There is a way to do it, to make more Indiana Jones movies. There have been at least seven different people who have played Indiana Jones at some point in time, everyone from George Hall, to Corey Carrier, to Sean Patrick Flanery—even River Phoenix. Then, of course, there are all the video games and commercial appearances where an Indiana Jones-like character is seen doing something, from amusement park rides and Coke commercials to cameos in other movies. Unlike other franchise characters, however, Indiana Jones is different in that Harrison Ford created a particular kind of character with a timeline expectation that society will hold Disney to. There is a nice period in the character’s timeline, from age 25 to 35, where a new actor who resembles Harrison Ford could tell all-new stories that the public would love. Most of the best Indiana Jones movies take place within a specific 3-4 year timeline that centers on Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in the iconic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that revolutionized the way stories are told and movies are presented. I personally think it was the best movie ever made and that changed the value of the character created for the public forever. The chances of doing something like that again with the same character but a different actor is impossible. I think it’s possible to make more movies after seeing how Disney and Bethesda, the video game maker, produced the latest Indiana Jones video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. It was a great game and a lot of fun, and it didn’t try to “reboot” Indiana Jones; it respected the timeline that people had come to know and trust. And many actors contributed to that effort, and those are the rules of engagement. There is a lot of talk now, halfway through 2025, that Disney wants to reboot the Indiana Jones movies. They own the property and want to make money from it. However, there are rules they must follow; otherwise, they will cause all kinds of social problems, just as they did with the Star Wars movies. If they want Indiana Jones to remain valuable to the public, they’ll listen and stay respectful.
But if they think they are going to retell Raiders of the Lost Ark with a woke actor like Pedro Pascal, or even a woman, then they are out of their minds, and another Indiana Jones movie would be a disaster. Indiana Jones is not something that can be ruined in the way that studios often do with Batman movies or James Bond stories. There has been over 40 years of story telling from books, television, comics, video games that for that entire time held to a stringent canon timeline, and that trust has been built across many generations of fans, from kids today to their grandparents who saw the movies in the theater when they were kids. I love the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, Florida, the stunt show that has been performed for years at Hollywood Studios. It has featured several different actors portraying Indiana Jones in that stage play. However, the difference was that all content creators were very respectful of the original idea. During the period I mentioned, numerous exciting stories could be told about a younger Indiana Jones as he establishes his excellent and famous reputation, which people would love to see depicted in movies. However, those movies would require directors, producers, and musical talent as passionate about making the movies as were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Williams, originally. Disney thought they would get away with a reboot of Star Wars by ignoring the story canon and essentially retelling A New Hope with TheForce Awakens, and people have never forgiven them for it. They might have made some short-term cash, but they destroyed the brand, and that has cost Disney a lot.
This is important because the character of Indiana Jones has likely been the single most valuable narrative device that has advanced the arts and sciences in the world today. There are many people who have become scientists because of Indiana Jones and the inspiration they received from him as children, which has been very beneficial. The value of the Indiana Jones property lies in this social motivation. And unless Disney respects that sentiment, it will harm them in very detrimental ways, and erode the character it currently holds socially. Indiana Jones is more than just Harrison Ford, and unless a new production is presented with the same level of commitment as those original films were, it will be rejected at the box office, just as the Star Wars movies have been. There is an arrogance that comes from the consultant class in society, who often con their way into the motion picture studios, never figuring these things out. And those are the voices at Disney who think they could make a movie as good as the originals were, without understanding the social consequences of destroying the public’s love of the property. The Indiana Jones timeline is unique in that it spans from his infancy in TheYoung Indiana Jones Chronicles to his portrayal by a 93-94-year-old man with an eye patch. Within that timeline, there is room to make movies just as exciting as Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the stories deal with the post-college years. However, suppose they recast and retell the stories for modern audiences with music by different composers, cinematography that fails to capture the spirit, and scripts that don’t adhere to the formula. In that case, the project will be a disaster.
