So, in the midst of all the recent hubbub about a fourth Indiana Jones movie, an uncharacteristically chatty George Lucas blurted out the following enigmatic quote about the new film’s premise:

“I discovered a McGuffin. I told the guys about it and they were a little dubious about it, but it’s the best one we’ve ever found. … Unfortunately, it was a little too ‘connected’ for the others. They were afraid of what the critics would think. They said, ‘Can’t we do it with a different McGuffin? Can’t we do this?’ and I said ‘No.’ So we pottered around with that for a couple of years. And then Harrison really wanted to do it and Steve said, ‘Okay.’ I said, ‘We’ll have to go back to that original McGuffin and take out the offending parts of it and we’ll still use that area of the supernatural to deal with it.’”

So, what the hell is he talking about? What could this object be? I’ve mulled it over for like five seconds, and really the only things you can infer are that the object is probably ancient and that it’s obviously controversial in some way. I’m going to guess it’s also got some solid pulp-ish elements — it’s magic-y or whatever — and the very idea of it resonates much like Moses’ commandment tablets and the holy grail.

Will these guys rock the Old Testament again? Or something from another ancient civilization? Something from East Asia maybe…? If the story is set in the early-mid 50s (just a guess), maybe the North Korean army replace Nazis as the baddies, which I guess would be kind of timely, controversial, and a thematic fit with the other three movies. Then again, they could skip all that and go after Excalibur or something along those lines. What historically exotic/adventurous part of the world wasn’t in the first three movies? Anyone got any ideas?

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