RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK exhibit mixes history with movie magic!

Raiders of the Lost Ark will always hold a special place in my heart. It is the first film tht my father bought on VHS to watch on our brand new VCR, and I remember sitting for hours in front of the floor TV to watch that movie and relive my experiences of seeing it in theaters.

In honor of the films 30th anniversary there is a cool touring exhibition that is a movie lover/history buffs dream! Indiana Jones and the Adventure of Archaeology takes props from the Indiana Jones films and puts them side-by-side with real archaeological artifacts. Guests can see the "Ark of the Covenant from “Raiders” and the Holy Grail from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” as well as objects from ancient Peru, Egypt and Iraq, all on display in a museum space inspired by Hangar 51 and ancient temples."

Lucasfilm has joined forces with National Geographic and Montreal’s X3 Productions to produce and curate the even, which started its six-year international tour at the Montreal Science Centre and will head overseas next month. At this time there are not any dates announced for the U.S,

Below are some cool excerpts fom the recent LA Times interview with Kyra Bowling, exhibits manager at Lucasfilm; Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist, explorer and National Geographic’s archaeology fellow; and Geneviève Angio-Morneau, co-project manager at X3 Productions.

Here is the interview:

NC: So how did this project come about? Why Indiana Jones?

KB: At Lucasfilm, with the release of the last film, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I think everyone was just so delighted with the kind of lasting power of the character and the franchise. We’d never done a formal Indiana Jones exhibition before, so the light-bulb moment went off. … Here we are, several years later.

FH: Let me tell you the perspective from National Geographic’s in-house archaeologists, because that’s what I am, and it’s a very special hat to wear, to use an Indiana Jones idiom. I normally deal with what I call the Indiana Joneses who come to National Geographic to do real research, and it’s an amazing group of scholars that we have …. A great number of them have been inspired by the films of Indiana Jones. It’s like a whole generation. I used to teach at theuniversity where in Intro to Archaeology — Archaeology 101 — one of the first questions that I always ask is, “How many of you were inspired by Indiana Jones?” What’s amazing is that this is the 30th anniversary of the first Indiana Jones film, and these students are like 20 years old, and 70% of them raise their hands, saying they were inspired by the films. That is one of the world’s most awesome inspirations that could happen. It’s almost like Indiana Jones is the world’s most famous archaeologist. Even now. He’s not a real person, but he’s had an incredible, incredible impact on the field of professional archaeology, both at the university, and here, now, that I have the great honor to sit at National Geographic …. We are all inner Indiana Joneses. Every archaeologist has a little bit of that adventure in them.

NC: In watching the movies, you always wonder how much of it is like real archaeology, how many of the objects in the the movies are based on real artifacts.

FH: The really cool thing about getting to know Kiera and the whole Indy brand is the real, genuine interest that George Lucas and the whole operation had in being inspired by real archaeology to create the Indiana Jones films. And we really feel that. I mean, Indiana Jones is Hollywood. It’s got to be some of the best Hollywood I’ve ever seen, right? I mean, it’s great, it’s action-packed, it’s adventure.

KB: We kind of address that question point-on in the exhibition. We take a look at the inspirations behind the stories that you see in the films, and give the visitor the ability to see the origins of those stories, and the realities of those stories, and where fact meets fiction, and to go into depth about the real-world archaeology behind some of those fun adventures in the films.

GAM: One of the main ideas was to have an exhibition that would focus, yes, on the artifacts and the props and the costumes and the artwork from the Lucasfilm Archive, but also to have real artifacts …. We might be coming across visitors [making] their first contact with real archaeological objects, so doing an exhibition about archaeology, this was a really important part of the concept for the exhibition. It was also one of the biggest challenges to have these two completely different collections living in the same space, so when we designed the exhibition, we made sure that these objects were in separate actual spaces. We designed the exhibition as kind of a mirror effect.

Read the rest of the interview at the link below in the references. Check out some of the cool photos from the exhibit below. I can't wait until North American dates are announced. Let us know your favorite photos below.