It leaves so many unanswered questions, e.g. what happened to Short Round, and why Indy doesn't believe in magic in Raiders.
And the reason was ridiculous. George Lucas said it was because he didn't want to make the Nazis the villains again. It's his screenplay, the villains can be whoever he wants, regardless of chronology.
And the movie is set in China and India, the Nazis never went near there.
That, and you know Jones is going to get out unscathed. It takes some of the suspense out of it.
shareI don't know about taking the suspense out of anything considering as others here have already mentioned that most people never even realized this was supposed to be a prequel until they heard about it online years after the fact. The prequel-ness of the film is such a subtle detail that it's essentially an easter egg.
shareAgreed. Also does any really one think going into a movie franchise that the main hero will die? lol.
shareWell, you see, I've seen the movie many times and just now realized it with because of this post. 😅
shareThe opening to Doom says 1935. Raiders said 1936 .
shareYou got to understand this was released before everything was available at your fingertips. I don't even think you could rent Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1984. So unless you had a great memory you wouldn't recall Raiders was a year after.
sharewell most film buffs back then would buy the novel and comic adaptations (so the years would be on the 1st page) . also it would probably be talked about in interviews with Spielberg/Lucas etc in the pages of the various SF magazines of the time Starlog, Cinefantastique etc and also the official Raiders and Doom souvenir magazines
shareI remember going to see it with a bunch of college friends when it came out and none of us had ever heard of it being a prequel whether it happened right before Raiders or right after wouldn't really change much though since the Nazi's didn't start invading Poland until 1939 and Japan didn't invade China until 1937... so the lack of any real conflict going on really didn't require the setting to be earlier than Raiders.
shareYou could. Raiders was first released on VHS in 1981. I had a 1983 release and it had a teaser for Temple of Doom on it.
https://youtu.be/5R4cEI-tkCw
Exactly. Not some subtle little detail that nobody would notice.
shareIndy is more than a Nazi fighter. China has been a very fertile land for pulp fiction heroes for a long time and that's the real nature of Indy; he's a typical pulp fiction action hero.
shareIt's possible that Lucas actually thought that Indy and Marion were now a couple and he wanted to make a movie which had Indy unattached. Either they break up or Indy is not allowed to be romantically involved with a character like Willie.
It's something that cropped up in previous pulp fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs married Tarzan off in his second Tarzan novel. He managed the next novel by separating Tarzan from Jane and then (4th novel) they had a kid and Burroughs immediately had the kid grow up and paired him off in the same book. Later in the series Jane was often simply forgotten (sometimes literally - Tarzan was prone to amnesia). Prince Valiant almost shuddered to a halt when Hal Foster couldn't keep his hero unattached...
He might also have liked the idea of stepping back, at least by a year, from WWII. In any event, many people didn't even notice that Temple of Doom was a prequel.
I didn't even know it was a prequel until years after the trilogy was complete. If one doesn't pay attention to the years the first two movies take place in, it's not noticeable.
I didn't know that was Lucas' reasoning for making it a prequel, though. It's pretty odd. As for Short Round, I figured he just went back home after this adventure was done.
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