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"I'm not too fond of snakes either."

- W.J. Flywheel, Webporium Curator

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INDIANA JONES

Indiana Jones is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials. The character first appeared in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1992 to 1996, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008.

Jones is most famously played by Harrison Ford and has also been portrayed by River Phoenix (as the young Jones in The Last Crusade) and in the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles by Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, and George Hall. Doug Lee has supplied the voice of Jones for two LucasArts video games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, David Esch supplied his voice for Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, and John Armstrong for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings.

The character is distinguished by his appearance (bullwhip, fedora, satchel and leather jacket), sense of humor, deep knowledge of many ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes.

Since his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones has become one of cinema's most famous characters. In 2003, the American Film Institute ranked him the second greatest film hero of all time.

A native of Princeton, New Jersey, Indiana Jones was introduced in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. The character is an adventurer reminiscent of the 1930s film serial treasure hunters and pulp action heroes, whose research is funded by Marshall College (named after producer Frank Marshall), a fictional college in Connecticut, where he is a professor of archaeology. He also attended the University of Chicago.

In this first adventure, he is pitted against the Nazis, who are commissioned by Hitler to recover the Ark of the Covenant. Dr Jones travels the world to prevent them from recovering the Ark and is aided by ex-girlfriend Marion Ravenwood. The Nazis are led by Jones's archrival, a Nazi-sympathizing French archaeologist named René Belloq, and Arnold Toht, a sinister Gestapo agent.

In the 1984 prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in 1935, Jones travels to India and attempts to free enslaved children and the three Sankara stones from the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. He is aided by Short Round, a young boy, and is accompanied by singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw).

The third film, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in 1938, returned to the formula of the original, reintroducing characters such as Sallah and Marcus Brody, a scene from Professor Jones's classroom (he now teaches at Barnett College), the globe trotting element of multiple locations, and the return of the infamous Nazi mystics, this time trying to find the Holy Grail. The film's introduction, set in 1912, provided some back story to the character, specifically the origin of his fear of snakes, his use of a bullwhip, the scar on his chin, and his hat; the film's epilogue also reveals that "Indiana" is not Jones's first name, but a nickname he took from the family dog. The film was a buddy movie of sorts, teaming Jones with his father, often to comical effect. Although Lucas intended to make five Indiana Jones films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the last for over eighteen years, as he could not think of a good plot element to drive the next installment.

The 2008 film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, is the fourth film in the series. Set in 1957, 19 years after the third film, it pits an older, wiser Indiana Jones against Soviet agents bent on harnessing the power of an extraterrestrial device discovered in South America. Jones is aided in his adventure by his former lover, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and her son, Henry "Mutt" Williams (Shia LaBeouf), later revealed to be Jones's biological child. The film also reveals that Jones was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, attaining the rank of Colonel in the United States Army. He is tasked with conducting covert operations with MI6 agent George McHale against the Soviet Union.

In March 2016 it was officially announced that there is a fifth Indiana Jones film currently in development, with Ford and Spielberg set to return to the franchise. The film will be released on July 19, 2019.

From 1992 to 1996, George Lucas executive-produced a television series named The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, aimed mainly at teenagers and children, which showed many of the important events and historical figures of the early 20th century through the prism of Indiana Jones' life.

The show initially featured the formula of an elderly (93 to 94 years of age) Indiana Jones played by George Hall (right) introducing a story from his youth by way of an anecdote: the main part of the episode then featured an adventure with either a young adult Indy (16 to 21 years of age) played by Sean Patrick Flanery or a child Indy (8 to 11 years) played by Corey Carrier. One episode, "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues", is bookended by Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, rather than Hall. Later episodes and telemovies did not have this bookend format.

The bulk of the series centers around the young adult Indiana Jones and his activities during World War I as a 16- to 17-year-old soldier in the Belgian Army and then as an intelligence officer and spy seconded to French intelligence. The child Indy episodes follow the boy's travels around the globe as he accompanies his parents on his father's worldwide lecture tour from 1908 to 1910.

