Three decades ago, Disney released the greatest Indiana Jones spoof of all time, bringing an unlikely franchise story full circle in the process. The Indiana Jones movies are massively influential, as evidenced by everything from The Mummy franchise to the novels of Dan Brown. However, one reason Harrison Ford’s adventure franchise had such an outsized mark on pop culture is that the Indiana Jones series itself was, in turn, influenced by a lot of earlier movies, novels, and shows.
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The Indiana Jones movies collected many of the tropes of classic adventure novels, old-fashioned serials, and early swashbuckling movies and collated them into one iconic character. This is why Indiana Jones was so frequently parodied in everything from The Simpsons to Weird Al Yankovich’s movie underrated parody UHF, since Ford’s archaeologist/ adventurer was the walking embodiment of the action-adventure genre. This is also why Disney’s DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp was so critically acclaimed.
DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp Was Released On August 3, 1990
With a stacked voice cast that included Christopher Lloyd, Russi Taylor, and Rip Taylor, DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp saw the aging adventurer Scrooge McDuck and his mischievous grandkids Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby discover a magic lamp in Egypt. When an evil warlock tries to use the lamp’s genie to take over the world, it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the day.
With a budget of $20 million, DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp was a box office letdown that earned only $18 million upon release. Although nowhere near as big a box office disaster as Disney’s The Black Cauldron, this underperformance was still enough to kill the movie’s planned sequels. The DuckTales show lasted another season, with the movie’s story taking place between the events of its third and fourth outings.
Critics were kind to DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, calling the Indiana Jones spoof a fun family adventure and praising its wit and nonstop cartoon action. The movie’s underperformance and the subsequent cancellation of DuckTales left the franchise dormant until 2017, when DisneyXD’s DuckTales revival debuted. The series lasted three seasons until 2021, garnering critical acclaim for its inventive new take on the material.
The DuckTales Franchise Has A Shocking Canon Connection To Indiana Jones
While DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp deserved better than its underwhelming box-office, the movie’s good-natured parody of the Indiana Jones series wasn’t the franchise’s first link to the iconic adventurer. As hard as it might be to believe, according to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Scrooge McDuck was originally an inspiration for the character of Indiana Jones.
Comic book writer Carl Banks’s Uncle Scrooge comics were filled with the sort of immersive, cinematic adventures that animated the screen life of Indiana Jones, with the iconic opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark being a direct reference to the Scrooge McDuck story “The Seven Cities of Cibola”, originally published in September 1954’s Uncle Scrooge #7. In a fun pop culture game of Telephone, Banks’ Uncle Scrooge stories were inspired by classic adventure serials, then the Indiana Jones movies were inspired by these comics, and, finally, fittingly, DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp was inspired by the Indiana Jones franchise.
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image courtesy of marvel and sony
