General Indiana Jones Thread

In my head, I have this entire alternate plot where the Thuggee are actually a bunch of criminals and fakers who Indiana Jones exposes Scooby Doo style using drugs, hypnosis, and special effects to pretend to be evil Satanists. They're in league with the British Army General who is excavating the place to steal precious valuables and artifacts to sell on the black market.

Indy gets one their arms shipments from the Brits diverted and the locals are the ones who come to his rescue.

Maybe make it "you betrayed Kali."

I seem to have a real immunity to supposedly annoying characters. Willy doesn't bother me at all. Neither does Short Round, nor Scrappy-Doo.

Short Round has nothing wrong with him other than all the Asian kids bullied because of it.

He's a brave and decent kid who also is an excellent car driver.

It's just Indiana Jones has a son then suddenly doesn't.

Short Round is...iffy. I don't hate him but his voice is kinda grating and a bit stereotypical (though there's worse examples...ugh...).

After Marian Ravenwood, Wille, unfortunately, is a poor shadow. She's mostly just there to shriek and lampoon dumb tourist-ness.

Indy's (slightly) greater heroism in Temple really isn't necessarily inconsistent; he's just not yet quite as disillusioned as he'll eventually get in Raiders. Still, I think he's pretty shady in Temple; this is a man who hasn't tuned out his better instincts yet, but he's definitely in the process of doing so.

I've always liked Short Round (he's one of the best things about the film) and I think it's a shame that he doesn't appear, or at least get referenced, in Last Crusade and Crystal Skull (he was supposed to be a guest at Indy's wedding in one of Crystal Skull's early drafts) Apparently, he does appear as an adult in a couple of the novels (and is an archaeologist in his own right). They ought to have an adult Shorty show up as Indy's partner in whatever the new film is (played by John Cho maybe...)

edited 2nd Jun '18 12:51:41 PM by Robbery

I wonder what happened to that student who wrote 'Love You' on her eyelids.

If Shia LaBeouf hadn't had a bad time after Crystal Skull's backlash, I would've been happy about a fifth film where he meets a grown up Short Round.

Character development is not necessarily linear or in one dimension. Indy may be a grave robber / "tomb raider" but it would take a particular immoral person to overlook the plight of starving villagers or child slaves. Similarly, his "It belongs in a museum" dialogue in Last Crusade suggests that he at least views himself as trying to preserve the artifacts for public viewing and education, rather than selling it to a private collector for their vanity. After all he is a professor at a university and contracted through a museum.

There was a "Jet Li as grown-up Short Round" rumor circulating the 'net a few years back.

Personally, I have no problem with grave robbing. I don't believe in any sort of afterlife, so "stealing" from the dead is a textbook victimless crime.

Now, the opening to Raiders is still morally dubious because of all the other archaeological discoveries Indy disturbed just so he could get the shiny idol he could sell, and because of the unclear relationship between the natives and the temple. Though it's worth noting that, in almost all of the treasure hunts we see Indy go on, he's after treasures that had already been stolen by someone else, anyway. Even the Ark, which was only in Egypt because the Egyptians stole it from the Israelites.

Most religions don't have a particular care about graves from the dead. It's just it's enormously likely to piss off the living. In the case of the Hovitos, they may or may not be the people who built the temple (the RPG says they are descendants of the people who built the temple by an order of centuries) but it's clearly a holy place to them now which Indy destroys as well as robs.

edited 3rd Jun '18 1:30:40 PM by CharlesPhipps

A lot of those offerings to the dead, then and today, still belong the families of those who placed them in remembrance, regardless that the original owner is dead.

That is a very good reason for the Ark to be returned to the Jews.

Mind you, the actual discussion of who owns what in historical treasures would make a good movie on its own. The Kohlinar Diamond doesn't belong to the British save by theft rules. But does it belong to Pakistan or India? Or the blood descendants of the Singh dynasty? (which is now extinct) And technically, they took it via conquest as I understand.

edited 3rd Jun '18 1:33:41 PM by CharlesPhipps

It's still stealing from a culture and the people of said culture.

I remember there was a big kerfuffle in the American Southwest in recent years over some mummified remains that had been found. Local tribes wanted the remains reburied immediately and left alone, but the archaeologist or researcher (or whatever he/she was) pointed out that they did not, upon discovery, know what tribe the remains belonged to, or even if they were the remains were those of a native. This left the tribes in the interesting position of having to wait for tests to be done in order to see how upset they should be.

How long can you leave something sitting in a hole in the ground before it officially counts as abandoned?

Certainly, if the people who put it there are dead, and everyone who ever knew them is dead, and everyone who ever knew anyone who ever knew them is dead, then at that point I think it's safe to declare it in the public domain.

I mean, you go back far enough in time, everyone's a blood relation of everyone else. If we discovered the lost treasure of Ghengis Khan, would 1/5th of the human race be able to claim a share of it?

edited 3rd Jun '18 1:55:06 PM by RavenWilder

You can't put a culture in the public domain, and in that hypothetical (and nonsensical) situation, Genghis's treasure would go to the Mongolian government.

Sometimes it comes down to who owns the land, even if there is no one on the planet left related to the original lifeform anymore. For instance, the dispute over ownership of the fossilized remains of Sue the T. rex.

edited 3rd Jun '18 1:58:30 PM by Tuckerscreator

Mind you, I admit part of my distaste is the tackiness of materialism itself.

Aside from educational value, the whole looting of the dead and the art as well as objects of the past is an inherently skeevy thing because it's appropriating the goods of the past just because they're the goods of the past.

But in my local museum, for decades, they had the bones of a Native American woman on display until someone pointed out, "Holy shit, why is this an exhibit?"

edited 3rd Jun '18 2:04:26 PM by CharlesPhipps

I literally work at the museum that has Sue, no joke.

That is pretty cool. I like their Twitter account.

edited 3rd Jun '18 2:17:43 PM by Tuckerscreator

I assume there's some tie-in novel, video game, or comic book that has Indiana Jones fighting dinosaurs, yes?

Grave-robbing is an expression of disdain for the dead and their loved ones. It's a shitty thing to do whether you believe in an afterlife or not (unless the dead person in question was shitty, I guess?). But if it's been thousands of years, like in the case of someone like King Tut, we'd be forgoing a lot of valuable/interesting information by not exploring the tombs.

That's part of Indiana Jones' arc, I think.

Indiana Jones believes he's doing this for the benefit of mankind, science, or whatnot. However, by the time of Raiders, he's wandered extensively off the path to become heavily involved in organized crime and artifact trafficking.

Part of this was due to the fact he's seen artifacts stolen and trafficked with the support of the law (See Last Crusade where the Sheriff blatantly turns over a cultural artifact to thieves) but he's suffered some severe Motive Decay. He deludes himself that hes' doing it for a higher cause but that's a paper thin reason given he's bypassed stealing artifacts from thieves to stealing artifacts before other thieves can steal them.

After all, he sold Lao Che the remains of a Chinese Emperor.

He's selling to a museum but he's still selling to oter people too. I also get the impression Marcus Brody is Old Money financing a private museum versus anything related to a university.

edited 3rd Jun '18 2:46:35 PM by CharlesPhipps

In regards to grave robbing, remember that medical science is built on a foundation of grave robbing. The fact that, in those cases, the robbers and the dead were generally of the same culture is irrelevant, really; the people who interred the dead very likely didn't want them disturbed. And yet, studying the remains provided a wealth of useful, practical knowledge. It's a conundrum, and not one that can be chalked up entirely to easily dismissed colonialist attitudes.