Again, "What The..."

I had decided to rent the Indiana Jones movies in order to brush up on my Indy-ology in preparation for this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So I bop on over to my local Hastings -- a sort of hybrid music/video/book store we have in smaller towns like where I live.

I check the Action section, moving through the R's. Here's the 2000 made-for-cable movie Race Against Time. It tells me "Even the brightest future...has its dark side," and it may be better-known as "the movie Cary Elwes was most ashamed of until he did Saw." OK, I made that up. It's not "better-known" as anything.

Here's Raising the Heights, which tells me it's about "A city divided by fear, vengeance is in the truth." Apparently it's not about coherent declarative sentences. But no Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somebody's rented it, I says, and I decide to re-watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the least-liked movie of the series and one I probably haven't seen all the way through since it came out.

Here we go -- good ol' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so the movie just in front of it must be...Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark? Step on the brake, Bubba. What's this? I may have been in high school then, but my memory hasn't faded about certain things, like that girl in my sixth hour yearbook class or the title of one of the greatest movies of all time. It was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Period. Indy was in the movie, but he wasn't in the title.

But, according to IMDB, that's what the movie's called now, at least in its video title. Apparently someone decided that, in order to market a DVD set or something, all three movies needed to have the same title format. Maybe they thought people wouldn't get the connection: "Hey, honey, look at this! Harrison Ford played Indiana Jones in this other movie, too even though it doesn't say his name in the title!"

Look forward to the re-titled rereleases Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Hal the Computer in 2001, Michael Corleone is Still the Godfather in Godfather III and One Day This Guy Will Be President But Now He's the Cowboy from Brooklyn. Coming soon to a video store near you!