The show provided some backstory for the films, as well as new information regarding the character. Indiana Jones was born July 1, 1899, and his middle name is Walton (Lucas's middle name). It is also mentioned that he had a sister called Suzie who died as an infant of fever, and that he eventually has a daughter and grandchildren who appear in some episode introductions and epilogues. His relationship with his father, first introduced in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was further fleshed out with stories about his travels with his father as a young boy. Indy damages or loses his right eye sometime between the events in 1957 and the early 1990s, when the "Old Indy" segments take place, as the elderly Indiana Jones wears an eyepatch.

In 1999, Lucas removed the episode introductions and epilogues by George Hall for the VHS and DVD releases, and re-edited the episodes into chronologically ordered feature-length stories. The series title was also changed to The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.

The character is also featured in novels (based on the movies and some original stories), comics, video games, and other media. Indy also appears in the 2004 Dark Horse Comics story Into The Great Unknown, collected in Star Wars Tales Volume 5. In this non-canon story bringing together two of Harrison Ford's best roles, Indy and Short Round discover a crash-landed Millennium Falcon in the Pacific Northwest, along with Han Solo's skeleton and the realization that a rumored nearby Sasquatch is in fact Chewbacca.

Indiana Jones is also featured in the Disney theme park attraction, Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea, as well as the Disneyland Paris attraction Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril.

The Americian and Japanese attractions were some of the most expensive of their kind at the time and opened in 1995 and 2001, respectively, with sole design credit attributed to Walt Disney Imagineering. Disney did not originally license Harrison Ford's likeness for the American version; nonetheless, a differentiated Indiana Jones audio-animatronic character appears at three points in both attractions. However, the Indiana Jones featured in the DisneySea version does use Harrison Ford's likeness but uses Japanese audio for all of his speaking parts. In 2010, some of the Indy audio-animatronics at the Disneyland version were replaced with ones resembling Ford.

The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! is a live show that has been presented in the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park of the Walt Disney World Resort with few changes since the park's 1989 opening, as Disney-MGM Studios. The 25-minute show presents various stunts framed in the context of a feature film production, and recruits members of the audience to participate in the show. Stunt artists in the show re-create and ultimately reveal some of the secrets of the stunts of the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, including the well-known "running-from-the-boulder" scene. Stunt performer Anislav Varbanov was fatally injured in August 2009, while rehearsing the popular show.

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Indiana" Jones's full name is Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., and his nickname is often shortened to "Indy".

In his role as a college professor of archaeology, Jones is scholarly and learned in a tweed suit, lecturing on ancient civilizations. At the opportunity to recover important artifacts, Dr. Jones transforms into "Indiana," a "non-superhero superhero" image he has concocted for himself. Producer Frank Marshall said, "Indy [is] a fallible character. He makes mistakes and gets hurt. ... That's the other thing people like: He's a real character, not a character with superpowers." Spielberg said there "was the willingness to allow our leading man to get hurt and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him." Harrison Ford said the fun of playing the character was because Indiana is both a romantic and a cynic, while scholars have analyzed Indiana as having traits of a lone wolf; a man on a quest; a noble treasure hunter; a hardboiled detective; a human superhero; and an American patriot.

Indiana Jones is modeled after the strong-jawed heroes of the matinée serials and pulp magazines that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg enjoyed in their childhoods (such as the Republic Pictures serials, and the Doc Savage series). Sir H. Rider Haggard's safari guide/big game hunter Allan Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines, who dates back to 1885, is a notable template for Jones. The two friends first discussed the project in Hawaii around the time of the release of the first Star Wars film. Spielberg told Lucas how he wanted his next project to be something fun, like a James Bond film. According to sources, Lucas responded was something to the effect that he had something even better.

One of the possible bases for Indiana Jones is Professor Challenger, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1912 for his novel, The Lost World. Challenger was based on Doyle's physiology professor, Sir William Rutherford, an adventuring academic, albeit a zoologist / anthropologist.

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Another important influence on the development of the character Indiana Jones is Carl Barks' comic character Uncle Scrooge, which, since his creation has been an intellectual property of the Walt Disney Company. Carl Barks created Uncle Scrooge in 1948 as a one-off relation for Donald Duck in a Donald Duck comic book. Barks realized that the character had more potential, so a separate "Uncle Scrooge" Dell Comics book series full of exciting and strange adventures in the company of his duck nephews was developed. This Uncle Scrooge comic series strongly influenced George Lucas. This appreciation of Scrooge as an adventurer influenced the development of Jones in clear and obvious ways. For example, the prolog of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" contains an homage to Barks' Uncle Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Gold" published in "Uncle Scrooge" #7, Dell Comics, September 1954. This homage in the film takes the form of playfully mimicking the removal-of-the-statuette-from-its-pedestal and the falling-stone sequences of the comic book.

