Snowy from Tintin vs. Brain from Inspector Gadget

SNOWY by Mia Timpano

Let me give you a little recap of Les Adventures de Tintin . Tintin, a reporter, enjoys traveling to various global destinations. Where, specifically? Oh, the usual. Coups d’état . Major violent revolutions. Basically anywhere extremely life-threatening. And this wouldn’t be so bad, but this is ALL Tintin does with his friends: send them somewhere to die.

It is up to Tintin’s dog Snowy (or Milou, in the original French text) to retrieve all major evidence and Captain Haddock’s ability to generally take charge when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

Snowy is a super-dog, inasmuch as he understands all languages and international politics and generally finds whatever piece of evidence the entire plot hinges on. But all Snowy wants to do is run around Marlinspike Hall, chow on bones and lick his balls. And that is precisely what Snowy would be doing, if Tintin could stop hauling his butt to a new death zone every week. Oh, why are we trapped in this cursed ancient Egyptian pyramid again? Yes, that’s right, because the bourgeois cunt in the puffy slacks dragged our arses down here! Oh, look, and here are tombs with our names on them . Thanks, you over-manicured shit!

Oh, look, here we are on a plane operated by ARAB AIR. Hmmm, there’s a name that screams safe air travel. Snowy’s pissed about the whole fucking ordeal, as usual, but at least has the presence of mind to check out the luggage. As Snowy clearly anticipated, there’s a bomb in a bag (Snowy sniffs it out, another super-dog ability and point for team Snowball), and starts growling and pointing at the bag. But what does Tintin say? “Snowy! Stop playing games!” He’s trying to save everybody’s fucking life, you middle-class pig!

Snowy, despite being surrounded by this kind of gross arrogance, doesn’t give up. He continues barking until tick-tick-BANG, the bomb detonates, sending Snowy headlong into what should have been his early pooch grave. But Snowy survives (go team Snow, way to cheat death AND fight the War on Terror, bonus points), leaving Tintin there helplessly saying, in his drippy voice, “Snowy! Good old Snowy! You sensed danger, didn’t you?” Yes, he did, you arrogant fuck! Try listening next time, or does Snowy have to get blown up to warrant you giving him five seconds of your sweet time?

Granted, Snowy does go pretty hard on the bottle, but don’t tell me Snowy hasn’t earned his right to serious substance abuse. All he wants is fucking bones, but no, Tintin has to drag him to “The Land of the Soviets”. That sounds like fun in the sun. No, wait, that’s right, the other thing, A BULLET IN THE HEAD. For Christ’s sake, this dog is shell-shocked. All he wants is his damn whiskey. But when Tintin notices that Snowy is getting wasted on Loch Lomond , he takes him out and SPANKS him. Here’s an idea, you puritanical a-hole. How about you actually do some work for a change, and file a story to the fictional newspaper you work for, instead of beating your dog? Oh, no, I forgot, you’re too busy in your giant, bourgeois mansion, thinking of new places to send your dog to get blown up.

Snowy, though clearly a super-dog, is an underdog, and I award him bonus points for displaying the poise and savoir-faire that he does under various foreign terrors and the fist of Tintin.

BRAIN by Benjamin Law

While Snowy the Dog does endure horrific, unimaginable abuse at the hands of his boy scout cunt-of-a-master Tintin, lets not forget a bigger victim here: Brain, the yellow, antennae-eared dog of MENSA-like intelligence who played second fiddle to Inspector Gadget. When it comes to dogs, Brain is by far the most intelligent—and abused—dog on television.

There is something epic in the tragedy that is Brain the Dog. In many ways, he is like Cassandra, the figure in Greek mythology whose gift is to know the future, but whose curse is that no one believes her. Similarly, Brain is both gifted and cursed. His gift is that his intelligence is so profound he is hardly even a dog any more. He occasionally walks upright, predominantly uses charades to communicate and is also known to slip into actual anthropomorphism. Unlike Snowy, Brain has taken a page from those sign language trained gorillas, and can actually communicate outside of his own species. What a star.

But Brain is also cursed. He is like Stephen Hawking—a veritable genius of a mind, confined to an inferior vessel of a body. (He is a dog, after all.) Nonetheless, this doesn’t stop him from foiling the plans of international villains, and the frequent—and vaguely pedophilic—abductions of Penny, his similarly intelligent girl-master.

However, Brain’s even greater curse is in having to play second fiddle to Inspector-fucking-Gadget, Penny’s useless uncle who has been appointed—god knows why—an international detective. It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that Inspector Gadget—whose apparently “amusing” foibles seemed entertaining at the time—was not even technically human. Let’s be frank about this, kids: Gadget was a cyborg, an unholy marriage of flesh and steel. A hollowed-out wreck of a human being. We can only speculate what sort of car-crash or government experiment led to his android state, but the point is this: Inspector Gadget was a monster.

And not just in the physiological sense, either. In the Inspector Gadget episode ‘The Spa’, Inspector Gadget can, at one point, be seen using Brain’s spine—his fucking spine , people—as a trampoline, oblivious to the fact that the dog is spread-eagled across the top of a shallow, crocodile-infested well. What the fuck do you even call that? While you’re stomping all over the spines of dogs, why not digitally rape a rabbit? Why not fist-fuck a cat? It’s seriously fucked up. After years of this sort of horrific behaviour, it’s no wonder Brain was conspicuously absent from the Inspector Gadget spin-off, Gadget and the Gadgetinis . You know why? He was traumatised. Look it up in Wikipedia.

Poor Brain. In the end, his involvement in Inspector Gadget only served as a stark and chilling morality tale. He taught a generation of children that the world is unjust and cruel, and you never—never—get the credit you deserve, even when foiling the most diabolical of international villains. Instead, what you get is some hollowed-out Korean-made robot man, obliviously using your skeleton as a jumping pad, while nasty, poisonous children the world over just laugh and laugh and laugh while you’re being abused. It’s nasty, it’s wrong and Australia says no. Come on and give the dog a fucking bone.

See also: other rants co-authored by Benjamin Law and Mia Timpano
“Horrific trends in fashion”
“You can shut the fuck up now”

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