I think Disney should leave it all alone and let it be what it is. They’ll make more money off Indiana Jones if they allow it to stay valuable in people’s consciousness. However, Disney is not filled with creative people; it is essentially run by consultants who choose to live by copying what they think is successful and trying to pass it off as their own. And it never works well, and it certainly won’t work with Indiana Jones. So, with all the talk about Disney developing another actor to play Indiana Jones in a new movie, I would advise them to proceed with great caution. I’d see the film if they were respectful to the established timeline. But if they want to put a minority character in the role instead of a white guy, and change elements of Indiana Jones for a more modern audience, then it will be a disaster. And I’m only writing this now in the hope of keeping them from making that big mistake. But I don’t have much faith that they’ll listen, and will destroy this as they have so many other things in life, and the impact of that in the world is very significant. It matters more than people think it does; we’re talking about the way that humans create reality for themselves through story and narrative devices, and Indiana Jones emerged as a necessity for human consciousness that was more than entertaining. Disney has been warned, so we’ll see what they do. I’d like to see it work. I think there is an actor out there who could carry the torch of Indiana Jones during an exciting period that audiences would accept. However, short of that, it would be best to leave it alone, as the social impact of changing the value with new content would be devastating in ways that most people cannot measure. What I have said is the only way that it could be done because all other methods would be very destructive and unnecessary. People are pretty forgiving as long as they know they can trust a story not to change on them. And that’s true with everything in life. People can come and go, but people want to know that the story stays the same.
Everyone should read Leo Tolstoy’s little book published in 1886, The Death of Ivan llyich. It is the perfect story to exhibit what the great psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi articulated in his ground-breaking work on human motivations in his work titled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences. Ivan llyich was a successful man who had cancer and was dying and he had to come to terms with the meaning of his life essentially as it was closing. Slowly had to realize that the social climbs he had done throughout his existence, his marriage, his career, the things he put his value in up until the time he found out it was ending were worthless and personally disingenuous. The book is important because the great Tolstoy was knocking on the door he never quite entered in that book written late in his own life. The essence of it is that most people, if any people truly live any kind of fulfilled life and they never come to realize it until it was too late. Csikszentmihalyi later would take the next step with his book Flow, but back in 1886 is was quite something to ask such psychological questions sprinkled with elements of deep philosophy which is what high art should be.
Most people today, in 2019 are living the death of Ivan llych even as they think that what they are doing is living life. They meander about buying the things that society tells them to, reaching for the goals that they are told matter in life. I continue to be surprised at how people even in their 60s are obsessed with titles and office space because they are searching for meaning in their work that they just aren’t getting any other way. They have after all worked hard and towards the ends of their careers they need to know that it all mattered, yet nobody seems to care what they did or how they did it, because what they did do wasn’t authentic. Too often we allow ourselves to fill this empty feeling with political and religious motivations, both of which are quick to blame this effect on capitalism which is extremely disrespectful to the greatest economic device which produces the greatest human autonomy of anything ever invented by the human mind. But without facts and understanding people facing the problems of Ivan llyich who get pulled below the line in their thinking can’t come to terms with how they arrived where they did so quickly at the end facing the grim reality that none of it really mattered. Once they die there will be a funeral, people will come to it, but nobody will really care or miss them. And that is a tragedy most just can’t handle.
I was exposed to the writing of T.S. Eliot early in my life. I used to work at a high scale Chinese restaurant as a busboy and was dating the pianist who played there ever weekend and her daughter. They were both high art women who roamed around Cincinnati going to all the art exhibits, knew all the names of every wine and dined at the best restaurants. The mom was personally wealthy, her husband had died in much the same way that Ivan llyich had and left two very beautiful women behind to fend for themselves, one was in her forties and facing the prospect of losing that beauty forever and wanted desperately one adventure in life that mattered and the daughter was looking for a big personality to fill that void left by her father that was actually filled with quicksand she didn’t want to be consumed by. So I learned all about T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and would talk to them about it in ways that made them happy. The relationship was very fulfilling to them, but for me it was another example of how women can often be the boons of new experience, especially for men, young men at that. I was able to launch myself into a lifelong journey that started what I would say was a life of Flow as understood by Csikszentmihalyi. The Wasteland was about the same kind of sentiment as The Death of Ivan llyich and I was determined not to fall into that trap so you might say I have lived a very adventurous life. Not a comfortable one, but certainly one that was filled with great Flow and that continues even to this day 35 to 40 years later. I will never have the problem of Ivan llyich or even Leo Tolstoy for that matter. I learned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow before he published his groundbreaking book in 1990 and I have lived it every day through some very scary stuff.
