Flight 714
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Flight 714 |
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| Released | 1968 | |
| Publisher | Casterman | |
| Genre | Bande dessinée | |
| Pages | 62 | |
| Tintin chronology | ||
| The Castafiore Emerald (1963) |
Flight 714 (1968) |
Tintin and the Picaros (1976) |
Flight 714 (Vol 714 pour Sydney), first published in 1968, is the twenty-second of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.
[edit] Storyline
While changing flights in Djakarta on their way to Sydney for an international conference on space exploration, Tintin, Captain Haddock and Calculus happen upon their old friend Piotr Skut, who is now the chief pilot for eccentric millionaire Laszlo Carreidas. A short time earlier, the Captain had erroneously taken the somewhat disheveled Carreidas for a tramp and surreptitiously slipped him a five-dollar bill. When introduced to Carreidas, the Captain inadvertently shakes the hand of the millionaire's secretary, the tall, aloof Spaulding.
Unable to politely refuse Carreidas's offer of a ride on his prototype private jet, Tintin and his friends join the millionaire on the way to Sydney. Carreidas plays Battleship with the Captain, defeating him repeatedly by cheating with a hidden closed-circuit television camera and monitor. Unbeknownst to Carreidas and the others, Spaulding and two of the pilots have been recruited to hijack the plane and bring it to a deserted island called Pulau-Pulau Bompas in the Indian Ocean. Skut is not involved in the plot, and so becomes himself a prisoner. After a rough landing, our friends are escorted out of the plane, and a terrified Snowy breaks out of Tintin's arms and runs off. Armed guards shoot at him, and a mortified Tintin takes him for dead.
A moment or two later, to Tintin's further shock, it turns out that the mastermind of the plot is none other than the evil Rastapopoulos, who declares that since "it's a bore to stop being a millionaire," it would be easier to simply take Carreidas's fortune. Accordingly, he has hatched an elaborate scheme to kidnap Carreidas and extract his Swiss bank account number. Captain Haddock's corrupt old nemesis, Allan, is working as Rastapopoulos's henchman. As for Tintin, the Captain and Calculus, Rastapopulous actually had no idea they would be accompanying the crotchety millionaire, but is nonetheless delighted to have the opportunity to exact revenge, and makes it quite evident that a very grim fate awaits our friends.
Everyone is bound and held in World War II-era bunkers.
Meanwhile, Rastapopulous takes a defiant Carreidas to another World War II-era bunker and has him strapped to a chair, to be subjected to the tender mercies of the malevolent Dr. Krollspell (a name possibly alluding to Adolf Hitler's quack doctor, Theodor Morell--"Kroll" is also the name of the Berlin Opera House where the Nazi Reichstag met). The corrupt doctor injects the millionaire with truth serum, so as to enable Rastapopulous to pry Carreidas's Swiss bank account number out of him. Unfortunately for Rastapopoulos, this plan quickly flounders. For Carreidas proves more than willing to tell the truth--about everything except the Swiss bank account. To Rastapopulous's fury, Carreidas launches into long disquisitions about his greedy, unscrupulous nature, boasting how he first stole a pear in 1910, at the age of four; shamed both his grandfather and his great-aunt to death; and has generally led a life of perfidy. Realizing the serum is defective, Rastapopulous becomes enraged and accidentally injects himself with the serum, becoming intoxicated. He too recounts hideous deeds in a boasting manner, calling himself "the devil incarnate". This angers the still drugged Carreidas, who begins an argument wherein both of the two men boast, rage, and quarrel over which one is the more evil.
With the help of Snowy, who is not dead after all, Tintin and his friends manage to escape the bunker they are held prison in and find the bunker, high on the volcano, where Carreidas is held prison. Tintin captures Krollspell and Rastapopulous and escort them to lower grounds. However, the serum wears off and Rastapopulous tries to escape. Later, they discover a hidden entrance to a statue-filled cave. Knowing that they are in danger, as Rastapopulous is gathering the locals to pursue and kill them, they decide to enter the cave and they discover a large path, leading to the inside of the volcano. They enter the core of the volcano by triggering a mechanism. Rastapopulous and allies are not far behind, but they can not find the trigger mechanism which give them entrance to the core, so they use explosives to make their way.
Penetrating deeper into the volcano, Tintin and friends meet a strange man, who wears a transmitter on his ear and speaks with a heavy Russian/East European accent. He immediately notes that they are all in great danger, because the explosion has made the volcano unstable and it will soon erupt. They follow the stranger, who has the power to influence their minds, as he knows exactly where to escape. It is becoming hotter as they find their way out of the core of the volcano, and there is even a flow of lava that is threatening them, but they find a way up that leads to an exit. Carreidas pushes Haddock off the stairs, but fortunately Haddock grabs onto a stalagmite, narrowly escaping an imminent death of falling into fresh lava. The strange fellow uses his mind trick to calm Carreidas down.
Soon they find the way out and the stranger puts them all under his hypnosis. The man uses his transmitter, and apparent psychic powers, to summon a flying saucer, piloted by unseen aliens with whom the man is apparently familiar. The hypnotised group climb up a retractable ladder and board the saucer, which deposits them in a rubber dinghy, exchanging them for Allan, who is whisked away in the saucer. The group awakes from hypnosis and next thing they remember is that they are freed, and safe, but they cannot remember what happened to them. The party is eventually rescued, but only Snowy, who cannot speak, has any recollection of their alien abduction.
[edit] Missing pages
Hergé made an error when drawing the story: it was meant, like all Tintin albums, to be 62 pages long, but when he finished, it was found to be 64 pages long. Hergé's solution was to remove two pages from the end of the story, which covered the rescue of Tintin's group from the erupting volcano.
The omission meant that the reader now sees a cliffhanger. At the bottom of one page a reporter on a seaplane watching the raft holding Tintin's group exclaims (in the English translation), "They'll be boiled alive like lobsters! We've got to do something." On the next page ("Thousands of miles away, several days later"), the story switches to Jolyon Wagg's living room as his family watches a TV interview of Tintin and associates.
[edit] Influences
The story seems to have been influenced by the "ancient astronauts" literature popular at the time, in addition to the mythology of a hidden ancient city in the South Pacific.
Laszlo Carreidas is based on aircraft manufacturer Marcel Dassault,[1] although he clearly also displays some characteristics of another aviation legend, Howard Hughes (hypochondria, obsession with hygiene, hypercompetitiveness for example).
[edit] Trivia
- Karaboudjan, an avant garde metal project (one of Dan Swanö's many projects), released a demo, Sbrodj, which is inspired from the Tintin stories. The first track from Sbrodj is entitled Plan 714 Till Sydney, which is similar to the original name of the comic book (Vol 714 Till Sydney). Interestingly enough, Karaboudjan is also the name of the ship where Tintin and Captain Haddock first meet.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Juventud (Spanish publisher of Tintin) (Spanish)
| The Adventures of Tintin | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin | ||||
| Characters: | Supporting · Minor · Complete list | |||
| Miscellany: | Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations | |||
