07 - ‘The Broken Ear’ (1937) || Radio Tintin
The pre-Columbian wooden idol, belonging to the Chimu people of Northern Peru. Herge would imitate it almost exactly for his Arumbayan fetish, though the titular ‘broken ear’ of the story was an original invention.
The Parrot Reveals His Secret
Cover of Le Petit Vingtieme, 27 February 1936, featuring Ramon and Alonso.
Herge, usually a staunch perfectionist, is reduced through time-restraints to single-shade backgrounds in some sections of The Broken Ear.
Sir Basil Zaharoff (right) and Herge’s Basil Bazarov (left).
Zaharoff, despite his powerful political connections, was a controversial figure in his own time, gaining the nickname ‘The Merchant of Death’, owing to his preeminence in the international arms trade. Herge has Bazarov selling arms to both San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico and framing Tintin as a traitor.
The arms corporation represented by Bazarov (Mazaraoff in the original) is changed from Vicking Arms (a reference to the real-world Zaharoff’s association with the Vickers corperation) to Korrupt Arms, which amalgamates ‘corrupt’ with German arms dynasty Krupp.
One of Herge’s Arumbaya and the magazine clipping that undeniably inspired their appearance.
As a nice little piece of fictional-history, Herge includes a statue of one General Olivaro, liberator of San Theodoros. Olivaro is probably based on Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), who led liberation movements against the Spanish in many South American nations, including Bolivia, which was named after him and served as one of the main inspirations for the fictional San Theodoros.
Herge’s decision to depict the villains of the story being taken to hell was one he wouldn’t repeat in any future albums, for some reason.
In the original French, the Arumbaya spoke a language phonetically-similar to the Bruxellois-Brussels dialect Herge was very familiar with. In the English translations, however, this is change to the London-based cockney dialect. As such, when one of the Arumbaya accidentally hit Tintin with a golf ball, Professor Ridgewell responds:
"Cor, luv-a-duck! I told you to hit the flipping ball into the hole! And I don’t mean his flipping ear hole!”
The changing image of the South American revolutionary: General Alcazar in his first appearance in The Broken Ear (1937, coloured in 1943) and his final appearance in Tintin and the Picaros (1976).
One of the beautiful full-color pages included with Casterman’s otherwise black-and-white edition of The Broken Ear in 1937. These were omitted from the 1943 edition, presumably because this whole album was in color and thus these pages would no longer have stood out.
The only publicly-available episode of the 1959 animated adaption of Belvision’s ‘Herge’s Adventures of Tintin’ animated series episode of ‘The Broken Ear’. Animation fansite lesgrandsclassiques.fr attributes the stilted animation (or lack thereof) to Herge’s refusal to let any other artists handle his character models. Later adaptions in the series would be in color and feature significantly-more fluid animation.
