The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer is a strange series when you first put it in to your DVD player. At first glance you think it's a cartoon from the 50's or 60's with it's plummy dialogue and old fashioned animation but it's actually from 1997.

Secondly it's based on a series of 12 stories by Edgar P. Jacobs, who also illustrated two Tin Tin stories before his untimely death. You can definitely see the similarities between the two series here. They have the same style of stories and the same style of animation.

The simplistic animation here doesn't bother me in the slightest, in fact I really like it. The stories themselves don't really appear to translate to the screen very well. The first twelve are obviously based on the original tales and then the 13th and final one is a newly written one. At times the writing is incredibly ham fisted and not in the slightest bit subtle, even going so far as to making me groan at some of the inane dialogue.

Another thing is the voice acting. There appear to be credits as to who did the voices of the characters here. Maybe that was on purpose because most of the voice acting here is amazingly bad to the point of being incredibly infuriating.

Anchor Bay, normally a source for good entertainment value, really bet their wagons on this release being a success. Even going so far as to put many adverts in various magazines and even the Guardian newspaper. I really don't know why they bothered.

There are absolutely no special features here whatsoever and that maybe just have been the saving grace for this set.

While yes it is fun, in a guilty pleasure kind of way, in places, it's mostly just an annoying messing of epic proportions.

Highly avoid unless really, really bored.