All this came up the other day because all my grand children and my children were raised on the Indiana Jones movie Temple of Doom which came out in 1984. I would have never guessed when I saw it in person in the theaters way back then that it would be so important to my future family. My two youngest grandkids just love the energy of that movie even though it’s actually filled with some of the scariest stuff that one might find in human experiences. After all Indiana Jones in that movie gets tortured, poisoned twice, burnt, cursed, crushed and almost eaten by alligators. But at the same time he has a lot of fun making jokes even in the worst of circumstances and at the end of the film instead of sitting around crying about it seems to be ready for the next adventure. The movie is filled with crazy stuff from beginning to end but it is also all about the Flow experience that Csikszentmihalyi would later put to paper in his great book. Kids are born with a natural understanding of Flow and they enjoy Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom because it feeds them. The movie isn’t about some character arch about learning some progressive lesson in the movie, it’s about literally going to Hell and back without the bitterness of living through such an experience and openly accepting whatever life brings next, but the purpose is to live that life to the fullest, moment by moment every day.
I bring all this up to convey a message about how to live life. The best way to do it is with a sense of Flow and to enjoy it for whatever it is at any point that you experience it. The world we live in now assumes that you are suffering from the ailments of the fictional character Ivan llyich and are afraid of losing that nameplate on your desk or your office only to be replaced slowly by the next generation as the world has only use for the panicky youth full of sexual ambition and filling their bellies with food and drink. There is much more to life than even the most sophisticated circles of politics can even dream of. Living a life of Flow is the goal and should be for everyone. However, to do that you can’t get hung up on dumb stuff, and you can’t expect life to be perfect. Darryl Parks from WLW radio once asked me on air how I did it, how did I even manage to go anywhere after being such a controversial figure, because whenever you enter a grocery story or shopping mall where people might recognize you, there is always those little snickers in the corners of the room from people who wonder if it’s really you, the person that so many people hate or just dislike for a multitude of reasons. I told him off air during a commercial break that I didn’t usually see them because they were living in The Waste Land and weren’t living an authentic existence, so their opinions didn’t matter to me. I was living in my own Flow, and they obviously were stuck. They were all future Ivan llyichs. And that is the nature of most of our politics these days, and most of our understandings of economic theories—even our education systems. And my point is that we need to change the whole system into something that has more Flow and less Ivan llyichs.
It was reported to me that the Indiana Jones booth at COMIC CON in San Diago July 11th through July 15th will have a recreation of the famous Well of Souls scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark complete with live snakes to celebrate the release of all four Indiana Jones films to Blu-Ray. For those who need a map and want to know where to go, the Indiana Jones booth is 2913 at the Lucasfilm pavilion on the show floor. In the spirit of this exciting push to keep the name of Indiana Jones alive I am going to spend a moment to defend the last film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from the scrutiny it has received, which I have been thinking about for 4 years now.
To me all the Indiana Jones films are innovative fun escapades into the deepest questions of our times. Few people know it but George Lucas originally wanted to be an anthropologist but since he settled into a job as a “filmmaker,” the character of Indiana Jones allowed him to explore aspects of archeology that he could have only dreamed of as a field scientist. However, I will say this; George Lucas should go down in history as one of the greatest archeologists who ever have lived for the simple fact that many of today’s current world explorers, scientists, physics geeks, treasure hunters, mercenaries, and authors have been profoundly inspired by George Lucas’ creation of the character Indiana Jones. Because of Indiana Jones hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars have been invested in archeological research that would have never happened in the field of that scientific endeavor if not for the first Indiana Jones movie, the greatest movie in the history of the world in my opinion, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I would have come to use a bullwhip anyway, since my grandfather passed on to me the love of it which predated Raiders. He and his father were deeply inspired by old Zorro films like Don Q Son of Zorro from the silent era, so he was going to teach me whether I liked it or not. But when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, which was a tribute to those old Saturday Matinees it allowed my generation to understand what my grandfather’s generation had loved so much. From the early film era of the 1940’s it was Zorro’s Fighting Legion that I love the most, and Indiana Jones was the modern mythic tale of those old adventures. So I took to the study of the bullwhip which has personally led me on many unique adventures and has given me a view of the world few get to see through that martial art weapon.
