Tintin Forums

I wonder if your are able to shed some light on the following query:

Back in the late 60s I chewed my way through numerous packets of chewing-gum of - presumably - Belgian manufacture.
These packets included 4 colour slides of pictures from Tintin, which, incidentally show more of the original colour drawings than you see in the albums!

Being already then an incurable fan, I persevered and ended up with a collection of approx. 70 different slides.
In the mid-80s the fantastic travelling exhibition, Tintins Museum visited Denmark, and, realizing that the exhibition did not include slides among the many articles on display I contacted the curator(s) who had never heard of them.
I was thus encouraged to donate my collection to the exhibition, but fortunately I only ventured the ones of which I had copies.
I was asked to forward these to the next venue of the exhibition: the National Museum in Copenhagen. When I later again visited the exhibition in Copenhagen to hopefully find my slides included I was sadly disappointed!
Nobody had ever heard of the slides and their destiny remains a mystery!
Lo and behold, I still posses the original 70 slides, and I am now curious to learn more about their origin and - possibly - their value.

Has anybody any knowledge of their existence at all?

Welcome to the forum, FAsch ! I know that one chewing gum manufacturer put stickers of Snowy in each pack, and you had to collect them all to put on a chart, but I didn't know about these slides. However, having had a bit of a search, I've come across a set for sale on eBay - see here - are they like the set you have ? The date seems to correspond and they're a set of slides, so I'm guessing they might be.

Concerning the value, I wouldn't adhere very closely to the eBay prices if I were you, they act as a guide that can barely be described as a 'ballpark' figure. I've never seen a set of those before, let alone for sale, so if you were to sell them, then it may be worth considering a specialist auction, such as the Tajan ones that are held fairly often. For anyone that has a copy, are they mentioned in the BDM at all ?

Update : I've just come across this page here which chronicles all of the slides plus the 'viewer' for them. They look fascinating, seems like you have a nice collector's item there !

Thanks for your help - that last page which featured a slide "viewer" was a treasure! It appears that my collection is ALMOST complete!

Thanks for bringing these to our attention - it is a pretty unusual thing to give away with sweets! I was intrigued to see that there is no attempt to tell the story through the slides - just random incidents!

FAsch
these slides (which incidentally show more of the original colour drawings than you see in the albums!)
The images will have been redrawn for the slides (probably by studio artists, if the rather elongated Snowy on the page with all the slides on is anything to go by), so that they are all the same size. While it would be nice to think that the pictures existed in some larger format, and were then assembled into the strips, that was rarely the case. Some of the early books used artwork pasted into the page layout from prior publication, and the size was sometimes altered, but largely the artwork is as we see it on the page - anything extending the image was probably added just for these slides.

A bit of searching has found that there were (at least) ten series of slides, each series having ten slides; they were manufactured for Rizla gum (I have added this to the title for reference), and seem to have been issued from 1966. A cardboard viewer was available in a red and white design featuring Snowy (or "Bobbie" as the one I have seen shows, which suggests that it was aimed at Flemish/ Dutch customers); there may have been others with other characters.