Right, here's one from the vault! I knew we had touched on this, but couldn't remember if we had come to any conclusions when I recently stumbled across a bit more information - it would appear Richard drew a blank last time!
Anyway, the link above in the previous post is now dead and long-gone, but what I came across was the text from the page, which in the interests of preservation I attach below, as it is the project information that ESI Design (the company who created the on-screen content) used to promote their work.
From their publicity material:
What It Was
A nationwide interactive television game, based on popular European cartoon characters, on Home Box Office (HBO).
What It Did
Let children actively participate in their TV viewing and learn about United States geography.
How It Worked
Children watching HBO's animated Tintin
series were invited to help Tintin find his dog, Snowy, by playing along at home.
By manipulating the buttons on their touch tone phones, selected children helped steer the plane in which Tintin travelled in search of his dog Snowy.
Participants followed clues that appeared on the screen, directing Tintin to various destinations on the U. S. map.
The results of this live interaction immediately appeared on screen. Other viewers could play along with the live version by completing a paper-and-pencil version of the game, in which they unscrambled word-jumbles from the letters that flashed on the screen.Further information was gleaned by me from a publicity press photo which recently sold on eBay (not to me), which had a handy blurb with some more details as follows:
Where's Snowy?: HBO will present the first national live interactive television game when "Tintin and the Search for Snowy" begins a two-month run on the pay-cable service this April. Featuring a sweepstakes grand prize of a family trip to Belgium for a week of astronaut training, the innovative game consists of a four-minute segment that will appear at the end of eight consecutive all-new weekly episodes of the hit family series The Adventures of Tintin, debuting every Monday (7:30-8:00 p.m. ET&PT), beginning April 6.So, we now have an idea of when the competition was held, the nature of the game, and how it was played, and also that there was a "play along at home" element for those who didn't get through on their 'phones.
What we don't know is how much content was included in the segments - was there a host or presenter on screen? Did it have any sort of story element to how the game was set? Did they use visuals from the books or the cartoon series that it was teamed with?
Does anyone remember seeing this, or even took part in it? Could it be possible that we have amongst us a winner who trained as an
astronaut...? ;-)
There is
a small illustration from the game - some sort of title card - over on our Facebook page.
Update: I have also managed to locate
this second small illustration, which presents a simplified version of the incident on p.9 of "Tintin in Tibet", where Haddock makes a terrible choice of gangway...