Volkswagen Beetle & MG TF 1500 (Tintin and the Thermozero)

Tintin and the Thermozero (French: Tintin et le Thermozéro) is an abandoned comics project at one point considered for Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin series, and then, later, for his Jo, Zette and Jocko series.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The video:

This is Tintin project : 053

This project was originally completed on 2025/10/28

The story:

Ok. So you may have noticed, this one is a little… different. Here’s the story, according to Wikipedia:

In 1960, shortly after completing Tintin in Tibet, Hergé began developing a plot line on the basis of a December 1957 article from Marie-France. Written by Philippe Labro, the article was titled “La Peur qui vient du futur” (“The Fear from the Future”) and told the story of two American families who had been exposed to high levels of radioactivity after breaking a pill. He jotted down a number of notes about the proposed story:

A bottle (or some other object) containing a deadly substance (atomic pills? See Marie-France) has been carried off (by mistake) by someone. Tintin pursues the fellow and finds him just as the substance in question is about to unleash its damaging effects.

He turned the project over to staff at Studios Hergé to work on, with the cartoonist Greg developing two plot synopsis for two stories, Les Pilules (“The Pills”) and Tintin et le Thermozéro (“Tintin and the Thermozero”). Hergé took the latter project and produced eight pages of pencil drawings for it. However, Hergé was uncomfortable with working on a story already plotted out by someone else, commenting that:

“I felt like a prisoner in a straitjacket unable to get out. Personally, I need to be constantly surprised by my own inventions. Besides, my stories are always created in the same way. I know my starting point, and I know more or less where I want to end up, but the route I take to get there depends on my whim of the moment.”

According to Hergé biographer Benoît Peeters, the problem with Greg’s outlines was that he had “absorbed the style of The Adventures of Tintin to the point of imitating it.”

Unwilling to abandon a good idea, Hergé planned to make Le Thermozéro the plot of the third filmed adventure of Tintin but once again, this did not take place. Bob de Moor, Hergé’s assistant, was asked to change the synopsis and make it the sixth Jo, Zette and Jocko adventure. After a few sketches were made this project fell through as well, as Hergé asked Bob de Moor to modernize The Black Island instead. Hergé then turned his attention to The Castafiore Emerald, which saw book publication in 1963.

In March 2014 it was revealed that de Moor had indeed written a complete script for Le Thermozéro and that more pages had been pencilled before the project was shelved. Tintin’s publisher Casterman also announced plans to publish an edition of Le Thermozéro, possibly in the same vein as the other unfinished Tintin adventure Tintin and Alph-Art. However, Hergé’s heir, his second wife, Fanny Rodwell, was opposed to the idea and the project was ultimately shelved.

The build:

An unfinished Hergé / Greg collaboration? Sign me up!

But, how do I include an unfinished work in my Tintin 1/72 Project? I’ve long had an idea for one of rough sketches that Hergé did for the Tintin and Alph-Art unfinished work, but it’s not something that would work for Tintin and the Thermozero. The pencils for this project might be unfinished, but they’re MILES ahead of most of those pages. You can CLEARLY seen that the driving sequence includes both a Volkswagen Beetle and an MG.

Now, mind you, it is hard to peg exactly what KIND of Beetle it is. In one panel you can see a very early model VW Beetle with the split rear window, in others  you get a later full window. Eventually I settled on a Mid-1950s version as it seems the most “classic” and is likely what ultimately would have been in a finished version. The MG as well is a bit loose on the details, but again, given the timelines, I chose a late 1950s version of the MG TF 1500.

However, since this was an unfinished project, I didn’t want to produce a finished-looking model. Then it struck me… why not print the cars and figures in clear resin and then use a Tamiya panel wash to bring out the details. So that’s more or less what I did. The hard part of this build was editing the 3D files I found online to match the outcome I needed. Once I had them actually printed though… that was about it.

I did do a little bit of minor sanding to help the fit, and I dipped the final prints into some Future to try to make them a bit clearer and take out some of the printing artifacts. After that though, it was a generous panel wash to get the details, and some clean up to get rid of most of the mess.

Oh, and I also used one of my regular wooden box bases to create a mould out of hardware store silicon caulking that I could use to pour a two-part clear resin into. That came out pretty rough and took a fair amout of sanding, but again… that’s the unfinished look I was going for,

I have to admit though, it does look a bit odd on my Tintin shelf… but maybe that’s the point.

Check it out and tell me what you think: