The Adventures of Mark Twain, released in the UK as Comet Quest, is a 1985 American stop-motion animation film directed by Will Vinton (best known for “The California Raisins” animation). It received a wider theatrical release, still limited to seven major cities, in May 1985. It was released on DVD in January 2006. The film features a series of vignettes extracted from several of Mark Twain‘s works, built around a plot that features Twain’s attempts to keep his “appointment” with Halley’s Comet. Twain and three children, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher, travel on an airship between various adventures.
The concept was inspired by a famous quote by the author:
“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘”
Twain died April 21, 1910, one day after Halley’s Comet reached perihelion in 1910).
Big Mark Twain Fans here!!!I’ve read a great deal of his works and nearly paessd out from laughing so hard when my friend Carlton and I went to France with some other people and had to share a room together. We were in the south of France and there was little to do after dinner talking and drinks so we all went to bed. Carton asked me to read to me what I was reading which was Mark Twain’s autobiography. We nearly suffocated trying to keep our laughter down as the walls seemed to be made of rice paper. It was the scene where Mark Twain was stuck in the printing office as a boy and dropped a watermelon rind on the head of his brother walking bellow the window of the printing office. I’m not sure what struck us so funny but we couldn’t breath for laughing so hard. Read the passage again some years later and it wasn’t nearly as funny, but still good. I suppose it’s a matter of timing as well.