The Real Reason Temple Of Doom Is An Indiana Jones Prequel, Not A Sequel

When it comes to the adventures of Doctor Jones (Harrison Ford), anything goes. That includes the timeline of Indiana Jones' adventures, and most specifically, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." For the whip-cracking archaeologist's second big screen adventure, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have Indy escape from Shanghai before dropping him in the Indian village of Mayapore, where he faces off with a child-snatching cult. The significant detail about this entry is that it actually takes place in 1935, a year before the events of the first film, "Raiders of the Lost Ark." This decision has no impact on the franchise as a whole, so why did the filmmakers go this route? Well, according to Lucas and Spielberg, it was all about giving our hero a brand new foe to fight against.

Speaking to Empire about the 1984 film, Lucas explained his thought process behind swapping out the Nazis for an ancient, heart-handling group. "We made 'Temple Of Doom' a prequel because we didn't want to use the same bad guys. We had ideas about the Monkey King." The road to Mayapore was a long one, though. Initial plans called for a trip to a haunted house, only for Spielberg to nix the idea, having already spent time producing (and maybe even directing) "Poltergeist." However, in hindsight, it's a film that perhaps has aged the worst, and one that even its director doesn't look back on fondly.

Of all of Indiana Jones' adventures, "Temple of Doom" is without a doubt the one that has become only more problematic over time. It's one of the iconic '80s movies that didn't age well, having a white savior head into a land that depicts Indian culture steeped in mysticism, voodoo, and monkey brains. Indy might be the hero who's well-versed with the culture and progressive for being so, but in the final act, he fights the routine heavy, who is, in fact, white actor Nizwar Karani in blackface. In the end, even Steven Spielberg himself admitted the result wasn't to his standard.

Speaking to The Sun Sentinel, the director said, "I wasn't happy with the second film at all. It was too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific. I thought it out-poltered 'Poltergeist.' There's not an ounce of my own personal feeling in 'Temple of Doom.'" The perk for the filmmaker, however, was that during production, he met his future wife Kate Capshaw, who portrayed Willie Scott. In 2012, Spielberg told Empire, "It was a good learning exercise for me to really throw myself into a black hole. I came out of the darkness of 'Temple Of Doom' and I entered the light of the woman I was eventually going to marry and raise a family with."