Indiana Jones - The Adventure Collection

The words "double dipping" may bring a smile to the face of an 8-year-old who thinks he's going to get a chocolate-covered treat, but to even the most casual of DVD collectors, those words are usually used to express the betrayal felt by the regular "up yours!" from one of the movie studios. Double dipping is the practice of repackaging a movie or movies with new bonus features or additional footage and selling it to the same established fan base that bought it when it was new. New Line did it with "Lord Of The Rings." MGM has done it a number of times with the James Bond movies. And how many times have "Star Wars" fans forked over good money to re-purchase their beloved childhood memories every time George Lucas wants to buy another horsy for his Skywalker Ranch?

Appropriately, the trilogy of Indiana Jones movies that Lucas produced with pal Steven Spielberg between 1981 and 1989 have been given the double-dip treatment, and fans who preemptively eBayed their original issue 2003 box sets are going to want to go back online and try to buy them back after seen how lean Paramount's latest issue of the three movies really is.

The one benefit is that like Paramount's 2005 splitting of their previously box set-only "Godfather" trilogy, each of the three movies -- "(Indiana Jones and the) Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989) -- are now available separately for the first time. Beyond that convenience, though, the benefits are few.

The most obvious indicator of the studio's lazy cash grab is their top-loading of the trailer for the new movie, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which plays automatically when you pop each disc in your player. And since the discs had to be produced well in advance of their release date, it's the teaser trailer, which is comprised mostly of title cards and clips from the other three movies. The super-slim cases in "The Adventure Collection" box set are nice, allowing three discs to take up the shelf space of less than two regular ones, but should serve as a warning about how slim the package inside actually is.

Gone is the two-hour making-of documentary from the previous set, which was as comprehensive as the "Empire of Dreams" doc from Lucas's original "Star Wars" box set. Instead, each disc has paired with it a handful of mostly diced and reassembled puffy featurettes. The most interesting is on the "Raiders" disc -- a brief and newly-produced look at how old school FX wiz Chris Walas did the "melting face" bit. The 10-minute excerpt from the 2003 AFI event on the "Last Crusade" disc, during which Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and Alison Doody were saluted, is nice but too short. The movies themselves are remastered, though only the crew that did the remaster could probably tell the difference between these and the 2003 editions. The preview of LucasArts' summer release of the Indiana Jones Lego video game looks like a lot of fun, but considering that it and the trailer are both big ads, shouldn't we be paying no more than 20 bucks for the three, rather than this one's $60.00 SRP? Considering that Amazon has the three massive and feature-packed "Adventures of Young Indiana Jones" sets for a ridiculously low $50.00, fans fearful of being left holding the bag -- rather, the box -- should skip this one and wait for the inevitable Blu-Ray editions.

*****

In 1982, three friends from Mississippi -- Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb -- set out to pay tribute to their favorite movie, "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" with paper route money, a home video camera and a pie-in-the-sky dream. Seven years and three pubertys later, they finished their magnum opus -- The Raiders Adaptation -- and it has since become legendary. Over a decade later in 2003, it had its first screenings, and since it is not available on DVD or for download anywhere, the three gents have been taking time off from their day jobs to bring it to audiences around the world.

So, do they pull it off? They were able to mimic every scene (save for the missing tarmac showdown) with varying degrees of success. Yes, the camera work sometimes looks painfully as if it were shot by a 12-year-old, and some of the substitutions are downright daffy. However, if you can ignore the fact that the film was shot out-of-sequence, and the players sometimes age forward and back within a scene, the answer is a whip-cracking yes. The whole thing is a love letter to the wide-eyed wonder of movies, and these guys should be proud of having the determination to accomplish something so lofty at such a young age. Before graduating high school, they had done something bigger than many people work up to in an entire lifetime. Find out where it's playing next and get there, and if you have the funding, bring them to your local college or independent theater.

For more information on "The Raiders Adaptation," including where you can see it, visit the fan site TheRaider.net and drag down "The Films" menu.