The 10 Biggest Indiana Jones Rip-offs

Posted at 5:05 AM Mar 21, 2008

By Todd Ciolek

Raiders of the Lost Ark did more than just introduce Indiana Jones and turn Steven Spielberg and George Lucas into Hollywood royalty. It also brought upbeat, half-silly 1930s serial adventures back to life, inspiring everyone from moviemakers to game developers to copy the film’s style and its roguish, whip-cracking hero.
And copy it they did. Raiders and its two sequels touched off a pop-culture explosion that spawned imitators for decades to come, some okay, and others merely horrible. Topless Robot has sat down to decide which of them are the most obvious about it.

10) Earnest Evans

Video games had no fear of copyright law back in the age of the Sega Genesis. Take Earnest Evans, the star of a three-game series created by the workhorse Japanese developer Wolf Team. Earnest has Indy’s fashion sense, his whip, his gruffly efficient manner, his Prohibition-era sense of adventure, and his penchant for trekking around the globe to beat back ancient horrors. Still, Earnest has a few things Indy doesn’t: a flowing blond mullet, a variety of Lovecraft-inspired monsters to fight, and a green-haired Peruvian girl named Annet to tag along with him.

And Earnest did something Indy would never do: he let a woman upstage him. Earnest wasn’t even the star in his first game appearance: El Viento, a 1991 action-platform deal for the Genesis, focused on Annet fighting mobsters and demons while Earnest merely put in a cameo or two.

Earnest didn’t get the lead until El Viento’s considerably worse prequel, simply called Earnest Evans, arrived on the Sega CD (and, in cut-down form, on the Genesis). No one noticed. So great was Earnest’s emasculation that the last title in the alleged “Earnest Evans Series” put Annet back in the spotlight and called itself Annet Again. When you think about it, Earnest is actually Annet’s sidekick.

9) Montana Jones

Just about every lazily written cartoon of the ‘80s or ‘90s had its own little Indiana Jones parody, usually under titles like “Pasadena Jones.” Yet it fell to an alliance between anime studios and Italian producers to make an entire series about a leonine explorer named Montana Jones and ship it to easily entertained children around the world.

Fueled by the same thinking that gave us such cartoons as Sherlock Hound and Dogtanian and the Muskehounds, Montana Jones uncreatively thrust the Indy ethos into a world of 1920s cat-people, complete with steampunk embellishments like giant mechanical elephants. Though it limped through over 60 episodes and even inspired an (awful) game for the Panasonic 3DO, Montana Jones never came to the U.S., perhaps because 1994 was long past the sell-by date when it came to American kids and furry versions of Indiana Jones.

8) Frank Buck from Bring ‘Em Back Alive

The real-life Frank Buck was an animal trapper who found fame by catching defenseless creatures and appearing in jungle-adventure movies of the 1930s. It’d be tough to call him an Indiana Jones rip-off, seeing as how Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t come out until 1981. But when TV producers at CBS decided that they wanted a piece of the Indiana Jones pie, they went straight to Frank Buck’s legacy.

Granted a TV series and some very, very Raiders-ish music, the ‘80s version of Frank Buck was paired with an exasperated Asian sidekick and a brainy blonde romantic interest, predating The Temple of Doom’s similar supporting cast by a year or so. Buck himself was played by Bruce Boxleitner, fresh from the glowing, empty computer-scapes of Tron. In a safari hat and ridiculous shorts, Boxleitner’s Buck approached the show as a comedy, and the movie-lot production values put no one in danger of taking it seriously. Bring ‘Em Back Alive ended in 1983 after one season, and Boxleitner went on to Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Babylon 5, neither of which had him wearing shorts.

7) Jack T. Colton from Romancing the Stone

Romancing the Stone slides around accusations of aping Indiana Jones by pitching itself as metafictional fantasy fulfillment by a mousy romance novelist (Kathleen Turner), who effectively lives out one of her books on a South American odyssey. There’s a criminal conspiracy, a treasure hidden in an ancient temple, and, of course, a dashing man of the world to sweep her off her feet.

Jack T. Colton (Michael Douglas) isn’t an archeologist or even an accredited professor at some community college, but he’s still enrolled at the Indiana Jones school of sex appeal, the same school that made women love Harrison Ford and sit through The Mosquito Coast. Romancing also has a bit of Lucas-style comedy relief in Danny Devito, who plays a bumbling crook and, like Lucas’ most annoying characters, survives too much of the film.

6) Lara Croft from Tomb Raider

If anyone charged Lara Croft with swiping from Indiana Jones when she emerged on the market in 1996, such criticisms were rapidly forgotten as the buxom explorer established the Tomb Raider series as a hit and herself as a gaming icon. In all fairness, Croft’s creators at Core couldn’t be faulted for taking the concept of a male action hero and giving it gigantic breasts. The comic industry’s done it for decades.

If we were pretentious types trying to squeeze out a term paper, we could say that Lara serves as a feminist response to the sexist patriarch-type of globe-traversing Indy clones, as her rival in the original Tomb Raider is very much a ruder, redneck mockery of the rugged Dr. Jones. But then we’d feel silly.