Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

 * Mutt drives his motorcycle into the library then slides on the floor, pushing a student on a chair with the wheel, he then asked Indy a question about history. Why doesn't he panic? When your teacher is out mystery solving, artifact hunting, people saving, you know he's going to be out for days on end. Ask a question when you can, because you don't know when he's going to be back.
 * At first, the scene wherein the Princeton student casually turns to Indy in the midst of a fight and asks for something related to his schoolwork seemed tacked on and even silly. It took me a while to realize--the kid was brilliant! When your professor is Indiana Jones, you have no idea when or if you are ever going to see him again. Get it done before he's off to find Excalibur!
 * To many, Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear blast is a Wall Banger already being known as "Nuking the Fridge". To me, if he had merely gotten in and survived, I would have thought the same. The fact that the fridge was flung through the air, while everything else was disintegrated, and that he came out with barely even a bruise, just tells me that this is Refuge in Audacity. -- User:Lord TNK
 * Heh, those guys didn't understand being over-the-top was one of the series' major selling points. -- User:Medinoc.
 * It's not even that over the top. The movie took place in the 1950s, the "nukes" back then weren't nukes -- thermonuclear weapons wouldn't be developed for somewhere around another decade. At the time, the "nuclear" weapons (the term at the time was atomic) were fission bombs, with a yield measured in kilotons (thousands of tons of TNT). Modern nuclear weapons are fusion bombs, and measured in megatons (millions of tons of TNT) -- literally ONE THOUSAND TIMES stronger than the primitive atomic weapons of the 1950s. This is borne out by the real life fact that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese cities bombed with atomic devices at the close of WWII, had significant numbers of survivors even without the benefits of lead-lined refrigerators to hide in --the weapons of the day simply weren't strong enough for the kind of total unsurvivable devastation we think of from nuclear weapons today. In fact, some of the modern fuel-air devices in use by the modern US military in the middle east (such as the MOAB) rival 1950s-era fission weapons in explosive yield. -- Kitty_TC
 * Would just like to add dates here. The first thermonuclear device was Ivy Mike, tested at Eniwtok Atoll on Halloween 1952. It clocked in at 10.4 megatons, but it was too big to be weaponized; in 54 Castle Bravo was tested at 15, and that one, a dry bomb without horrendously large cooling systems to keep the unbonded hydrogen isotopes liquid, was a deliverable device, so thermonuclear weapons were available at the time. That said, the majority of megaton-range weapons were tested out at sea, since nobody wants to use a bomb that big on dry land, so the device seen in this movie is probably in a similar range to the Hiroshima weapon, and geared more towards a miniaturization of existing technologies instead of making the biggest hole possible (which, as they eventually learnt, was most easily accomplished with more smaller bombs anyways). That said, I doubt Lucas and Spielberg think about the technical accuracy of their movies that much. -- Morganbored
 * No they don't. The MOAB has a yield of 11, that is eleven, tons. The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 13,000 tons, greater by three orders of magnitude. What the MOAB is comparable to is weapons based on the W54 warhead, such as the M-388 Davy Crockett. But that thing was specifically designed to be as small as possible and the blast itself wasn't even the point of it, the radiation was. So the biggest conventional bomb designed to be as powerful as possible is about equal the nuclear bomb designed to be as small as possible. -- Sordid
 * The MOAB is not a Fuel-Air bomb, its a conventional explosive bomb. Fuel air bombs (like the Russian Father of all bombs which weighs half as much as the MOAB but is 4 times stronger) can rival the blast effect of a low setting dial-a-yield nuclear weapon, but despite of what people believe the blast is not created by explosives, but by igniting a cloud of vaporized fuel released in the air. This consumes the oxygen in the area and produces a very rapid variation in the local air pressure that creates a blast effect. Thus Fuel-Air Bombs have effects order of magnitude higher then their weight might indicate. However to obtain something that would rival a 5 kiloton nuclear weapon the damn thing would have to weigh around a 100 tons. Good luck dropping that, the only aircraft able to carry the load would be AN-225, and even then I don't think it would be droppable.
 * Keep in mind that Indiana Jones movies are based not on today's facts, but the logic of the time. The character himself is based on the idea that in the 30's, serialized shorts made archeology out to be guns-a-blazing treasure hunts. By the logic of 50's Cold War "duck and cover" safety shorts, Indy's escape makes absolute perfect sense. It's supposed to be a mock of that logic.
