Indiana Jones Biography

Indiana Jones first appeared in the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and went on to become an enduring hero of movies, TV and video games.

As played by Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones was an intrepid, fist-fighting archaeologist who wore a fedora and carried a bullwhip while racing the Nazis to unearth the lost Ark of the Covenant. The movie was the brainchild of George Lucas (who first dreamed up the character) and Steven Spielberg (who directed), and co-starred Karen Allen as Jones’s old flame Marion Ravenwood.

Harrison Ford starred in two sequels in that same decade: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989, with Sean Connery as Indiana’s dad). An episodic television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, ran from 1991-93; it starred Sean Patrick Flanery as the teenaged Jones and Corey Carrier as the very young Jones. A fourth feature film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, once again starring Ford and Allen, was released in  2008.

Yet another absolutely-last-time sequel, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was released in 2023, again starring Ford as Indiana Jones. In that film he was hunting Archimedes’ Dial, a woo-woo object said to have been built by the ancient mathemetician to lead users to “fissures in time.” (No such object existed in the real world, just FYI.)

And now for a side note: The first film in the series was originally titled simply Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the 21st century, the film’s owners decided to retcon the name to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, so that the phrasing would be in line with all the “Indiana Jones and the…” sequel titles. This was a dumb choice, because the title is now redundant; Indiana Jones was himself one of the raiders of the lost ark in the film. Discerning filmgoers will continue to call the first film by its true name, Raiders of the Lost Ark.