The Indiana Jones tetralogy comes out on Blu-Ray in a couple weeks, and to mark the occasion, an IMAX-sized version of Raiders of the Lost Ark is coming to certain cities this weekend. My own city, alas, is not one of them, but I figured this would be as good a time as any to re-post the article that I wrote on the Indiana Jones franchise for Books & Culture some four years ago — and, in this version of the article, I have added several links to blog posts that expand on some of the themes that I touched on only briefly within the text of the article itself. You can read that article here; and, in the spirit of deleted scenes everywhere, you can read four paragraphs here on the franchise’s approach to sex and the family, which I had to squish down to a single paragraph for space reasons.