up so that the three scrolls held together will reveal the coordinates of...his house. And in the basement of the house, he has hidden the treasure. He tells his 3 sons cryptic things about this treasure, so their descendents can eventually recover it. Um....''why did Haddock bother with all this?''. Why even hide the treasure at all? He already had it, why not just spend it? And if he didn't want to spend it, why did he need all the creepy clues? Why didn't he just ''tell'' his sons "Hey, there's some treasure in the basement"? It seems like he invented the most roundabout way possible of doing things, just so Tintin could have an adventure.
** Maybe it was to protect the treasure from Red Rackam's descendants.
** I don't think it is said, but the insinuation is, I think, that the three sons had a horrible falling-out, so they were each given a clue that would not work without the other two. They would have to work together to get their inheritance. Unfortunately, none of them ever figured out the clues, so the final wish of Haddock was never fulfilled.
** It was also a SecretTestOfCharacter; merely finding the basement wouldn't really help. The ''real'' test was being enough of a sea dog to spot what was wrong with the globe. Which is why he needed to over-complicate it somewhat; if he had simply said "there's something secret about that globe in the basement", then it'd only be a matter of time before someone simply cracked it open. His sons would need to work together to find the right spot, but only a ''true'' Haddock (an experienced sailor), could find the treasure.
* Along with the small fortune in gold, Haddock leaves a note which provides a clue as to the coordinates of the ship when it sank. Um...why would he do that? The ship is at the bottom of the ocean. There's no way to recover the gold unless you have a submarine, and I ''seriously'' doubt that a 17th-century sea captain anticipated the eventual development of submarines. (Also see the previous bit asking why Haddock had to keep this information secret from his own sons).
** Tintin says that Haddock did that because "he couldn't let it lie". Presumably Haddock left the clues so that one day, one of his descendants would be able to recover it somehow.
* Modern!Haddock's grandfather walled off part of the basement before he died. Why? Was it to protect the treasure? But if he knew that the treasure was there, why wouldn't he just take it and use it?
** Probably because he couldn't figure out how to access the treasure; if Sir Francis Haddock considered only a true Haddock to be worthy of having the treasure, not being able to figure out where it is means he wasn't worthy of having it. Therefore, before losing the estate, he walls off part of the cellar so that hopefully another Haddock will be able to figure it out, which winds up being his grandson.
* Remember that one guy who was shot on Tintin's doorstep? Thompson and Thompson say he was working for Interpol, but they don't know what he was working on. How is that possible? Didn't the guy fill out some paperwork or something before he began the case?
** It was obviously classified information. Interpol ''did'', in fact know what Dawes was working on, they just felt like keeping it a secret from local police, most likely because it involved sensitive information or something.
** If people getting shot on his apartment's doorstep is a common occurrence, why doesn't Tintin move?
*** It's not so much the apartment itself that's the problem. Tintin's own AmateurSleuth and GentlemanAdventurer tendancies mean that a lot of people would end up shot on his doorstep no matter where he lived.
* That one guy uses the newspaper to spell out "Karaboudjan". (Quite convenient that there was a newspaper nearby and that it had all the letters in the proper order). Tintin remarks "Karaboudjan, that's an American word!". In what way is that word even ''vaguely'' American?
** He said ''Armenian''.
* So Barnaby Dawes marked out the letters to the ''Karaboudjan'' in blood. How did Tintin know what order to put the letters in?
** Presumably Barnaby had the good sense to mark the letters in the correct order. Otherwise, it'd be a pretty useless clue.
* Isn't the captain supposed to go down with the ship?
** Not if you're Francesco Schettino.
** I think the idea is that the captain should be the last person onboard, because he's responsible for everyone else on the ship, so he should make sure everyone else gets out of the sinking ship safely before he leaves it. But Hadoque's entire crew had already been slaughtered, and obviously he felt no such obligations to the pirates who killed them.
* Isn't it somewhat out of character for Tintin (who, at least in later albums, seemed to be something of a TechnicalPacifist) to own a handgun? Yes, he does use guns in the comics, but only occassionally and usually he either has a good reason to be carrying them (such as in Prisoners of the Sun, where he's making his way through jungle/mountain terrain populated by dangerous animals) or he takes them off of people who are trying to kill him in the first place. Him actually owning a gun seems incongruious with his goody-good image, even if it does indicate him to be somewhat GenreSavvy. Admittedly, Movie-Tintin just might be more pragmatic than Comic-Tintin and even when he does use guns in the movie, he never actually shoots any living people with them, but still.
** It may just be the animated adaptation, but the line "it's him or us" while Tintin is wielding a machine gun and being attacked by a plane shows that he is willing to kill if it's the only option left. And considering how often Tintin gets shot in the animation, carrying a gun himself just makes sense.
** Tintin seems to just use it for intimidation most of the time. He never shoots to kill and always uses a melee fist-fight approach when it would be much easier to use the gun. Even when he does fire whilst escaping the Karaboudjan, it's again only for intimidation rather than actually for killing his opponents, or for saving time doing something (moving the lever on the spotlight or cutting the lifeboat ropes). The possession of the pistol early in the film is likely to be for intimidation purposes so that the other person feels that he means business (as shown in the seaplane scene where Tintin threatens the pilots with a gun that's out of ammo).

* Why does Haddock seem to hate parrots? Yes, the one that Bianca gave him in "The Castafiore Emerald" was an annoying and agressive bird but he doesn´t seem terribly happy about receiving a parrot as a pet.It could be that he simply doesn´t enjoy receiving pets out of the blue but in other stories he doesn´t seem very fond of the birds.

** Yes. it is, it was shown by ''{{Mythbusters}}'' that this is possible, but only if, and I mean (IF) the singer [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10lWpHyN0Ok can sing that high.]]

*** Truth in Televison – my partially-deaf father does this all the time.

** Tintin, after the first few albums anyway, doesn't take place in any specific country. Hergé based Tintins hometown on Brussell, but added a major habour, according to some based on a photo he saw of the Copenhagen habour. Marlinspike is about half of a château in France. The world of Tintin is like a thirties fairytale-version of western and northern europe. Well, except germany. Mainly Belgium, with bits of France, England and Scandinavia.

* Along with the small fortune in gold, Haddock leaves a note which provides a clue as to the coordinates of the ship when it sank. Um...why would he do that? The ship is at the bottom of the ocean. There's no way to recover the gold unless you have a submarine, and I ''seriously'' doubt that a 17th-century sea captain anticipated the eventual development of submarines. (Also see the previous bit asking why Haddock had to keep this information secret from his own sons)

** Tintin seems to just use it for intimidation most of the time. He never shoots to kill and always uses a melee fist-fight approach when it would be much easier to use the gun. Even when he does fire whilst escaping the Karboujhan, it's again only for intimidation rather than actually for killing his opponents, or for saving time doing something (moving the lever on the spotlight or cutting the lifeboat ropes). The possession of the pistol early in the film is likely to be for intimidation purposes so that the other person feels that he means business (as shown in the seaplane scene where Tintin threatens the pilots with a gun that's out of ammo).

** It was also a SecretTestOfCharacter; merely finding the basement wouldn't really help. The ''real'' test was being enough of a sea dog to spot what was wrong with the globe. Which is why he needed to over-complicate it somewhat; if he had simple said "there's something secret about that globe in the basement", then it'd only be a matter of time before someone simply cracked it open. His sons would need to work together to find the right spot, but only a ''true'' Haddock (an experienced sailor), could find the treasure.