You can’t buy happiness, but for $45 and a trip to Best Buy you can come closer than ever.
Indiana Jones is on DVD. Released nearly 20 years ago, these films (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) managed to turn archeology from bookish academia into the sexiest, most butt-kicking profession imaginable.
Harrison Ford is Dr. Indiana Jones: charismatic college professor by title and charismatic grave-robber by trade. Over the course of three movies, Jones travels the globe in the name of stopping evil, finding treasure and keeping his hat on.
In Raiders, Jones is hired by the United States government to recover the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do, whereas Temple has Indy fighting evil cultists and freeing children in a gigantic underground fortress/temple/mine (it’s as deep as it sounds). Crusade finds Jones once again racing the Nazis, this time for the Holy Grail, but mixes the formula with Sean Connery, Indiana’s father, and an extended opening sequence that reveals the events that made Indiana Jones into, well, Indiana Jones.
The films are only available as a boxed set, which includes a fourth “bonus disc,” so if you’re one of those “Temple of Doom sucks” folks, you’re just going to have to bite the bullet and purchase all three.
For those of you on a budget, it works out to $11.25 a disc, a more than reasonable price for the most quality action/adventure movies ever made.
Each of the three “movie discs” contains only the movie, that is, all of the customary DVD goodies (trailers, interviews) are relegated to the fourth disc. This means that the entire disc is devoted exclusively to making the movie look and sound its best, which they do.
Each punch, gunshot and whipcrack practically thunders with adventure, and the series’ signature temples, jungles and deserts are positively breathtaking. In preparation for the release, each film underwent an intense clean-up process. The master print of the three movies had roughly 100,000 pieces of dirt on it, and in the case of Raiders, a severe scratch ran across around 30,000 frames. Needless to say, these were removed.
So with great movies looking and sounding phenomenal, there has to be a catch right? Well, kind of.
The fourth disc is a disappointment. What we get are trailers for all three movies, four 12 minute featurettes on the stunts, special effects, sound, music of Indiana Jones and a documentary for each movie. Granted, all of these are done well, but after all this waiting, it seems like we could have been treated to a bit more. Outtakes, deleted scenes, storyboards, and commentary would have all been heartily welcomed.
Despite statements to the contrary, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll be getting a “deluxe-gold-plated-edition” of the films around Christmas time.
I suppose we’ll just have to wait for Indy 4.