Viewers here cringed when the world’s most famous fictional archaeologist arrives in Peru and announces that he learned to speak Quechua, the language of indigenous people across the Andes, when he was captured by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.
Villa and his revolutionaries raided the US town of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916 — and in an episode of the 1990s TV show, “The Young Indiana Jones,” the young Jones is kidnapped.
But Villa’s men spoke Spanish, not Quechua, which is spoken by some 10 million people in places like Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Wake up, people! Lucas did that on purpose to embrace the Campbellian mythos of pompously imperialist and ethnically confused 30’s adventure stories to which all his Indiana Jones movies are a loving, humble, even pious, homage.
Oh, and another thing, Peru (if that’s your real name):
The movie also shows quicksand, man-eating ants and enormous Hawaiian waterfalls, all of which do not exist in the Peruvian Amazonia.
I’m not falling for the “no man-eating ants or bottomless pits of sandspooge here” line again. There’s just no oversight on these chamber of commerce slogans.