1. Short Round
The Movie...Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) When audiences were first introduced to Short Round, I'm pretty sure they though this Chinese kid had been designed to purely spout inane catchphrases and cause trouble for our favourite archaeologist at every possible moment. For the first hour of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Shorty serves almost no purpose. His exists only to "knock levers into walls and sets off bobby traps." Check out the way Indy looks at him when he's screwing things up: he looks like he secretly wants to murder the kid and blame it on the Thuggee cult.
And Yet... Short Round is the unabashed hero of the entire movie. Seriously. He stops Indy from being murdered so many times in this installment, it's insane. It probably should have been called
Short Round and the, uh,
Saving Indy Movie, or something much, much better than that. Consider the facts: Short Round's role as Indy's babysitter firstly begins when he escapes from the mines (where hundreds of children are being held captive) and makes his way to the Temple of Doom, where Dr. Jones has been put under "The Black Sleep of Kali," which basically means he's been hypnotised into becoming a kind of scary douchebag. Indy slaps Shorty around the face, tries to kill Willie Scott, and just at the last moment, Shorty uses a flaming torch to break Indy out of the spell. It doesn't stop there, though. When Indy goes down into the mines to take free the rest of the enslaved children, he finds himself facing off against a huge dude and a kid with a voodoo doll. As you could probably imagine, this is not a good combination when you're moving towards a crusher at the end of a conveyer belt at the same time. No problem: Shorty takes out the voodoo doll kid, and gives Indy the chance to fight fair. If Shorty wouldn't have bothered, Indy would have been mince meat. Had Short Round not intervened at these extremely crucial moments, Indiana Jones would either be the only American member of the Thuggee cult right now, or squashed into a gooey red paste. Sure, Indy does heroic stuff in the movie, too, but nothing that even vaguely compares to what Shorty does for him. Even at the end, Indy's all, "I'm gonna cut this bridge, let's
hope we survive," whereas Shorty's more like, "Why did I bother saving you so many times if you're gonna risk killing me?"
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