Ellipse-Nelvana: Reasons for differences between the book- and screen-versions?

As a child I was a massive fan of the Ellipse-Nelvana made animated series of Tintin, and whilst these where generally faithful to the orginal books, there are a couple of changes that I have noticed when watching them again as an adult.
For example, in The Cigars of the Pharaoh (which used to really scare me!) the weird "dream sequence" in the tomb is shown as a POV from Tintin's perspective, and in The Seven Crystal Balls we actually see the "Sanders-Hardiman Expedition" enter Rascar Capac's tomb, whereas in the book it is mentioned in conversation only!

I'm not sure if this was done deliberately by Nelvana as a way of making the stories more engaging, but I've always wondered if Studios Hergé (or their successors) were ever consulted when it came to making them?

Almost certainly so - that, and simply having to make different stories of different levels of complexity run to a standard length to fill the time-slots for the show.
The series was designed to allow the stories to be shown or viewed in any order as much as possible - so there are few if any big introductions of characters, and instead Tintin encounters recurring characters as if he has always known them, and they him. This allows viewers to engage with the series, whatever story they start watching with, and TV stations could put the series on endless rotation, or show individual stories as filler material, and not have to worry about a reference to a past adventure confusing a new viewer.
This also means that if you can get a new viewer to watch one story, they might want to see more, so something like the scene in the tomb is a good way to entice those watching to see more.


I'm sure they were - they are the source of the material, after all; however it's not to say that they will necessarily have been overly controlling. For example we know that when the Young Vic theatre company mounted their stage show The Adventures of Tintin, they were given a pretty free hand to adapt the material as they saw fit, and so we got a Snowy who peed on the audience and fart jokes in the tents on the mountain, and the Studios didn't intervene.

Yes. Producer Robert Réa approached Fanny Remi directly as the rights holder. Both Benoît Peeters and Philippe Goddin read and advised on the scripts, on Fanny's request. Peeters, although initially positive about the series, was disappointed with the quality of the visual material that came back from Korea and asked for his name to be removed from the credits. Goddin remained as 'consultant'.

In Philippe Lombard's book about the screen adaptations, Tintin, Hergé et le cinéma, he notes that the first story filmed, The Crab with the Golden Claws, took more liberties than the rest of the series to keep the momentum high in the opening episode: we see Herbert Dawes being attacked, and there's a fight between Tintin and Bunji Kuraki's kidnappers. Still, there was one occasion when they went too far: the climactic speedboat chase, as originally envisaged and storyboarded, would have featured Tintin barefoot water skiing. The Fondation, feeling it rendered the character unrecognisable, refused its inclusion.