Would the Real Indiana Jones Please Stand Up?

After my birthday blog on Roy Chapman Andrews, Darren Naish commented that it is a myth that Andrews inspired Indiana Jones. I admit that this is a commonly told anecdote and that George Lucas never specifically cited a person as his inspiration for the character. He apparently told Steven Spielberg when they first discussed the movie trilogy in 1977 that he had been inspired by movie serials from the 1940s and the 1950s. Though these serials may have taken their inspiration from the real-life adventures of Andrews, he had retired by 1942. Other possible candidates for Indian Jones include:

*Professor Hiram Bingham III, an American academic, explorer and politician who rediscovered and excavated the lost Incan city of Machu Picchu in 1911.

*Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett a British archaeologist who disappeared in 1925 while searching for a lost city the Mato Grosso region of the Amazon jungle.

But perhaps the most interesting of ‘inspirations’ is religious archaeologist, Vendyl "Texas" Jones, who claims the fictional character was modeled after himself. He pointed out that by trimming his first name he could be ‘Endy Jones’ and claims his name made it into the movie by way of Randolph Fillmore, a science writer who attended one of his digs before writing the first draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

While Lucas and Spielberg remain generally tight lipped about their inspiration, Spielberg has adamantly denied that Vendyl Jones had any influence over the Indiana Jones character. Lucas says that Indiana is the name of his Alaskan Malamute and that originally he had planned on using the name Indiana Smith (after the fictional western movie character, Nevada Smith) but that Steven Spielberg changed it to Indiana Jones. Also, Randolph Fillmore was not involved in writing the first draft of movie And fortunately, Vendyl Jones has now stopped making his claim.

Happy Birthday!

Today is my birthday. I mean my actual birthday, because I started celebrating last week. I’ve seen all of my friends, most of my family (except my mom who is back home) and gotten loads of presents. It's been a pretty great celebration.

My birthday is shared with entertainer Liza Minnelli and American baseball player Darryl Strawberry and is a day after the death of one of the greatest explorers that ever lived: Roy Chapman Andrews died on March 11, 1960.

Roy Chapman Andrews was the real life Indian Jones, it was his adventures that inspired the fictional character. He was a naturalist, traveler, explorer and author.

Though he had a college degree he was so desperate to work at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) he took up a job scrubbing floors. A combination of taxidermy skills, an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, enthusiasm and ambition allowed him to finally convince the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to let him lead the museum’s most ambitious expedition: an exploration of the Gobi Desert. Andrews had to raise his own financial support and in 1922 made his first expedition to the Gobi to find the ‘missing link’ for Man. Bandits, venomous snakes, sandstorms were only some of the perilous and dangerous obstacles he faced. Instead of discovering human fossils, as he expected, he discovered mammals, reptiles and the first dinosaur eggs.

In 1934, after a series of expeditions to East Asia, he became the director of the AMNH and retired eight years later to the quiet town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where he wrote about his adventures. If you haven’t read any of his books I would recommend doing so. I read his autobiography Under a Lucky Star last year which chronicles many of his life’s adventures. Tough book to find, but definitely worth the read!