While a prototype of Uncle Scrooge in the beginning was Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol", quickly the personality of Scrooge took on some of the characteristics of H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain and Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger. This means then that Lucas and Spielberg may have been influenced directly by Haggard's Quatermain and Doyle's Challenger, as noted above, but also indirectly through Bark's/Disney's Uncle Scrooge.

The character was originally named Indiana Smith, after an Alaskan Malamute called Indiana that Lucas owned in the 1970s and on which he based the Star Wars character Chewbacca. Spielberg disliked the name Smith, and Lucas casually suggested Jones as an alternative. The Last Crusade script references the name's origin, with Jones's father revealing his son's birth name to be Henry and explaining that "we named the dog Indiana", to his son's chagrin.

Lucas has said on various occasions that Sean Connery's portrayal of British secret agent James Bond was one of the primary inspirations for Jones, a reason Connery was chosen for the role of Indiana's father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg earned the rank of Eagle Scout and Ford the Life Scout badge in their youth, which gave them the inspiration to portray Indiana Jones as a Life Scout at age 13 in The Last Crusade.

Costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis noted that the inspiration for the series as well as Indiana Jones' outfit was Charlton Heston's Harry Steele in Secret of the Incas (1954) and called Raiders of the Lost Ark "almost a shot for shot" remake of the Heston film, citing that Indiana Jones was "a kinder, gentler Harry Steele".

Many people are said to be the real-life inspiration of the Indiana Jones character, although none have been confirmed as inspirations by Lucas or Spielberg. Names floated in this regard unclude:

Italian archaeologist and circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823).

Yale University professor, historian, US senator, and explorer Hiram Bingham III, (right top) who rediscovered and excavated the lost city of Machu Picchu, and chronicled his find in the bestselling book The Lost City of the Incas in 1948.

University of Chicago archaeologist Robert Braidwood.

British archaeologist Percy Fawcett (right 2nd from top), who spent much of his life exploring the jungles of northern Brazil, and who was last seen in 1925 returning to the Amazon Basin to look for the Lost City Of Z. A fictionalized version of Fawcett appears to Jones in the book Indiana Jones And The Seven Veils.

Frederick Russell Burnham (right 2nd from bottom), the celebrated American scout and British Army spy who heavily influenced Haggard's fictional Allan Quatermain character and also became the inspiration for the Boy Scouts.

British archaeologist and soldier T. E. Lawrence (right bottom, AKA Lawrence of Arabia).

Northwestern University political scientist, anthropologist, professor and adventurer William Montgomery McGovern.

Vendyl Jones (1930 - 2010) who led digs in Israel searching for the holy ark.

Carl Ethan Akeley (May 19, 1864 – November 18, 1926) Explorer, sculptor, biologist, conservationist, inventor, taxidermist, and nature photographer, noted for his contributions to American museums, most notably to the Field Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. He is considered the father of modern taxidermy.

Upon requests by Spielberg and Lucas, the costume designer gave the character a distinctive silhouette through the styling of the hat; after examining many hats, the designers chose a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed fedora. As a documentary of Raiders pointed out, the hat served a practical purpose. Following the lead of the old "B"-movies that inspired the Indiana Jones series, the fedora hid the actor's face sufficiently to allow doubles to perform the more dangerous stunts seamlessly. Examples in Raiders include the wider-angle shot of Indy and Marion crashing a statue through a wall, and Indy sliding under a fast-moving vehicle from front to back. Thus it was necessary for the hat to stay in place much of the time.

