Lambonius said:
The problem I see with that is that if you go back into 19th Century America, it basically just becomes a Western. We're already not all THAT far removed from a Western-style costume with all the leather and wide brimmed hats.
True, it would be hard to not turn into a Western, and to keep the 'purity' or whatever term you want to use of the character intact, but I think if done right it could be interesting. I just feel that unlike James Bond, there isn't really much you can do with Indy that wouldn't displease fans here. So I say, go nuts, be inventive, color outside the lines. People here are gonna complain anyway no matter what, cause that's what diehard fans of anything do best. I would pay to see a reinvention of the character in the 1890s if done right.
Some people want to see 1920s adventures, but that would essentially be prequels. Abner, Marion, all that stuff is part of the "Indy mythology" and if you don't show it, people are gonna let down, and if you do, people are gonna be let down cause it'll never go the way people have built it up in their own minds. Others want to redo the 1930s without Harrison but we've already been there and done that. The 1940s fans would want noir tones and I don't know that noir is a genre that can sell today.
I just think that any recasting is going to have to take the series in a very different, almost "alien" direction - the same way each Bond actor plays a very different character from the last. Like, take
Live and Let Die - outside of the character of James Bond (who is played very differently by Roger Moore), it has very little in common with past Bond films, but it worked. Change on the order of that magnitude I feel has to happen with a post-Harrison Indy for it to work. Playing the safe route and having the next phase be prequel films is going to get boring fast, and those films will never get to be their own special, unique things - the same way I feel that the Star Trek reboots leaned too heavily on pre-established mythos to really stand out in their own right.
I feel that Harrison has played the character for so long that any new actor is going to have a VERY hard time not standing in his shadow, and I think Harrison was half the selling point for a lot of people even back in the 80s - Han Solo in a quasi-Western that happened to also be a great set of films.