Old Indy, Willow, and the eyepatch

ATMachine

Member
Whoo boy! Haven't been on here in a while.

I just stopped in to make a remark--I think I know how Lucas envisioned Old Indy losing his eye.

The idea actually came to me while trying to discover everything I could about the early script for Lucasfilm's 1988 film Willow, the one the famous French artist Moebius did designs for.

In that early script, a lot of things were different from the final version. For instance, Madmartigan was a more serious and honorable character, a brooding knight-in-exile patterned after Mel Gibson's Mad Max.

And in the film's final battle against the evil sorceress Bavmorda, there was apparently going to be significantly more violence. Madmartigan would have lost his left arm in battle against Bavmorda's chief lieutenant.

Meanwhile, Madmartigan's love interest Sorsha, Bavmorda's daughter (who was originally a blonde half-elf, not the fully-human redhead of the final film), would have headed up to her mother's tower, to prevent her from completing a dark magical ritual.

In the final film, Bavmorda simply uses her magic to throw Sorsha across the room, nearly sending her into a wall full of spikes. However, the good sorceress Fin Raziel bursts in and counters the spell, sending Sorsha unconscious but unharmed to the floor.

I highly suspect that, in the original story, something considerably more exciting, and more violent, happened.

Bavmorda would have used her powers to bring to life several stone gargoyles. These fearsome statues would have sprouted swords and advanced on Sorsha, resulting in a Ray Harryhausen-style swordfight.

Outnumbered, Sorsha would hold them off as best she could, but her sword would not so much as dent their stone skins. Eventually one of them would land a telling blow, slashing her across the face and causing her to collapse in shock and pain. But before the gargoyles could finish Sorsha off, Fin Raziel would break down the door and shatter the statues with her magic.

During the film's finale, we would see Madmartigan with a golden prosthesis. Sorsha, on the other hand, would be left blind in one eye, with a vertical scar down her face from the sword-stroke.

Sorsha's injury is drawn not only from the Greek myth of Oedipus, but also from Sergei Eisenstein's famous film Battleship Potemkin, in which an old woman loses an eye when a Cossack slashes her across the face with his sword.

I would guess that Lucas simply transferred the unused idea of Willow's Sorsha losing an eye to Old Indy for his television series a few years later.

Moreover, I suspect that Lucas had much the same backstory in mind for Indy's injury as for Sorsha's: some sort of dramatic one-man swordfight against an overwhelming force of unkillable magical soldiers. A real Harryhausen-style bit of derring-do, but with a conclusion straight out of Eisenstein.

I doubt Sorsha would have been seen wearing an eyepatch, but Old Indy would need to avoid grossing the people of 1990s New York City out.

The same idea of the vertical scar around a hero's eye also recurs with Anakin in Revenge of the Sith. And back on Return of the Jedi, Lucas initially wanted Darth Vader to be blind in one eye when unmasked.
 

Indyfan82

Member
Interesting theory indeed. If a fifth Indiana Jones movie were ever made, it would be neat to see if the story behind old Indy's eyepatch was ever revealed...
 
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