Chapter 2: The Return of Adventure

The Time: 1981.

The Place: Hundreds of darkened cinemas.

The Paramount Pictures logo dissolves into the view of a real mountain top. Raiders of the Lost Ark begins. Pulp adventure in the grand style of 30s and 40s golden age Hollywood returns.

The lost art of non-stop thrills and cliffhanging suspense that generations of kids had been raised on was suddenly lost no more. Indiana Jones wields a bullwhip and transfers from his horse to a truck, just like in Zorro Rides Again (1937). He fights nazis on and around a flying wing, just like Spy Smasher (1942). The spirit of the Saturday Matinee serials and B pictures is back, this time an epic with state-of-the-art effects, location shooting around the world, and major studio A-list talent at the helm.

As the first adventure of Indiana Jones unfolds, an on-screen title tells us it's 1936 - the year Buster Crabbe became Flash Gordon and Republic Pictures opened its doors and started grinding out an unchecked avalanche of thrills through 20 years and 66 adventure serials.

Coincidence. Of course not. And George Lucas and Spielberg were the first to admit that this was a knowing, loving homage to the serials and adventure pictures of the thirties. Like their new hero Indy, they were raiders too, uncovering cinematic relics that were buried in the past and forgotten. Treasures that would bring them "fortune and glory".

And I became a raider too... Digging deep into Hollywood's past, uncovering lost art like serials and the pulp magazines and old time radio and adventure comic strips that inspired them... Discovering why these things were lost to us or what they evolved into, so they really weren't lost at all - like the great adventure TV shows of the 60s whose cliffhangers came with every commercial break instead of every chapter.

I don't really know why I'm drawn to these things. Only that I always have been. And I suspect if you are reading this, then you just may be too.

This blog is just beginning. We ARE the Raiders of the Lost Art and we have close to 100 years of moviegoing thrills to unearth and dust off, to hold up to the light in wonder. Especially now, when it's 2008 and Indiana Jones is about to return after a 19-year absence!

To be continued?

Well, that's an understatement.