Kenneth Dean: On the Scene

The snap of the bull whip, the crooked smile under the brown Fedora-style hat and the musical score from John Williams all sent me down memory lane.

For months I anticipated the release of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.” The film is the latest in the Indiana Jones movie series that began when I was 13 — an age between childhood and adult responsibilities, where the imagination is active and courage seems to be endless.

The year was 1981 and my brother and I stood in line with a few of our friends and a cousin. The movie we were going to see at the old Gaslight Theatre on North Broadway here in Tyler was “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The reviews from friends were simply that the movie was “awesome.”

I was skeptical, but from the very first moments in the film I was hooked and suddenly I knew that my career path would be that of an adventurous archaeologist who traveled the world fighting enemies of the United States.

Well it seemed like a great idea and my family listened to me rattle on about how I would find Noah’s Ark, lost civilizations and treasures protected by booby traps. I spent hours reading books dealing with history and trying to learn as much as I could.

We actually had to use our imaginations back then to entertain ourselves, because we did not have Gameboys, Playstations and all of the other latest video games our kids employ for hours on end.

We did have an old Atari game, but one could only play Pong, a game of a white dot representing a pingpong ball being hit back and forth by two solid white lines on a black screen, for so long before falling prey to boredom.

Heck, back then my brother and I were just graduating from being the remote control as dad finally broke down and got rid of the gigantic console TV that only had 13 channels on the dial.

In other words, we spent hours playing and using our imaginations and my brother and I along with friends, thought up different scenarios for each other as we played the parts of Indiana Jones characters as well as characters from other movies.

We swung from vines high in trees, rode our horses at break-neck speeds through the pasture and into wooded areas. We jumped off the barn and did a ton of other things that I look back on now and ask myself, “What was I thinking?”

Oh yeah. I was going to be the greatest archaeologist ever, but that plan didn’t work out and I never became a heroic champion for lost artifacts and cultures.

In fact the last fight I had was with an opossum I named Ralph that broke into my home in the middle of the night.

Instead of battling Nazis set to take over the world by using the power of God contained in the Ark of the Covenant, I was forced to square off with a nocturnal creature that really freaked me out.

No. I wasn’t dressed in khakis, a brown leather jacket an armed with a whip and a pistol like my childhood idol, but instead I was clad in a pair of shorts and cowboy boots and my weapons were a fireplace poker and a shovel.

I won the battle and Ralph has not been back, but it wasn’t exactly as I had thought my life would go at the age of 13.

Sitting in the theatre, early Thursday morning, watching the latest Indiana Jones film, my imagination began kicking in and once again I thought of what it would be like to be Jones — to live the life of danger and get the prize.

Yeah, I still have the imagination of a child, but I won’t be jumping off any barns or swinging from trees this time. This time I will just enjoy the film and smile at the memories from days long ago.

Kenneth Dean
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