Last night I was reading through "The Complete Making of Indiana Jones" (which is not as awesome as "The Complete Making of Star Wars", but still has some cool bits), and I came across a section about the early script summaries for the third Indiana Jones movie, written by George Lucas in 1984, just after Return of the Jedi was released.

Reading it, I just ... well, it becomes apparent that even at this stage of his career, Lucas was, in my opinion, struggling with understanding what made his movies so popular. Don't get me wrong, the guy has some undeniable genius to him. Some of the things he did with the original Star Wars, particularly on the technical side of things, were brilliant. But when it comes to writing a movie, well ...

Here is the original plot summary for the third Indy movie, Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, which eventually transformed into the entirely different Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The following is not directly quoted from the book, but is paraphrased and summarized by me.

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The movie starts with Indiana Jones on a fishing trip in Scotland, but he's interrupted by a policeman who needs his help solving unexplained murders at a haunted castle. After adventures and more killings, Indy discovers that the murderer is a ghost, possessing the body of a dead man. He infiltrates the ghost's room and battles two empty, animated suits of armor, then defeats the ghost.

He returns to his school and learns of a female zoologist who has discovered a pygmy in Africa who is 200 years old, and whose people may have discovered a lost Chinese civilization in Africa connected to the fountain of youth. Indy travels to Africa, where he teams up with the zoologist, a mystical African environmentalist, and (in a later draft) a female student of his who stowed away on the trip because she's madly in love with him and competes with the zoologist for his affection throughout the movie.

The pygmy is kidnapped by Nazis, and Indy chases them on a boat through the harbor, at one point water skiing with his bullwhip. The Nazis escape. Indy and his group take a riverboat deeper into Africa. The boat is run by river pirates. The pirate king joins their group.

While pursuing the Nazis, their camp is broken up by a stampede of wildebeests, triggered by the approach of a three-story Nazi prototype super-tank. Indy rides a rhinoceros against the tank (I am not making this shit up), climbs onto it and rescues the pygmy from inside, then blows it up by blocking a turret.

Wait, it gets better.

The pygmy leads the group into the mountains, pursued by the Nazis. In the mountains, they meet the monkey king, a talking spider monkey, who explains that he has magical powers because of the fountain of youth.

The Nazis arrive and the monkey king uses his army of gorillas to fight them, and then turns them to stone using his magical powers. The monkey king then forces Indy to battle the Nazi leader (Lieutenant Werner von Mephisto). During the fight the monkey king is killed and all the gorillas go crazy, but Indy and his allies escape.

In later drafts, Mephisto has a gun-arm. Indy leads an army of pygmies and gorillas in battle against the Nazis, but Mephisto kills Indy right before he himself is killed by a rolling bell. The monkey king resurrects Indy using his powers. The pirate king tries to take some of the fountain of life stuff for himself but it kills him because he is not pure of heart.

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I'm kind of glad we got Last Crusade instead.