This is part four of an ongoing series that focuses on the comic books that have extended the adventures of Indiana Jones into print. This is also the final in the Marvel Comics movie adaptations. Since the early 1980s up until the mid-1990s, the comics medium have given us another outlet for movie adaptations and new tales of the archaeologist.
As with the Marvel Comics adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade offers different points of view on certain scenes, explains continuity better, shows us scenes cut from the film or script, and fleshes secondary characters out more.
I originally read this adaptation after I saw the film in 1989 and this one helped greatly to understand a part in the film that I didn’t get upon first viewing. During the last ‘challenge’ at the end of the film, Indiana calls upon his faith to walk across the gorge in order to get the Holy Grail. He appears to be walking on air, which is what I assumed he was doing when I first saw the film. Not true. It’s not explained in the film but it is explained through Indiana’s thoughts in the comic adaptation. He says, "No! There's a path! But it's been painted to align with the rocks below! A perfect forced perspective!" It was there the whole time. To this day, I still see people occasionally ask questions about this sequence on Indiana Jones message boards.
Aside from answering questions, the Last Crusade adaptation also presents interesting scenes and dialogue that were originally cut from the film. A great example is the scene where Indiana Jones and Elsa Schneider arrive at the castle to “view the tapestries.” The butler doesn’t buy their disguises and says “If you are Scottish law then I am Mickey Mouse!” Watch the butler’s lips. They don’t match the word ‘Mickey Mouse.’ It’s because he is saying ‘Mae West.’ The film takes place during the late 1930s so that reference would have made sense for that era, but the filmmakers felt younger people in the audience wouldn’t know who she is, so they substituted the more universally known Mickey Mouse instead. Mae West wasn’t the first choice, in the script the butler says ‘Jesse Owens’, which is what he says in the comic adaptation. But again, the filmmakers felt younger people wouldn’t get the reference of the black Olympic runner who defeated Nazi Germany during the games at that time.
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