The hat became so iconic that the filmmakers could only come up with very good reasons or jokes to remove it. If it ever fell off during a take, filming would have to stop to put it back on. In jest, Ford put a stapler against his head to stop his hat from falling off when a documentary crew visited during shooting of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This created the urban legend that Ford stapled the hat to his head. Anytime Indy's hat accidentally came off as part of the storyline (blown off by the wind, knocked off, etc.) and seemed almost irretrievable, filmmakers would make sure Indy and his hat were always reunited, regardless of the implausibility of its return. Although other hats were also used throughout the films, the general style and profile remained the same.

The fedora was supplied by Herbert Johnson Hatters in England for the first three films. The fedora for Crystal Skull was made by Steve Delk and Marc Kitter of the Adventurebilt Hat Company of Columbus, Mississippi.

The leather jacket, a hybrid of the "Type 440" and the A-2 jacket, was made by Leather Concessionaires (now known as Wested Leather Co.) for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. For Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, jackets were made in-house at Bermans & Nathans in London based on a stunt jacket they provided for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tony Nowak made the jacket for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The Indiana Jones shirt is based on a typical safari-style shirt. Its distinctive feature is two vertical strips running from the shoulders to the bottom of the shirt tails and continued over both breast pockets. A common debate regards the original shirt color. Surviving samples of the original shirts seem to be darker in reality than they appear on screen. Most fans look for an off-white "stone" color for their replicas. The original shirts, however, may have been more of a "tan" or "natural" color. The shirt varied little from film to film, the only notable difference being the darker buttons in Temple of Doom and Last Crusade. Originally designed by Andreas Dometakis for the films, this shirt was once one of the hardest pieces of gear to find.

The trousers worn by Indiana Jones in all three films were based on original World War II Army and Army Air Corps officer trousers. Although not original Pinks they are based on the same basic design and do carry a slight pinkish hue. The trousers made for Raiders are said to be more of a greyish-brown whereas the trousers made for Temple of Doom and Last Crusade were supposedly a purer reddish brown. The trousers were made of a khaki wool-twill, pleated with seven belt loops, two scalloped button flap rear pockets, a button fly and a four-inch military style hem. They were all most likely subcontracted by the costume department and made by famed London based cinema costumers, Angels and Bermans, to be tailored perfectly for Harrison Ford for the production.

The satchel was a modified Mark VII gas mask bag that was used by British troops and civilians during World War II.

The whip was a 8 to 10 foot (2.4 to 3.0 m) bullwhip crafted by David Morgan for the first three films. The whips for Crystal Skull were crafted by a variety of people, including Terry Jacka, Joe Strain and Morgan (different lengths and styles were likely used in specific stunts).

The pistol was usually a World War I-era revolver, including the Webley Government (Last Crusade and Crystal Skull), or a .45 ACP Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector 2nd model revolver (Raiders). He has also used an M1917 revolver (Temple of Doom), a Nagant M1895 (Young Indiana Jones), and a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power (Raiders). The weapon is carried in a military pattern flap holster.

The shoes were made by Alden. A stock style (model 405) that had been a favorite of Ford's before the films, they are still sold today (though in a redder (brick) shade of brown than seen in the films) and are popularly known as "Indy Boots."

The fedora and leather jacket from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's American History Museum in Washington, D.C. The collection of props and clothing from the films has become a thriving hobby for some aficionados of the franchise. Jones' whip was the third most popular film weapon, as shown by a 2008 poll held by 20th Century Fox, which surveyed approximately two thousand film fans.

Originally, Spielberg suggested Harrison Ford; Lucas resisted the idea, since he had already cast the actor in American Graffiti, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and did not want Ford to become known as his "Bobby De Niro" (in reference to the fact that fellow director Martin Scorsese regularly casts Robert De Niro in his films). During an intensive casting process, Lucas and Spielberg auditioned many actors, and finally cast actor Tom Selleck (right) as Indiana Jones.

Shortly afterward pre-production began in earnest on Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, CBS refused to release Selleck from his contractual commitment to Magnum, P.I. (which was gradually gaining momentum in the ratings), forcing him to turn down the role.

One of CBS's concerns was that shooting for Magnum P.I. conflicted with shooting for Raiders, both of which were to begin about the same time. However, Selleck was to say later in an interview that shooting for Magnum P.I. was delayed and did not actually begin until shooting for Raiders had concluded.

After Spielberg suggested Ford again, Lucas gave in, and Ford was cast in the role less than three weeks before filming began.

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