It was pretty hard to miss the Star Wars references in tonight’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — and of course the love for Indiana Jones, even if there weren’t quite as many one-liners and visual callbacks to that film.
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Executive producer Phil Klemmer, who is no stranger to pop culture references having worked on Chuck early in his career, talked with ComicBook.com about the episode.
He told us, for a start, that the idea of Nate Heywood and Ray Palmer losing their identities if George Lucas never made Star Wars and Indiana Jones felt totally natural to him.
“That wasn’t that much of a stretch. For me, I got obsessed with studying Latin when I was in 7th grade because of Raiders and wanted to be an archaeologist,” Klemmer told us. “Obviously every single writer in our writers’ room was weaned on Spielberg and Lucas and ’80s movies and for us, we all know the power of a movie. We were just lonely kids who watched these things obsessively. We chose our careers based on having seen Goonies when we were 10 years old. It seems stupid but it really can change your life, so we wanted an episode that would be our love letter to that generation of filmmakers who made us choose a ridiculous career instead of doing something sensible with our lives.”
Of course, this was hardly the season’s first hat tip to the ’70s and ’80s, with the group having paid a visit to the office of another Hollywood great — President Ronald Reagan — in a previous episode when a time abberation made the President briefly the employer of Damien Darhk.
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DC’s Legends of Tomorrow moves to Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT when new episodes resume later this month. “Raiders of the Lost Art” debuts on January 24.
