Indiana Jones Week

My first exposure to Indiana Jones was a syndication sometime in the early nineties of Last Crusade. I don’t remember too much. Somebody turned into a skeleton. An ancient Knight. But that part that was really jarring and stuck with me long after the film had ended is the scene in which Isla falls down a pit. Where did this bottomless pit lead? For how long did she live during the plunge? And even more importantly, what thoughts went through one’s head when they were in a midst of a bottomless plunge?

Truth be told, I didn’t think about Indiana Jones or any of his adventures for another five years. By this time, I was into Spielberg in general and regaled by the glossy photos of the films special effects in a book I took out from the New Castle Public Library. Indy was never my favorite. It was always Star Wars, but I did watch the entire series as time went by and I held a special place for the film.

The thing about Indiana Jones is that ultimate he’s the icon for absurdist adventures. You can make this guy hunt after anything, and in any way you’d like possible. As long as its historical. For this reason, I was a huge fan of Temple of Doom and Last Crusade was definitely in the right vein. I actually think, I least enjoyed Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a little too vanilla for me. Almost as if the film was asking “Can I get away with this little boulder run? How about this car chase?”

So I thought it’d be fun to do a little bit of studying the Indiana Jones series this week. I feel the Eszterhas reviews were really informative as to what made his film tick that hopefully I can come to the same sort of conclusions about Indy. I’m going to pay careful attention to the sequels, which in my mind start with Last Crusade, carry out to the fairly recent Indiana Jones 4, and also include the unproduced scripts about The Monkey King, The Martians, and City of the Gods. I’m going to skip over Temple of Doom, but I might review it at a later point. Child slavery, black magic, and human sacrifice with Kate Capshaw. I love it too much for a critical study. Plus it was written by the schlock-meister team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who’d finish out the 1980’s by working on Howard the Duck and Radioland Murders).