I was on vacation with my family when it came out. There were 2 twenty-something couples sitting beside us in a small seafood restaurant, & I just remember one of the girls saying, "Who knew? Harrison Ford... The new BIG movie star."
It caught my ear because I was 9 & EMPIRE had made Han Solo the coolest guy EVER. Not too long after (& this part is fuzzy), I saw a still from the movie on the cover of a TIME magazine, I think. That was all I needed.
My family just never really went to the movies. We just watched the ABC Sunday Night Movie & it was fine, but I WANTED to see Raiders bad. Then school started & stuff changed...
I still consumed EVERYTHING I could about Indiana Jones, but during the first few weeks of school, we had the first Scholastic Book 'catalog' come out & I bought the big, single issue of the MARVEL comic adaptation, & being the scaredy cat I was, some of the scenes had me terrified to actually SEE them with my own eyes. I'd ask every kid I could find to describe the movie to me, scene by scene, in great detail, but I just didn't want to actually SEE it.
During the next few years, I ran around the house with Piece of string, tied to a stick for a whip, asked for a brown, Members Only jacket because we couldn't afford a leather one since I'd only get to wear it a few months (I got a burgundy, knock off from Sears), & was given an old, brown 'fedora' that had a narrow brim & a straight crease down the middle, but you couldn't tell ANY of my fat butt that I was NOT Indiana Jones.
I had no fabrication skills, so my granny sewed me a sandbag, a satchel, & a whip holder (I had upgraded by this point to a 4ft, loosely braided whip with a wooded dowel as a handle that my dad found at a cattle sale.
I actually didn't SEE the movie until it came out in VHS. My brother was 15 yrs older than my & the only one in the family with a VCR, so he put his name on the waiting list at the local video store, & over a month later, my Mom & Dad let me skip school to spend the 2 nights with my brother's family that he'd have the rental.
It was incredible, as we all know.
Things kind of died down during high school, & it wasn't until our first trip to Disney with my wife & kids, that I saw the Indy merch & became obsessed all over again. I bought a whip from a YouTuber named Adam Winrich, & started learning all types of cracks & tricks. One of my proudest moments (& my wife's most horrific) was when I was practicing in the back yard one morning, & a deputy was called to the high school across the street for a report of "shots fired". That afternoon, after everything was cleared up, the principal, whom I knew pretty well called to ask that I only practice after hours. I said sure, but he told me, when the deputy came back to the school, the principal asked what was going on. The deputy responded, "Indiana Jones across the street was looking for the ******* Ark!".
I said all that to say this-
I was a SW fan first & foremost, but this movie was the one that shaped a LOT of my childhood, & probably the franchise I've come back to the most. IDK who here was in the business back then & may have had any hand in it's existence, but if you're here or know someone who did, tell them thank you.
