boosterjones:
Spielberg, I'm told was quite a fan of Tintin as a kid when a number of the books came out in the US.
Yes, but
who told you? What makes
them more credible than the man
himself? What evidence do they have?
There really isn't any reason to put the pronouncement of an unknown third party over the word of the man himself, who, after all, was there, and has nothing to gain from lying about it.
If he'd read them as a child, it would surely have made it easier, not harder, to get a
Tintin film made, as he'd have been wanting to do it all along.
Also, look at the dates - he was born in 1946, and doesn't speak French. He'd have had to wait for English-language books to be available, so post-1958 at the very earliest, and even then, you'd still have to show that he ever saw one of the
Golden Press books - which sold badly - in the short space of time they were available.
boosterjones:
Indy's movies are by far the biggest hommage/rip-off of The Advenutres of Tintin ever!
Here you are working from the position that the Indy films are Mr. Spielberg's work entirely, when - as has been reported
here and elsewhere - they are
George Lucas's creations, not his; Spielberg didn't invent the character, write the story or script, and (although he obviously grew to have a lot of influence on the series) he still doesn't fulfill any of those rôles.
boosterjones:
Added to that I'm quite sure that the abanded 1970's/1980's Tintin film project (I'm not quite sure when this happened) would have had something to do with the movies
No, the Tintin movie plans all post-date
Raiders of the Lost Ark. I don't have a date to hand for when Hergé said that he felt Spielberg was the only director who could do
Tintin justice, but Spielberg's response that he didn't know the books, to the person who said that
Raiders had the spirit of Tintin about it, which lead to Spielberg getting the books, which then prompted talks with Hergé, all fall into the period after
Raiders came out.
Likewise the first meeting between Mr. Spielberg and Hergé was scheduled to occur just when Hergé's health took a turn for the worse and he died, and that was later still.
Had Spielberg wanted to do the movie earlier, he'd have surely contacted Hergé earlier, and a meeting would have taken place before
Raiders came out, or before it was even made.
So the weight of evidence as we have it is that no, Spielberg was not channeling pent-up desires to make a
Tintin film any time before
Raiders, otherwise he'd surely have at least asked to do so...
boosterjones:
Lucas did already come up with the idea beforehand when he was under the impression that the first Star Wars movie was going to be a flop.
Again, no: Lucas wanted to do a modern day version of a pulp serial, and used blow-ups of old adventure serial lobby-cards to decorate Lucasfilm's offices when he first set them up, including one of a horse rider jumping from the saddle onto a lorry, which later served as reference for
Raiders, so it was an idea bubbling around even before making
Star Wars.
In the same way, he'd wanted to do a
Flash Gordon-style space adventure - actually he
did want to make
Flash Gordon, and
had asked to do so, but he discovered that Dino de Laurentis already had the option on that property, hence Lucas penning his own space story...
I'm not convinced that Lucas thought that
Star Wars would flop, so much as he'd become convinced by his experience on it that directing was, for him, a chore: thus he sought to devolve that area of the work to someone else (in this case Steven Spielberg), and to concentrate on the writing/ creation of characters side of things (which is where any appropriation of
Tintin material - had it actually happened - would have occurred).
boosterjones:
lets see what I can spot that Steve has nicked from Hergé this time!
Setting aside the fact that the stories and scenarios aren't Steven Spielberg's to begin with, I think you are missing out on the fact that both series,
Tintin and
Indy, are drawing on a common history of action/ adventure fiction.
Hergé wan't shy of appropriating themes from adventure stories. Look at the parallels between
The Black Island and Hitchcock's
The 39 Steps (a fugitive on the run across Britain, wanted for a crime he didn't commit), which was of course itself drawn from an adventure novel, John Buchan's
The Thirty Nine Steps, or stunts like Tintin scaling the front of the skyscraper in
Tintin in America, and the films of Harold Lloyd.
Indeed, Martin Lodewijk, the author of
Agent 327 and
Storm, has gone as far as to say that
"What Hergé did, was steal." I personally don't believe this of Hergé any more than I think it of George Lucas or Steven Spielberg.