Raiders of the Lost Ark

It’s Steven Spielberg month on Cracked Movie Club! Back in the 1980s, everything George Lucas touched turned to gold (and action figures). As the newly crowned Prince of Hollywood, he had the power to make any movie he wanted. And the movie he wanted to make was… Indiana Smith, a treasure-hunting adventurer created as an homage to early Hollywood film serials like Zorro and Flash Gordon. Rather than direct the movie himself, Lucas went to his friend and fellow filmmaker Steven Spielberg and talked him into making it, leaving Lucas free to kick back and share creative input from safely behind his beard while Spielberg put it all together to form something that could sell tickets (and action figures). 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced the world to the strategically renamed hero Indiana Jones, kicking off a franchise that managed to last 27 years before completely embarrassing itself, which is almost certainly some kind of record.

On this inaugural episode of Cracked Movie Club, hosts Tom Reimann and Abe Epperson are joined by comedian Daniel Van Kirk as they discuss how poisonous snakes, punishing desert sands, an outbreak of what can only be considered a modern plague, and a grown man pooping his pants all came together to create Raiders of the Lost Ark. Along the way, they question whether Jones was ultimately a better name than Smith, the logistics of maintaining a puzzle tomb in the middle of a jungle, and whether a certain Disney prince made a depressing cameo appearance.