It’s the most successful Flemish comic ever, and now it’s the most expensive film ever made in Flanders. “Suske & Wiske: De Texasrakkers” (The Texas Rangers), the first 3D animated feature film ever to be made in my fair country, will be premiered on July 21st, our National Holiday, and will have cost a whopping 9 million Euro’s (about twice as much as previous top raking Flemish films). Even though the funding was raised from the Netherlands, Belgium and (to a lesser extent) France, the film is quintessentially Flemish, which fits in nicely with the pedigree of the comic it’s based on.
Ever since the young Flemish girl Wiske lost track of her brother Rikki (who went “to buy shoes”) and met up with Suske on Amoras, an island stuck in a clichéd version of Antwerp in the middle ages, their adventures have been avidly followed by generations of Flemish and Dutch readers. At one point, 400,000 copies were sold of each new book, and you can safely say that there’s no house in Flanders (or the Netherlands, for that matter) with at least a few Suske en Wiske books. In the early eighties, the series was launched as Willy And Wanda in the US, but with limited success.
Suske en Wiske books, which have passed the 300 mark, typically tell the story of a quite strange family, consisting of Wiske’s aunt Sidonia, the self-centred detective Lambik, sixteenth century brute Jerom and all-round scientist Barabas, along with a real galaxy of supporting characters and assorted baddies. They mix a very recognisable type of adventurism with a generous taste for the exotic, a typical strain of popular humour and, at times, a keen interest in contemporary topics.
De Texasrakkers is loosely based on the comic of the same name, which was originally published in 1959. It tells the story of how Suske and Wiske find a bottle with a little man in it, who tells them he is a Texas Ranger, from the town of Dumb City, Texas. He was shrunk, along with his colleagues, by a gangster named Jim Parasite, who now terrorizes Dumb City. Together with their friends, Suske and Wiske decide to go to Texas and help catch the crooks.
This story fits squarely in the second wave of Suske en Wiske stories, for which Vandersteen called in the help of an increasing number of collaborators. While people like Hergé preferred to limit their output and let quality prevail, Vandersteen was too much of an entrepreneur to fail to see that there was a lot of room on the Flemish and international market, and that he had to increase his output to fill it. He started an incredible number of series, quite often leaving them to assistants after a few books. Their production rhythm was hellish: for the Western series Bessy (“inspired” by television show Lassie), Vandersteen had committed to his German publisher to deliver a book per week. But the book was also very successful: at one point he sold more than half a million Bessy’s every week, making it the second most successful comic in Germany, after Mickey Mouse.
Bessy and De Texasrakkers also illustrate a second important new element in Vandersteen’s creative output at that time: the influence of television. Vandersteen understands the importance of that new medium in his readers’ entertainment package, and starts catering to it by creating stories that refer to popular films and TV shows: Batman, James Bond, Lawrence of Arabia, Zorba, all of them turn up in Vandersteen’s stories, along with numerous references to the news of the day. Quite often, they remain good stories, which remain in print even after all these years, but on the whole they predominantly provide a very keen picture of general public consciousness in Flanders of the early ’60′s.
De Texasrakkers will initially be released in a Dutch and a French version only. According to Skyline Entertainment, who produced the film, it has already been sold for distribution to Germany, while negotiations with Scandinavia and France are well under way. So perhaps, even the English-speaking world may one day (once more) discover the sheer joy that is classic Suske en Wiske. In the mean time, trailers for the film can be found here (the page is in Dutch, but the trailers are in Dutch and French). And from the looks of them, it’s quite a good movie, translating the look and feel of the books, while updating the humour ever so slightly to the 21st century.
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium where he is regularly seen in an almost lifelike 3-D. You can read more on his Ephemerist blog.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:56 am
Check your facts. Fly Me To The Moon is both the first and the most expensive CGI (&3D)film made in Belgium.