Named after a dog
George Lucas came up with the character in the 1970s as an adventurer named Indiana Smith. Steven Spielberg disliked the surname, and it became JONES. The first name came from Lucas's dog, an Alaskan malamute called Indiana, and in The Last Crusade the joke is repeated: it is revealed that Indy took his nickname from the family dog.
Tom Selleck was the first choice to play him, but he was contracted to a television series and could not get free. Harrison Ford, who had played Han Solo for Lucas, took the part.
The fight that never happened
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a swordsman in a Cairo market swings a huge blade in a showy display, and Indy simply draws his gun and shoots him. The script had a long fight with the WHIP against the sword. But Harrison Ford was suffering from a stomach illness during filming in Tunisia, and he suggested cutting the scene short. It became one of the funniest moments in the film.
The rolling BOULDER at the start was made of fibreglass and plaster, not stone, but it was still heavy, and Ford outran it many times for different takes, after Indy tries and fails to swap the golden idol for a bag of sand. For the Well of Souls, the film-makers gathered thousands of SNAKES, and the cobra that faces Ford was separated from him by a sheet of glass.
It belongs in a museum
Indy's catchphrase about a precious object is that it belongs in a museum. Real archaeology is a slow, careful science of digging, recording and dating, and a real archaeologist does not rip a golden IDOL out of a TEMPLE, but the idea behind the line — that the past belongs to everyone — is the same one museums and archaeologists hold today.
Raiders is set partly in Egypt, where Indy searches for the lost ARK of the Covenant in a buried city. Our ancient Egypt page covers the real TOMB builders and the pyramids.
A father only twelve years older
In The Last CRUSADE, Sean Connery plays Indy's father, Henry Jones Senior, although he was only twelve years older than Harrison Ford. Their bickering relationship is at the heart of the film, which follows a hunt for the Holy GRAIL. The opening scenes show a young Indy getting his FEDORA, his whip and the scar on his chin.
Indy is a PROFESSOR of archaeology when he is not out adventuring, and the films often show him teaching a lecture hall of students before being called away. Harrison Ford's FEDORA and leather jacket from the films are now kept in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, alongside other objects from American history.
The second film, the Temple of DOOM, is set in India, and the fourth, released in 2008, follows a CRYSTAL SKULL. MARION Ravenwood, Indy's fearless partner from the first film, returns in the fourth, and SALLAH, his friend in Egypt, appears in two.
The rest of the grid holds the adventurer's kit: a MAP, a RELIC, a TREASURE, an ancient ARTIFACT, and the name INDIANA itself.