Some die hard film critics will say that Temple of Doom was the worst Indiana Jones film. Even Steven Spielberg has said he isn’t proud of that movie. Yet, the film is one of the most beloved movies in the history of film. It invented the PG13 rating because the film was too violent to be simply rated PG and was too family oriented to be rated R. Temple of Doom is the ultimate adventure film and studios have been trying unsuccessfully to tap into the magic of that particular movie for many, many years. I’ve seen it at the movie theater over 15 times that I can remember, the most exciting time was when I was on a high adventure camp excursion deep in the hills of Kentucky within one week of Temple of Doom’s release. I was only 15 at the time so I was under the care of adult supervisors. After a day of intense backwoods hiking and spelunking the members of our camp went to bed around 9 PM. Two of my friends in the same tent waited patiently with me for everyone to go to sleep since everyone was exhausted and covered in dirt and sweat. When we no longer heard voices speaking from the many tents, we quietly escaped and ran 5 miles into a nearby college town to catch the last showing of Temple of Doom for the day at 11:15 PM. With sweat pouring down our faces and backs we bought our tickets and sat down in the wonderfully air-conditioned theater just as Indiana Jones came into the Club Obi Wan with his white tuxedo. I have raised my children to the movie Temple of Doom. It played on our television every day for about 8 years. I raised my niece and nephews on the movie since my wife and I helped raise them as children. To this day, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom brings them found memories that they cherish from their childhoods. It is the story of good and evil and even though Indiana Jones gets stabbed, burnt, tortured, poisoned, possessed, and beat up in countless ways he somehow comes out heroically in the end facing all the dangers by stating, “It’s a long way to Deli,” meaning anything can happen, and we’ll deal with it as it comes. To this day my wife and I say that to each other whenever a series of bad things happen, and it brings comic relief.
(This is a personal friend of mine, Gery Deer in Jamestown, Ohio performing at the Murphey Theater in Wilmington.)
When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out, I took my oldest nephew who was 5 at the time out of school to the premier. We saw the movie on opening day for the very first screening. I figured he would learn a lot more at that movie than he would in school, which I was of course right. In Last Crusade the archeology follows along the lines of the typically Christian pursuit of archeological relics. Made just 8 years after the first film in Raiders, Last Crusade had not yet experienced the changes in archeology that would come as a result of the massive amount of money that was flowing into the science because of Indiana Jones. Last Crusade was about the legend of the Holy Grail which is an item that runs deep into Christian religions. This film took Indiana Jones back to his childhood so audiences could see what kind of events helped shape the kind of person that Indiana Jones would become as a man. The concept was so successful that George Lucas started a television show called The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles that would be geared to teaching people about the events of world history taking place from 1900 to around 1919. (Yes, I have every one of them on DVD and my kids have watched them all with me many, many, many times.)
For many fans, The Last Crusade would be their last impression of Indiana Jones. Archeology to them would be biblical in scope, and the adventures of Indiana Jones would end. Life would move on. To the rest of society, people get old, and they put away the items of childhood, which Indiana Jones was. The television show was enjoyed by people like me who naturally loved history, but was not geared to the swashbuckling action of the movies. Instead it centered on the character development of Indiana Jones as a young man.
Over the years many things happened in popular culture. Thousands of archeologists who went to college and pursued their dream of working in that business because of Indiana Jones were doing investigations of their own. Private investors who loved the Indiana Jones movies poured millions of dollars into college research projects giving archeology a lot of money that it didn’t have prior to 1981 when Raiders of the Lost Ark hit theaters. In the 1990’s archeology were doing some big things—but the revelations being discovered with all this new money was not more of the Christian based study that many would have thought it to be. The evidence being discovered was that human existence on planet earth was much more complex than we previously thought and it appears that mankind had help getting started. So when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out, audiences who did not know of these developments were a bit mystified to see what had happened.
My oldest daughter asked me how I managed years ahead of the film’s release to make many of the statements about human society that Crystal Skull was making. I explained to her that George Lucas was following the Robert Pirsig “quality rule” as he was in front of the train yet again while the rest of society was well in the back. Crystal Skull offered an explanation to the advanced societies all over the planet that were obviously connected in some way. This science was revealed in part by Indiana Jones films, so it was up to Indiana Jones to offer the difficult reality that other beings played a part in human evolution, and not just beings from outer space, but “interdimensional” creatures. I had come to this same conclusion years ago after my own studies, which is why my daughter was amazed that Crystal Skull was right on target with what I had been saying for nearly 10 years, that earth was seeded from another civilization that did not originate on earth and that the idea of God had suddenly become much larger.
After 20 years of not seeing Indiana Jones on the big screen audiences were suddenly confronted with an Indiana Jones who was 70 years old who was still in fist fights, romancing women, and performing unbelievable stunts. This is a difficult reality to a society of people who cast senior citizens into disregard past age 65. Seeing a film icon like Harrison Ford looking quite good as a 70 year old man shattered perceptions of what the elderly could do, and opened up the possibility that aging didn’t have to be a degrading process. The second thing that audiences had trouble with was that Indiana Jones survived a nuclear explosion by climbing into a lead lined refrigerator. Many fans did not know that the only objects to survive nuclear explosions in the many tests done were lead lined refrigerators, so Indiana Jones true to his past exploits of always finding a way to survive climbed into the only thing that would have saved him from a nuclear blast, a lead lined refrigerator.
