Native American Chanting (Last Crusade)

Raiders90

Well-known member
At the beginning of the Utah, 1912 sequence in Last Crusade, there is audible sounds of Native American chanting before the title appears. This has never appeared on any soundtrack of the film. I am curious as to both what the chanting is saying, and why it has never appeared or been released anywhere?
 

Mickiana

Well-known member
Can't find anything. Although I did listen to plenty of soundtrack pieces on Youtube, enjoying my fruitless search. Any excuse.... :gun:
 

Sushi_Cat_Pye

New member
I have no clue to what it is saying, but its definitely not in the soundtrack, as I listen to it on a daily basis :p What I think is that the chanting was a sound effect rather than an actual song within the music scores of the movie, much like how a punch noise is implemented when Indy punches someone, for example. There are not many people out there that fluently know the Native American language, so that'd be rough to translate if you really want to know what they are saying.
 

Lance Quazar

Well-known member
I literally never heard that despite having seen the movie dozens of times until I saw LC at a drive-in in 2020. (RIP, Mission Tiki Drive-In, which was just shuttered this week!)

I actually heard quite a lot of sound effects, music cues and other auditory parts of the movie I never noticed before.

Despite having only car radio quality speakers, I'm assuming it was being in a small, enclosed space with sound bouncing off the windows that amplified and enhanced the sound to that degree.
 

British Raider

Well-known member
I’ve always liked it too. Wish we knew a little more about how it came about. Is it just library sound? Does it come from another movie?
 

metalinvader

Well-known member
Just had a thought..Ben Burtt is probably hard to come by these days but skywalker sound does have a twitter. Anyone with a twitter account could reach out to skywalker sound and ask? No doubt that chanting/singing is sitting in their library somewhere.
 

Jr!

New member
I actually was looking for this not that long ago, and here is what I found. So, about a month ago, I got into a discussion on a John Williams Fansite (JWfan), and someone on a pm thread started talking about the missing (at the time) Cairo source music from Raiders. So, and friend of mine and I spent a whole night tracking down as much of the source/missing music from all four of the films. We were able to find all of the Cairo Marketplace music, and the song from the bar. We were unable to find the Doc Workers chant, and the infamous Dig scene song. The unfortunate part about the Dig song is that someone sampled that scene's audio (with the sfx) in their song. And that brings me to the Indian Chant, which someone also unfortunately sampled in their song. So, for the Dig and the Indian Chant nothing came up.
 
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