[It’s guest post time again! This one is written by Martin F, who has previously written here about Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and Blue Sphere among others]
After the enormous success of the Lego Star Wars games, Traveller’s Tales collaborating with LucasArts once again must have been an easy decision for all concerned parties, especially with a long-awaited fourth film on the horizon in their other blockbuster movie trilogy. But while Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures was obviously successful enough to feature in this blog, and to beget a sequel of its own, there are a number of ways in which it proves to be a bit of an awkward fit for the Lego game formula.
Ask your average person on the street to name twenty Star Wars characters, and while they might well get stuck somewhere around the halfway mark, they’d probably give it a valiant attempt. Ask the same person to name twenty Indiana Jones characters, however, and I imagine that all they’d give you is an incredulous look. One of the big appeals of Lego Star Wars was in seeing how that series’ huge ensemble cast appeared in animated plastic toy form, and what unique skills they brought to the table in order to aid you in your quest. In Lego Indiana Jones, on the other hand, these skills are mostly provided by various items found throughout the levels, which can be used by any character, giving you even less reason to want to play as anyone but the title character, and making the supporting cast feel noticeably more interchangeable.
Lost Ark section when you meet Marion Ravenwood, “Ladies are more nimble and can jump higher than other characters”. And if you think that seems like a rather regressive attitude to gender politics, well, just you wait. After making it through to the end of Raiders (or even before, if you want to jump around in the chronology like a maniac), it’s time for Temple of Doom. We’re introduced to this film’s love interest, Willie, right away this time, and like Marion, she is a nimble lady, and therefore able to jump higher, but she also has another very special skill; a scream irritating enough to break glass! To be fair, it’s not like the source material they were drawing from gave them much to work with in terms of positive character attributes for Willie. And wasn’t I just now complaining about characters feeling interchangeable? Sure, they could have just made Willie a reskinned Marion, but instead they decided to lean into Temple of Doom’s reputation as the bad one. If the thing that sets Willie apart is that audiences broadly found her to be annoying, one can argue that there’s a kind of perverse brilliance in making that into her special power in the game.
Rather less defensible, however, is the decision to have a cutscene that recreates the infamous monkey brains scene unchanged, or at least, as unchanged as a dialogue-free reworking starring Lego can be. And it’s not like faithful shot-for-shot reproductions are the norm in these games; the Lego games are, in fact, well known for presenting gently humorous twists on classic moments from the films. Even in this very game, there’s no horrifying plastic face-melting sequence when the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant; instead they run away scared when a bunch of your standard Lego white sheet ghosts fly out of the Ark.
Wait, I’m sorry, did I say Nazis? I meant ‘enemy guards’, of course. One of the more awkward changes made in the transition from a film series that was partially responsible for the later introduction of the ‘PG-13’ rating in films to a kid-friendly animated toy adventure was a scrubbing of references to who exactly the bad guys are in the first and third movies. After all, it’s one thing for actors in a period piece to wear historically accurate uniforms, it would be quite another to see Lego men running around emblazoned in swastikas. Some things needed to be changed to make the game kid-friendly. Which is why it’s all the more frustrating that a lot of the racist parts of Temple of Doom made it through unchanged.
As above, so below. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures was made by people who most likely enjoyed the Indy films when they were kids and uncritically replicated them in video game form, problematic elements and all. And the films themselves exist as a result of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg consciously trying to recreate the adventure serials of their own youths in much the same way. And I’m not saying that this is an inherently bad thing to do; there’s a reason the films and the game were successful. Moments like the giant boulder trap, or “he chose… poorly” are still remembered decades later because they are, in fact, brilliant. The tactile delight of smashing up Lego scenery remains as fun in desert and jungle environments as it was in space. And things like Indy being unable to function when snakes are around, or the way you can trick guards into opening doors for you by putting on the hats of defeated enemies have a unique charm that sets Lego Indiana Jones apart from the Lego games that came before, or the many, many more that were yet to come. But when digging up the past, not everything belongs in a museum. Some things are better left buried.
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