Ripping-Off the Lost Ark: the for real poll

are we voting for the best ripoff or the biggest ripoff

good question

I think you should vote for your favorite, whatever your reasons are.

then I vote some some knob who plays dress-up on the history channel

I have made my vote, based on some criteria that may or may not be opaque even to me. Nah not really, my choice kinda leapt out and I think it's pretty much the best as well as my favourite. Although I haven't seen The Librarian.

Goonies with Duck Tales close behind.

I think Rick Dangerous is the thing I've enjoyed most from the list. I love a good old school platform game.

Duck Tales doesn't count - the material it draws from is Carl Barks comics that predate Indy by decades. You could probably make some case that "adventure" was in fashion in the 80s but it seems like a stretch to me. The Duck Tales movie almost certainly has a Raiders homage or two, though....

Goonies in a lock, much as I love the sound effects from "Pitfall" and the first Tomb Raider game.

it counts in the same way quatermain counts, wouldn't have gotten made if not for indy

Hasn't Spielberg or Lucas basically admitted that the rolling boulder scene in the beginning of the first Indy was lifted from a Carl Barks comic? I can't remember the exact title of the comic, but in it the Ducks and the Beagle Boys have found an ancient Mayan temple, and they spot a statue of a god or something made of some valuable substance, and one of the Beagle Boys picks it up from it's pedestal, but this sets off a trap with a giant boulder flying towards them. The only difference to Indy is that the boulder flies through the air and they just dodge it, they don't have to run through corridors to escape it.

Rick Dangerous please. I am getting ready to throw a strop when Tomb Raider beats it.

Rick here too, I won't vote for Goonies on the basis that Speilberg was involved with it anyhoo and so it's not really classed as a rip off imho.

I think I've got to vote for Goonies even though, as pointed out, it's more a relative than a rip-off.

"Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle "

tempted to vote on this even though i haven't seen this. i mean, the title alone deserved a vote.

Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle

Oh man I watched it like 3 times while tripping one night when I was about 16. So crazy.

It's actually Cannibal Women of the Avocado Jungle of Death if I'm not mistaken.

And it stars Adrienne Barbeau.

When it comes to voting though, Goonies is the clear winner on that list.

Tales of the Gold Monkey all the way! I wuvved that programme when I was small.

omg watched national treasure last night downloading the sequel right now!

it really takes the unreality of indy to the next level

haven't seen any of these but Romancing the Stone. Why would anybody?

I'm surprised you didn't see The Mummy movies! Although now that I think about it, wasn't there an old, old argument about those...?

don't forget King Solomon's Mines and its sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold

whoa, Sharon Stone! forgot about that.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I mean to nominate Spy Kids 2.

i had totally forgotten tales of the gold monkey, i loved that too. but not as much as romancing the stone. one of danny devito's funniest bits, among other things. (the second one is pretty weak tho.)

Eastern Condors is the Dirty Dozen style Vietnam War film with Sammo Hung you dopes. You are thinking of OPERATION CONDOR. Geez.

You forgot Tetris Plus:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v682/thiagok9999/Tetris_Plus_ntsc-front.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This is a better poll idea than my response from 2008 suggests. I'm fondest of the Goonies but in a do-over I would vote for "Romancing The Stone," which has possibly a stronger idea on how to borrow from Raiders: make it a romantic comedy by focusing on the relationship between male and female leads, cutting out all the expensive and complicated action scenes while reducing the number of locations, and lowering the stakes of the villains and MacGuffin. It's fluff but there are some fine enough moments in the script/acting. It's also the only one of these to really spawn its own sub-genre of ripoffs, e.g. Vibes with Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum, The Tomb with Cameron Mitchell and Sybil Danning, and of course the wretched sequel which I couldn't get more than twenty minutes through.

Watched The Golden Child this weekend - just horrible. None of the funny stuff is actually funny, the last act is just gibberish, and the romance is frankly just confusing. Also, Orientalism. I think there were two decent effects shots, and I guess as a kid I would have been interested in the "test" room full of traps, but otherwise it's just tedious as hell. Murphy keeps mugging his way through the same lame joke of not believing in all this Tibetan mumbo-jumbo and not giving any credit to his female partner in the mission, which wears really thin really fast. Lousy, lousy movie.