It’s well known that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were inspired by the adventure films of the past when they collaborated to create their first movie to feature hero Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. YouTube user StooTV has put together a video showing exactly how much an influence those films have had, by cutting shots from 31 adventure films from between 1919 and 1973 that compare to the opening 13 minutes of Raiders.
While StooTV doesn’t supply a list of all the films that he cites here, many are fairly recognizable. Now I’m certain that Spielberg didn’t set out to ape all of the shots in the comparison here, but it does illustrate how effectively the director managed to capture the tropes of the genre in a perfect distillation.
StooTV is something of an Indiana Jones fan. In his comments he mentions that he’s already working on a similar comparison for Raiders‘ famous truck chase sequence and has posted a number of the bookend sequences from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles television series featuring George Hall as Old Indy, segments that Lucas neglected to put on the DVD release of the series.
