10 Unexpected Inspirations Behind Movie Scenes
7. An Uncle Scrooge Comic Inspired The Boulder Scene - Raiders Of The Lost Ark
As ridiculous as it might sound, the iconic boulder trap from Raiders of the Lost Ark - in which Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is almost flattened by it after retrieving a golden idol - is actually inspired by a most unlikely of source material: one of Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge comics. Yup.
More specifically, the action beat was lifted pretty blatantly from the 1954 issue "The Seven Cities of Cibola," where the Beagle Boys similarly pinch a golden idol and inadvertently set off a boulder trap that they must then avoid.
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have repeated over the years that Indiana Jones was inspired by classic adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s, but in this case they also paid sly homage to a comic that at least one of them presumably read as a child.