Here’s an excellent treat, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake that two Mississippi kids made over the course of eight years in the 1980s. A few weeks ago a complete copy was floating around on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. Here’s the first ten minutes. (The audio level is low throughout, so you may have to turn up the volume.) Enjoy.

Jim Windolf wrote about the remake in the 2004 Vanity Fair feature “Raiders of the Lost Backyard.” That same year, the producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to the boys’ story, and Daniel Clowes is apparently working on a script (or he was at one point, anyway).

In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.

In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.

The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.

[via an excellent blog called Cynical-C.]

A few belated follow-ups to last week’s post about 5-25-77, the upcoming low-budget movie starring John Francis Daley (late of Freaks and Geeks) as a fanatical Star Wars fan in 1977:

First, my pal Rob was quick to inform me that it isn’t Martin Starr in the pre-production teaser—it’s Chris Owen, who’s best known for playing the Shermanator in American Pie. Owen really does look a lot like Martin Starr in that teaser, I have to say.

Second, I got a couple of nice emails from 5-25-77’s writer/director, Patrick Read Johnson. Based mainly on what I saw in the teaser, I wrote in my post that the movie is “apparently a Scary Movie-style spoof of ’70s culture.” Johnson made some clarifications:

The film, now in post-production, is actually NOT a spoof… We don’t focus on Smiley Face t-shirts or Earth Shoes. It’s not in the LEAST self-conscious in that sense (the teaser IS—) And though much of it is pretty damn funny (or so people are telling us) it’s not really even a comedy. It’s more like… American Graffiti in the months leading up to the release of the original Star Wars. Yet it’s not really ABOUT Star Wars… or Star Wars fandom, either, for that matter.

He also told me that among the many cameos in the film is one by Mark Borchardt, the subject of one of the best documentaries ever—no, one of the best FILMS ever: American Movie. Borchardt apparently has a small role as the manager of a movie theater.

Third, I discovered an extended interview with Johnson that makes it clear that 5-25-77 is at least partly autobiographical. When he was a movie-obsessed teenager growing up in Illinois, Johnson visited Los Angeles and got to hang out with Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters, among other adventures.