Tintin Forums

Has anybody seen this kids show, Lunar Jim?

The title character bares a striking resemblance to a certain blond tuffy hair one. His robotic companion looks a little familiar too. Robo Snowy anyone?

It looks like Explorers on the Moon clearly inspired the writers of this show. As for the title song, somebody please shoot me!

Ugh, I smell plagiarism, ppl...

http://www.lunarjim.com/

I checked out your link and yes, Lunar Jim does look a bit like a fatter-featured, more cartoony version of Tintin, with a more extreme version of the tufted haircut. It looks like Lunar Jim's creator, like many cartoonists and animators, may be something of a Tintin fan. But I think plagiarism is putting it a bit strong.

If we're talking about influence verging on plagiarism, it's been well recorded that Hergé based many aspects of the Tintin Moon books on an earlier French film about a fictional Moon mission, borrowing many of the film's plot lines, incidents and design elements.

I forget the film's name, but I think you'll find stills from the film shown next to frames from the book in books such as Michael Farr's Complete Tintin Companion. The similarities are much stronger than the similarities between Lunar Jim and the Tintin Moon books.

And if you're concerned that the character Lunar Jim looks too much like Tintin, I'm sure I remember reading something a while back about a Belgium picture book story dating from Hergé's childhood (which he could have read) that featured a tufty-haired or quiffed boy who looks a lot like Tintin and even had a similar name. (Maybe someone else on the forum can remember more of the details of this.)

I don't think Hergé ever disguised the fact that he was strongly influenced by external fictional sources for his Tintin books, so I'm not acusing him of anything he didn't freely admit to. And clearly, Hergé reshaped his influences and source material into something very original. But, given how much Hergé drew on earlier influences himself, I'm not sure it's fair to regard modern works that in turn have been influenced by Hergé's work as plagiarism.

That's not to say that there haven't been real cases of artists plagiarising Tintin.
I had a Biggles comic book as a child (not one of the excellent current Biggles comic books by Frances Bergesse) in which many characters appeared to have been virtually traced (badly) from Tintin books. But personally, I don't think Lunar Jim falls into this plagiarism category, irritating though his theme tune (and voice) may be.

That's my opinion, anyway. No disrespect to yours! I guess the line between influence and plagiarism is often a question of subjective opinion.