Having bought a model ship, the Unicorn, for a pound off a market stall Tintin is initially puzzled that the sinister Mr. Sakharine should be so eager to buy it from him, resorting to murder and kidnapping Tintin - accompanied by his marvellous dog Snowy - to join him and his gang as they sail to Morocco on an old cargo ship. Sakharine has bribed the crew to revolt against the ship's master, drunken Captain Haddock, but Tintin, Snowy and Haddock escape, arriving in Morocco at the court of a sheikh, who also has a model of the Unicorn. Haddock tells Tintin that over three hundred years earlier his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock was forced to scuttle the original Unicorn when attacked by a piratical forebear of Sakharine but he managed to save his treasure and provide clues to its location in three separate scrolls, all of which were secreted in models of the Unicorn. Tintin and Sakharine...
Written by don @ minifie-1
Anachronisms:
In the market Sakahrine offers to write a cheque for the model of the Unicorn using a retractable ballpoint pen (you can even hear the click). Ballpoints were not sold in the UK until December 1945 (and came into widespread use in the 1950s) and the retractable ballpoint pen was not invented until 1959. The movie takes place in the early 1930s based on the dates on the newspaper cutouts showing Tintin's reporting.
See more »