 * No matter what logic you use or how powerful the bomb is or how Indy survives a drop; one fact remains: that no one ever made a lead lined fridge (or a fridge that looks like the one in the film) There's no reason to make one - lead is poor insulator and heavy as well. Although, on a side note, the fridge looks mostly like a Crosley shelvator, but reads something like "Radiation King" above the handle.
 * Radiation King, you say? You mean the same one as in Fallout? That would actually explain a whole lot.
 * This idea is referenced in a recent comic from Sequential Art.
 * I thought Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just as good as any of the other three, with all these complaints about it being anything other than a highly entertaining adventure romp having become a pet peeve of mine. The worst of it is that most of the ignoramuses whining about the fridge-nuking scene fail to realize that the fridge is lead-lined; what do you think was the purpose of that totally gratuitous shot? In The Fifties, people thought that you could survive a nuclear blast if you surrounded yourself with lead (and that you could also avoid it by hiding under a table). Since in IJ All Myths Are True, it makes (ahem) perfect sense for Indy to have gotten away with it the way he did. -- User:Planet Cool
 * Actually, it wasn't the whole "surviving the heat and radiation of the blast" that bothered me about that scene. As you say, they did make a point of showing the fridge to be lead-lined. No, what killed me was the fact that he survived the impact of being dropped from hundreds of feet in the air. Maybe if there were airbags as well as lead in that fridge...
 * After watching the last crusade for the first time, I immediately noticed that Indy drank from the holy grail, an act that can heal fatal wounds as shown with his father. Even if such an act does not grant immortality to Indy once he left the temple/cavern/thing, I would have been disapointed if Indy did not have an upgrade, and KOTCS actually shows us an Indy over 50 years old who is not only still in good shape, but can also shrug wounds, even if said wounds are radiations: it is not an Ass Pull, it is a Chekhov's Skill from the previous episode. -- Nixou
 * I didn't know what to think of the fridge scene until I remembered in Back to The Future, the time machine was going to be a fridge, and to get back to 1985, Doc and Marty went to a 50s nuclear testing site. They made the time machine a car because they didn't want little kids climbing into fridges and getting stuck, and it would've been extremely expensive to shoot the proposed climax. This was a Shout-Out to the original script of BTTF, which Spielberg produced!
 * The opening of KOTCS opens with a Match Cut as the Paramount logo transitions to a mole hill. This is a reference to the saying "Make a mountain out of a mole hill", which means making a huge issue over a minor point". And that's just what happened! Fans got worked up over this tiny detail, in a manner not unlike the scorn the Star Wars prequels have had.
 * Actually, every Indiana Jones movie has started that way, with the Paramount logo turning into something else. -- General Nerd
 * But using a mole hill for the match cut must have been some sort of a reference to that saying. Almost like Lucas and Spielberg were egging on the haters. -- Premonition_45
 * It took me a bit to reconcile the fact that Indy was going after aliens rather than religious artifacts. But then I remembered that The Indiana Jones series was meant to be a throwback to the adventure serials of the 1930's. Pulp stories from that era was often based on magical artifacts and ancient legend. The 1950's saw a new fascination in outer space. So this story, set in the 50's, is reflective of 50's pop culture - with a focus on the Space Age and visitors from other worlds.
 * Another scene in KOTCS often criticized for being ridiculous/out of place/etc. is the one where Mutt ends up in the treetops with those monkeys. But, this troper was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark the other day, and what did he see? - a scene with Indy and Marion wandering through a marketplace, holding a monkey, and jokingly talking about it as if it was their son!
 * Marion's son goes by the nickname "Mutt"...which seems like a generally scruffy Rebel Without a Cause name until you think about who his father turns out to be. Henry Jones Jr. named himself Indiana after the family dog.
 * ...My mind. You have just blown it.
 * In the library scene, Indy tells the student the he should get out of the library to become a good archaeologist. This contradicts a line from The Last Crusade when he tells his students that 70% of all archaeology is done in the library. But that's just it! It's the last 30% that counts!
 * Although, in Last Crusade, Indy had acknowledged the contradictory nature of his teaching vs. practice, as the passage to the tomb of Sir Richard was marked by a giant "X", despite his insistence that "X never, ever, marks the spot.".