Indyfocus
The Animals of
INDIANA JONES
Part two: John Brueggen, Director of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park (yep! An ACTUAL job!) gives us the lowdown in a series of articles on the various animals Indy has encountered throughout the years. In indymag 10, I discussed the animals of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’d like to continue by looking at the animals in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Thankfully, Temple of Doom carries on the tradition with Indiana Jones being fully immersed in the animal kingdom. At the beginning of the movie Indy has to share his plane ride with crates of domestic chickens. The chickens play no real role in the story except to point out that Indiana Jones is definitely not riding first class on this trip. The loose chicken feathers also help drive home the amount of wind moving through the plane’s fuselage. Once Indy gets to the village in India and hears the plight of the local village, he, Willie, and Short Round each get an elephant as transportation to Pankot Palace. It is common to use elephants as transportation, pack animals, and even work animals in India and other parts of Southeast Asia. I once visited a crocodile park in Thailand where the visitors could see the crocodiles while safely perched on the back of an elephant. The elephants used in the movie are appropriately Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), which are typically smaller than their African counterparts and genenerally have smaller tusks. Indy’s elephant was actually given prosthetic tusks that attached to his smaller real tusks. It is a common practice for an elephant trainer (mahout) to grow up with the elephant and be bonded for life. It would have been much more likely that each of these elephants would have had a mahout steering 30 I indymag I Oct 2016
the elephant by riding on its neck while Indy and crew rode as passengers behind the mahout. I’ve worked with elephants in my zoo career and they do not readily take commands from people they are not familiar with. Instead you can see the mahouts walking alongside the elephants in these scenes. Interestingly Willie’s sequined dress was a very valuable prop… damaged by an elephant chewing on it…. Harrison Ford said that they had to ride the elephants for two weeks to get the shots they needed and that they are not as comfortable as you might think. While on the ride to Pankot Palace they see very large bats flying through the sky. Indy identifies them as “giant vampire bats”. This is a bit of movie license. There are three species of vampire bats in the world, surprisingly comprising three different genera. They all occur in the America’s (from Mexico into South America), and they are all very small bats, with just a seven inch (18cm) wingspan. The bats that were shown in the movie are actually a harmless fruit bat, also known
as a flying fox because of their foxlike features. Fruit bats were probably at the filming location, as they are common in India, Southeast Asia, and Australia, and were an easy thing to work into the script. Indy could have still been under the impression that these really were blood suckers in the 1930’s, as the scientific name of the Giant Flying Fox is Pteropos vampyrus. The name vampyrus is derived from the Slavic word ‘wampir,’ which means ‘‘blood sucking ghost or demon: vampire’’; this species was originally considered a blood-sucking bat. It’s true, frugivorous diet was not realized until after it had been named. After Willie gets thrown from her elephant, they decide to stop and camp at the world’s most animal friendly location. Willie runs into another fruit bat ( Pteropos vampyrus), a young baboon (Papio