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"Obi-Wan would have told you long ago had I let him."
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OK, here's a new topic for all the film buffs.
At the risk of invoking the specter of academia, I'll go along with the literary notion of the "Death of the Author," and ask:
What deleted scenes (or dialogue lines) do you wish hadn't been cut from your favorite movies?
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One of my favorite passages that didn't make it into the film version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade comes from Indy's full translation of Donovan's fragmentary Grail tablet:
"Let them bring me to your holy mountain... in the place where you dwell. Across the desert and through the mountain... to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, broad enough only for one man. To the Temple of the Sun, holy enough for all men... Where the cup that holds the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord resides forever."
The name of the Grail Temple used here is a clear reference to the Tintin album Le Temple du Soleil (translated into English as Prisoners of the Sun).
Fitting, given that another Tintin book--Coke En Stock/The Red Sea Sharks--sees Tintin visit the real-world location used to film the Grail Temple exterior: the Treasury in Petra. As in Last Crusade, the facade of this ancient building is put to other uses in service of Hergé's story.
Also, an alternate cut of Indy's meeting with Donovan has Donovan mentioning that Henry Sr. holds the Chair of Medieval Studies at Princeton. This idea was later taken up in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
(And I wonder if the reference to "your holy mountain" isn't a subtle reference of sorts to the Alejandro Jodorowsky film.)
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The Grail tablet's phrase "broad enough only for one man" was to pay off in a later deleted scene, where Donovan, Elsa, and the Nazis use dynamite to blast open the narrow canyon leading to the Grail Temple.
Around the same time, there was a great bit of unused dialogue from Henry:
"Marcus, we're like the four heroes of the Grail legend. You're Percival, the holy innocent. Sallah is Bors, the ordinary man. My son is Galahad, the valiant knight. And his father... the old crusader, Lancelot, who was turned away because he was unworthy, as perhaps I am."
Unlike the earlier bit of dialogue from Henry referencing a fictitious Charlemagne quote, this is actually based on the medieval legends of the Grail, particularly Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur.
The same dialogue also worked its way in modified form into the adventure-game adaptation. Really a shame it was cut from the film, in my view... it was quite profound, and well worth keeping.
“That Darth Vader, man. Sure does love eating Jedi.”
