The ‘Star Wars’ easter eggs hidden in ‘Indiana Jones’
The essential links between the New Hollywood era and the 1980s’ blockbuster big studio comeback were cinema titans Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
They also arguably ruined film, depending on your position. Forged in the halcyon era of Hollywood’s late 1960s commercial insecurity, when the studios just didn’t know how to translate the youth’s countercultural sea changes to ticket sales, the bigwigs opened shop to film schools in both Los Angeles and New York, inviting a new generation of filmmakers who both loved cinema yet had plenty subversive to say against a social backdrop of Vietnam, Watergate, and upending political tumult.
Such pessimism in the air fuelled the anti-heroes and moral ambiguity that lay at the heart of some of the US’ biggest movies of the day, Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Chinatown, and the vast underground of horror and exploitation, all tapped into the anxieties and mistrust pulsing through the nation’s air. The studios let the new film graduates get on with it, lacking any remote finger on the cultural pulse, and still miles away from figuring out how to strike box office gold.
In came Spielberg and Lucas. While boasting minor TV credits and low-key features between them, the 1970s’ pivot would see the pair catapulted to Hollywood’s A-list with dizzying pace. Pennies dropped for the studio honchos when Spielberg’s Jaws was released in June 1975, the shark thriller a mammoth winner around the world that kick-started the summer blockbuster business model. It was Lucas’ little Buck Rogers space opera idea that spelt the beginning of the end of the New Hollywood auteur era; however, a project that caused 20th Century Fox execs major anxieties over its effects-heavy budget and lagging schedule.
They needn’t have worried. Released in May 1977, Star Wars would yield a true cultural phenomenon, puncturing America’s malaise and delivering a fantasy slice of fun that sold tickets all over the world. After a year’s distribution around the globe, Lucas’ Star Wars beat Spielberg’s Jaws as the highest-grossing film to date.
Under the Lucasfilm production company, with Spielberg behind the director’s chair and roping in Star Wars’ Harrison Ford and composer John Williams, 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark would strike another massive success for the two, introducing the world to Indiana Jones and birthing a long-running franchise with as near a lifespan as Lucas’ space duelling saga. Naturally, being huge fans of each other, the Indiana Jones entries would hide easter eggs and secret details offering a link to the world of Star Wars.
First up is not long after Raiders of the Lost Ark’s unforgettable intro. When Jones is running down the hill toward a seaplane after the villainous Dr René Belloq has ordered the Peruvian natives to kill him, the pilot Jock, complete with his pet boa constrictor Reggie, flies Jones away from danger in his aircraft with the letters “OB-CPO” on its side, a nod to Star Wars’ respective droid and Jedi mage C-3PO and Obi-Wan Kenobi. The android translator and his robot sidekick, R2-D2, can be spotted in the Well of Souls’ hieroglyphics, too, when Jones and Sallah are uncovering the mysterious Ark’s stone cover.
Jump to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom three years later, with the original Star Wars trilogy now behind Lucas, and the Chinese nightclub that a dapper Jones escapes from with shrieking dancer Willie Scott after its musical opener is titled Club Obi-Wan. Several years would pass before film number three, but 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would include a Star Wars detail for the real fan anoraks. After the Boy Scout sequence exploring Jones’ youth, an unnamed nemesis during the water-battled ship segment can be seen striding past barrels labelled “carboneto”, Portuguese for “carbon”, being the solution Ford’s Han Solo character is frozen in The Empire Strikes Back.
Lastly, and perhaps tenuously, but 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sees the titular archaeologist mutter the lines “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” as the finale alien spaceship begins to whir menacingly, a slight homage to the line’s mainstay across the whole Star Wars saga.
