It turns out that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are as much movie nerds as Quentin Tarantino and that their four Indiana Jones films are just as full of references and echoes. But while Tarantino discovered most of his favorites on video, Lucas and Spielberg probably saw many of theirs in film school on 16mm prints, many of which never made the transition to video. Last month our own Richard von Busack wrote a post about a rare film called The Secret of the Incas (1954), with Charlton Heston as a fedora-and-leather-jacket-wearing adventurer. (Another Heston adventure, The Naked Jungle (1954), is also a definite influence.) Richard found his info at TheRaider.net, which is where I also went to work on this list of potential Indy influences. Many of the titles they list are difficult to find, and I'm also trying not to give away crucial plot points in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so -- to quote Indy himself -- I'm making this up as I go.

1. Saturday Afternoon Serials
For those that don't know, serials were presented in front of regular features in 20-minute installments over a period of 12 weeks (mainly in the 1930s and 1940s), leaving off each time with a cliffhanger, to be miraculously resolved the following Saturday. Many of them are rentable today, and you can watch the entire 240 minutes in one sitting, if you so wish. To date, I've made it all the way through only one serial, though I've attempted many. Most reviewers credit serials as a major Indy influence, but few reviews actually name which ones. I've narrowed it down to five. The first two are Zorro Rides Again (1937) and Zorro's Fighting Legion (1939), mainly for the swashbuckling hero's use of the bullwhip. These two are in the public domain and widely available on DVD and for download, but I'd suggest going with VCI Entertainment's DVD versions. The other three are examples of the "jungle adventure" subgenre: Perils of Nyoka (1942), Secret Service in Darkest Africa (1943) and Perils of the Darkest Jungle (1944) -- although each has also been released under alternate titles.

Remember serials? I don't, because I'm too young, and by the time I began going to the movies, it was already the practice for cinemas to stick to single, self-contained, feature-length fare. With the way screenings are arranged today, scheduled so that both theater owners and studios can get as much money from as many showings as possible, there's just no room for any accompanying shorts, especially the kind that don't end in a conclusive manner.

I'd probably be okay with being left out of that experience from the moviegoing past, but each time another Indiana Jones movie is released, I can't help but think I'm at least a little less appreciative of George Lucas' intent than some of the older folk in the audience. When Lucas thought up the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, he partly meant the film as homage to the serials he remembered from his childhood.

Yet Raiders didn't end with a cliffhanger, as most serials had on a weekly basis. And with the third sequel to that film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, arriving in theaters this week, I still wonder why at least two installments couldn't have been connected with the serializing device. Lucas had already somewhat shown us, through the uncertain ending of The Empire Stikes Back and continuation/resolution beginning of Return of the Jedi, that it could be done.