Indiana Jones Trivia
- George Lucas originally wanted to call his daring archeologist "Indiana Smith," which Steven Spielberg thought sounded too mundane. Together, they settled on "Jones."
- Harrison Ford was cast as Indian Jones less than three weeks before filming began.
- "Indiana " was the name of George Lucas's dog.
- The mysterious South American temple seen in the opening sequence was called the Temple of the Chachapoyan Warriors - and was set at Elstree Studios outside London.
- The same jungle "creepers" used to adorn the Dagobah set in The Empire Strikes Back dressed the Temple set.
- More than 100 live tarantulas were clown in for the shot.
- Ford had to outrun a 300-pound boulder 10 times before Spielberg got the shot he wanted in the film's thrilling opening sequence.
- Kauai, Hawaii, substituted for South America in the opening sequence of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK - but production designer Norman Reynolds and associate producer Robert Watts also scouted locations in Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Mexico.
- Te biplane Indy uses to escape from the warriors was located in Junction city, Oregon, and after filming was returned to its owner, Henry Strauch, who continued to use it to fly to work and back each day.
- Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan named Marion Ravenwood for his wife's grandmother (Marion) and a street off the winding Beverly Glen in Los Ageless (Ravenwood Court).
- The bar Marion owns in Nepal is called The Raven.
- Indiana Jones' fight with an Arab swordsman was memorably truncated because leading man Ford was suffering from abdominal pains and wanted to use the bathroom.
- To shoot the scene on Sallah's roof, crew members had to remove 300 television antennas from homes in Kairouan , Tunisia. TV hadn't been invented in 1936.
- In a nod to Star Wars, a "hieroglyph" of R2-D2 and C-3P0 can be spotted fleeting on the wall of the Well of Souls.
- The submarine sequence was filmed in La Rochelle, France, because the full-size sub (built for a never-filmed version of Das Boot) was too large to be moved further than the French coast.
- Tunisia was used to "stand in" for Egypt because, as production designer Reynolds reasoned, neither the Pyramids nor the Sphinx was seen in the film.
- The Nazi "Flying Wing" was created to reflect Hitler's advanced state of aeronautics and was built using a Fling Wing prototype created by Northrop=Grumman.
- The canyon in which Indiana Jones confronts Belloq and Nazis carrying the Ark was the same location used to represent Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope.
- Producer Frank Marshall said he "ended up not liking the monkey" who was an integral character in the plot. "He was impossible to work with," Marshall recalled. "Didn't listen to me at all."
- In 1989, one of Indiana Jones' kangaroo-hide bullwhip was at Christie's auction house in London for $43,000.
- The film's original title was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death.
- Willie Scott sings a Mandarin version of Col Porter's "Anything Goes" in the opening scene. The setting: Club Obi-Wan, named for the character in Star Wars.
- "Willie" was the name of Steven Spielberg's dog. Unmentioned in the script, singer Willie Scott's real first name is Wilhelmina.
- "Short Round" was named after Willard Huyck's dog.
- INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM was only the second theatrical film for Kate Capshaw (after 1982's A Little Sex) and the film debut for Ke Huy Quan, who later starred in the Spielberg-produced The Goonies.
- Originally, the screenplay for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK called for Indy, looking for a piece of the Staff of Ra, to travel to Shanghai, where he and Marion would escape a museum by hiding behind a rolling gong and would later be chased in a mine car. Both ides were later surfaced in INDIAN JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
- Actor Dan Aykroyd makes an uncredited cameo as the Englishman who welcomes Indy and Willie at the Shanghai airport.
- Both producer Frank Marshall and director Steven Spielberg also make cameo appearances during the airport sequence - as hard-to-spot tourists in the background.
- The car Short Round drives through the streets of Shanghai is a 1936 Auburn Boat-tail Speedster.
- The Mayapore River village was built in Sri Lanka on tea fields owned by Lipton.
- Chilled monkey brains? Try whipped cream and food coloring and Jell-O - that's what Kate Capshaw was really served in the dinner sequence.
- For the bug chamber sequence, Kate Capshaw was covered with more than 2,000 creepy, crawly insects.
- The rope bridge used in the climatic showdown wasn't an effect - it was specially constructed for the movie over a 300-foot gorge in Kandy, Sri Lanka.
- INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM was the first film to fully utilize THX's Theater Alignment Program, which ensured that cinemas showing the film met exacting technical and presentation standards.
- To prepare for his role as young Indiana Jones, the late River Phoenix said that instead of watching the first two Indy films, he concentrated on observing actor Harrison Ford out of character and basing his performance on Ford - not Jones.
- Although they don't appear in the film together, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE marked the second time Phoenix and Ford were cast in related roles: Phoenix played Ford's son in 1986's The Mosquito Coast.
- Sean Connery previously played James Bond; John Rhys-Davies co-starred in the Bond adventure The Living Daylights; Alison Doody played a Bond girl in A View to a Kill; and Julian Glover played a Bond villain in For Your Eyes Only.
- Glover also has a connection to the Star Wars saga - he played General Veers in Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back.
- Although the scar on Indiana Jones's chin is explained in THE LAST CRUSADE, in reality Harrison Ford got the scar in a car accident.
- The dog young Indiana Jones sees in the opening scenes of the film is an Alaskan malamute - the same breed as George Lucas's "real" Indiana.
- Sean Connery played Harrison Ford's father in the film but is only 12 years older than Ford in real life.
- For the sewer sequence, effects technicians created 1,000 mechanical rats to augment the hundreds of live rates they used in the filming.
- Connery and Ford shot the entire Zeppelin sequence without wearing any pants.
- The temple that houses the Holy Grail in the film is actually Petra, Jordan, and has virtually no interior.
- During filming, Queen Noor of Jordan and her royal family visited the set.
- Actor Michael Sheard is uncredited in his cameo appearance as Adolf Hitler, and also played a Nazi U-boat commander in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the doomed Admiral Ozzel in Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back.
