This is it, folks.  This is the greatest movie of all time.  It’s better than “Blade Runner” (1982), better than John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), better than “Aliens” (1986).  And those movies were all … perfect.  (Man the 1980’s really were a golden age for pop culture, weren’t they?)

I was eight years old when I saw this in the theater, and I thereafter was a bit of an Indiana Jones cultist.  It wasn’t just the action figures and board games and comic book and posters and role-playing games.  I actually resolved to become an archeologist (or a paleontologist), and I thought the best way that I could prepare for that as a third grader was to gain experience “in the field.”

So I would lead my friends on “digs” or “expeditions” in the forests around my neighborhood.  We would often arbitrarily pick a spot in the middle of nowhere and then just dig there, with a shovels we borrowed from my family’s garage.  We were hoping to find … anything of interest, I guess :buried treasure, dinosaur bones, Indian arrowheads, whatever.  (We never did.  About the only thing we “discovered” was that tree roots are a real bitch when you’re trying to dig a hole.)  I even kept maps and journals of our “adventures.”  These are the kinds of things that boys do before they discover girls.

I tried to look the part, too.  I had a brown cowboy hat that I hoped could pass for a fedora, an (empty) binocular case and a prop bullwhip snagged from a Levi’s jeans display at the local mall.  My older brother called me “Idaho Bones” because I essentially was a cheap, skinny knockoff of the character I wanted to emulate.  I hated it at the time, but as an adult, I kinda can’t dispute his assessment.

Oh, well.  We all had fun.  Every other boy in the neighborhood who spotted that bullwhip wanted to try it, so there’s that.

To this day, “Raiders” is still my favorite movie ever.

By the way, I am linking below to the Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers Youtube channel.