Fans were mixed on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It wasn’t what they thought it should have been. Indiana Jones as a character had evolved over the years through the television show, which was incorporated into the new film and it served as a kind of bridge to merge the films and the television show together. The abandonment of typically Christian relics also caused some anxiety as the plot of Crystal Skull centered on the ancient alien oriented plot complete with flying saucers and little green men. And of course people had a hard time accepting Indiana Jones as an older person with a society that thinks age 30 is the end of life as they know it. But, society will catch up to the vision of George Lucas. They are doing it already. The current show on the History Channel Ancient Aliens would have never become possible if not for the mass audience exposure to the kind of information that has been coming in from archeological research. The mainstream audience was confronting for the first time in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the possibility that mankind’s Gods were in fact beings from another world, and possibility from another dimensional reality which really messed with the stereotypes many had formed over the years through their religious studies.
Before seeing Crystal Skull I had already read several books by Zecharia Sitchin and of course the great Forbidden Archeology by Cremo and Thompson so I could almost see George Lucas smiling from behind the movie screen as I watched the events of the latest Indiana Jones movie play out. I knew exactly what he was doing, and slowly, four years after the release of that very innovative movie, people are beginning to catch up to Lucas’ vision. In the years to come, it will be Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that will be known for changing the way human beings see themselves as science is only now starting to admit that the discoveries of Indiana Jones in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull film are turning out to be more of a reality than they ever dared to admit.
I personally loved Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and I place it somewhere in quality to being between Last Crusade and Temple of Doom. To this very day it is Raiders of the Lost Ark that is my favorite movie of all time. So much so that the CD soundtrack has been played in my home and to my family well over a thousand times—my oldest daughter actually used to sleep to it. When she was married, it took her about 6 months to finally learn to sleep without listening to the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack. My favorite song on that soundtrack is called “Desert Chase” which I listen to almost every day at least once. In fact yesterday as I cleaned my motorcycle, I listened to that part of the soundtrack on my iPOD.
For my birthday several years back, my family bought me a leather flight jacket from U.S.Wings that was made from the same roll of leather that created the leather jacket for Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I have put that jacket through absolute hell. It’s been drug in the dirt, pelted with rain, snow, ice, and had just about every kind of living creature crawling on it. It has been to the top of mountains and touched the breath of foreign countries. It has seen 30,000 miles of torture from a motorcycle. I said to my family just the other day that the jacket was just now starting to get the look of “character” that I like. In another 15 years, it should look just about right. Indiana Jones is known for his period style hat, his beat up leather jacket and his whip. Many of those things are part of my personal attire as they are of many science lovers coming out of the 1980’s who found magic and hope in Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones for millions has set the bar high for not only what we expect in our movies, but also in what we expect out of ourselves.
People often wonder how I have done and survived many of the things I have, and why I am not content to just drift off into the sunset on a sail boat. Well, I spent a lot of time watching Indiana Jones and raising my family on those films, and it just wouldn’t be right if I didn’t give them the closest thing in reality to that dynamic character. The magic of Indiana Jones is in saying “yes” to life, to not allowing convention to rule the day. If Indiana Jones is anything, he is probably the most tenacious character ever to appear in film, and he is a survivor to such an extent that not even a nuclear blast can stop him. He’s not a superhero from some other planet, or a multi millionaire who can afford to build the machines of his dreams to combat crime. Indiana Jones is just an ordinary man with an extraordinary sense of wonder and hope, which has never learned the word can’t, and that is why fans will flock to the Indiana Jones booth at COMIC CON and take pictures of themselves next to the live snake exhibit. They’ll do it because there’s a little bit of Indiana Jones in each of them, thanks to George Lucas who decided to make his kind of movie from the front of the social train while the rest of society watched from the back.
Yes, I will buy the new Blu-Ray set of the Indiana Jones films. I have a grandchild coming and I can promise that his first images, his first sounds, his very first impressions will be of Indiana Jones punching a bunch of maniacal Thuggee in the face from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. My grandchild has a lot to learn from me, and to prepare his mind for what his life will be like, he had better start thinking the way Indiana Jones does—that nothing is impossible, that life is a never-ending adventure, and even when the worst that can possibly happen happens—there is always a way out so long as your mind can dream and adapt.
The Overmanwarrior 