Harrison Ford was initially baffled by the Indiana Jones wardrobe, especially the whip

The Indiana Jones series is iconic in its own right as an 80s pop culture phenomenon with a legendary director on top of his game and the dashing actor known for playing Han Solo in a little indie space opera coming together to bring audiences a fresh type of adventure that eventually created its own sub-genre. However, those films aren’t wholly original, as they are throwbacks to the golden days of cinema that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had been nostalgic for. Indiana Jones was an amalgamation of swash-bucklers, adventurers and James Bond.

Spielberg and Lucas had compiled a simple yet distinguishably iconic costume for their archeologist hero. According to Variety, series star Harrison Ford fielded many reservations when he first saw the wardrobe for Indy when starting production on Raiders of the Lost Ark, “It was presented to me as an aspect of character in the first film. My questions about it were many. Why am I wearing a leather jacket in the jungle? Isn’t it hot here? Why am I carrying a whip? What am I going to do with a f*cking whip? I’m going to whip people?”

When Spielberg and Lucas wanted to make nostalgia pieces in their heyday, Star Wars and Indiana Jones were born. When studios want to make nostalgia pieces today, they make more Star Wars and more Indiana Jones. Although, when it comes to the main continuity, Ford has now officially hung up his fedora. When outlining how he wanted to close out the series for Dial of Destiny, Ford explained in Esquire, “I wanted an ambitious movie to be the last one. And I don’t mean that we didn’t make ambitious movies before — they were ambitious in many different ways. But not necessarily as ambitious with the character as I wanted the last one to be.”

Ford added an anecdote about doing stunts on the latest entry, particularly riding on horseback through a city parade. The stunt people were very protective of the legacy star as he mounted or dismounted the horse and would attempt to catch him should he slightly be off, “I thought, ‘What the f*ck?’ Like I was being attacked by gropers. I look down and there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup. They said, ‘Oh, we were just afraid because we thought, you know, and bah bah bah bah.’ And I said, ‘Leave me the f*ck alone…Leave me alone, I’m an old man getting off a horse and I want it to look like that!”’