Indiana Jones/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Banned in India: Temple of Doom, briefly, for obvious reasons.
  • Fake Nationality: John Rhys-Davies as an Arab begs to be mentioned.
    • Julian Glover plays an American, and Michael Byrne plays a German. Both are British.
    • Terribly British Paul Freeman as terribly French Belloq.
    • Alfred Molina ain't South American, señor.
    • Irish Alison Doody plays Austrian Elsa Schneider.
    • Australian Cate Blanchett as Ukrainian Irina Spalko.
    • Indy's failed attempt to impersonate a Scottish laird in The Last Crusade is an in-character version, if not a Lampshading of this trope, which originated with Harrison Ford attempting to mimic Sean Connery's accent while playing around.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Real Life Relative: Isla Blair, Mrs. Julian Glover offscreen, played Mrs. Donovan in Last Crusade.
    • In Crystal Skull, the girl who punches Mutt in the diner is Sophie Spielberg, daughter of Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw (Willie Scott in Temple of Doom).
  • Refitted for Sequel: Temple of Doom included several sequences originally planned for Raiders of the Lost Ark:
    • Much of the original sword fight that would have been between Indy and the swordsman he shot instead made it into the sword fight at the end of Temple of Doom (where Indy tries the same thing, but his gun is missing).
    • The minecart chase was originally planned for Raiders (and even storyboarded) but had to be cut for pacing reasons.
    • Indy hiding behind a rolling gong from machine gunfire and the life raft escape from a plane and down a mountain slope were in the original script for Raiders.
      • The rolling gong went as far as being storyboarded.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Had Sean Connery declined to appear in The Last Crusade, Gregory Peck was Spielberg's second choice to star as Henry Sr.
    • Tom Selleck was Spielberg's original pick as Indy, but Selleck was unable to get out of his contract to Magnum, P.I., thus paving the way for Harrison Ford. Take a look at High Road To China (1983) to get an idea of what Selleck might have been like. We dodged a bullet there. Not to mention Ford's acting career might have ended with Star Wars just like most of his costars if George Lucas hadn't gotten him a second iconic role.
      • The DVD features include a screen test of Selleck, where he certainly doesn't display the charming badassery Ford brought to the role.
    • There were loads of unfilmed scripts written for Young Indy episodes before the series was canceled. One involved Indy meeting a young Rene Belloq and unearthing a crystal skull in South America, an idea Lucas reused (obviously) for the MacGuffin of Crystal Skull.
    • If The Other Wiki is to be believed about the production history of the fourth movie, we could've gotten it some fifteen years earlier with a very different plot if Lucas had not insisted on it involving extraterrestrials.
  • You Look Familiar: The taskmaster and the Nazi Giant Mook in parts 1 & 3 (the latter in a deleted scene) Indy kills were played by the same, late stuntman Pat Roach.
  • The Wiki Rule: Indiana Jones Wikia