I’m listening to the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack again, I know most of the movie verbatim. It occurs to me;
1) the dialogue has the rapid-fire banter of movies from the 30s-40s, like Bladerunner, so it has more “period” feel than the sequels.
2) who says things like “my services are entirely inconsequential” or “the Ark eludes us still in some secluded antechamber”? Of course this grabs a kid with a higher than age group reading level, the sort of little nerd infatuated with archaeology.
@moonlit I figure that unless someone’s actively speaking Arabic or German pretty much all dialogue defaults to English as an easily accessible language. But that makes sense, the slightly crisper more formal English for non-native speakers, especially educated by Brits (Sallah is, no?).
@Leucrotta We always imagined it as someone trying to shove German words into English sentences! Things like “the Ark eludes us still in some secluded antechamber” always felt like exactly the kind of thing someone who learned their English primarily for the purpose of archaeological studies would end up saying. (Were they even supposed to be speaking English in most of Ark, or just casually screen-translated German?)