Man, I remember watching this show a lot during high school. Thankfully, none of my friends and I ever quite ended up in Chris Peterson’s shoes, but there’s something sureally idyllic about being a thirty-year-old paper boy; kind of like a broken, demented version of Peter Pan, minus the lost boys and the pirates.

I completely forgot that Chris Elliott‘s real dad played his TV dad on the show. Then I found out his daughter Abby‘s on Saturday Night Live these days. That makes it three generations of Elliotts to be on too late for prime time.

Ubiquitous vending machines, a photo by anduril on Flickr.

The days are warming up (slowly). This always makes me wake up in the mornings, dreaming of Tokyo’s streets. It’s been too long since I was last there.

At first, I thought this was a really well-made troll poster (much like the “Disney TV’s: Calvin and Hobbes” images floating about on the ‘net). Then I looked it up. It’s real! And it looks awesome! The cast looks terrific as well, with Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the lovably buffoonish Inspectors Thompson and Thomson.

The Tintin comics maintain a hold on me still, well over two decades after I last gazed on Hergé’s marvelous artwork. They’re a memorable part of my adolescent years, having spent many hours in the school library as a bookish nerd, going over their extensive collection (well, that and Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix series). They were so charming, so full of wit and a sense of boundless adventure, and set in so many exotic locales — locales that were beautifully and densely illustrated that they invited you to sit still and really examine every last little detail.

I do wonder if the love of Tintin is a bit of a generational issue; some friends of mine not much younger than myself have no special memories or specific fondness for the series, and tend to give me blank stares whenever I let out with any of Captain Haddock’s deliciously alliterative curses (“Billions of blistering blue barnacles! Ten thousand terrifying tortoises!”).

Hm. I guess I’ll have to be more proactive then, and pick up some copies of the series for my nieces.

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If there’s any more of this, I’m really going to have to track it down.

By Dominic Boudreault. I’d recommend watching it in full screen HD; it was far more than what I expected it to be.