As we all know, when Sallah takes Indy to see the old man to have the markings on the headpiece translated, the old man says the staff should be 6 Kaddams high.
To which Sallah mumbles, "About 72 inches."
Then the old man says to take back one Kaddam, etc etc.
Thus the staff is roughly 5 feet tall. When Indy uses the staff it is roughly 25% taller than him. Making Indy roughly 4 feet tall. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
I was just thinking though; Sallah was hanging around Indy speaking English and probably translating Arabic or Egyptian or whatever between the two. When the guy said 6 kaddams, Sallah inadvertantly translated the word to 'feet' in his mind and figured '6 feet is 72 inches.' In reality though, a kaddam is probably not exactly 12 inches. It is more likely a totally different unit of measurement. Indy is NOT a dwarf, Sallah just made a mistake!
Is it possible the old man screwed up his lines, and he was supposed to say "add" one Kaddam, instead of "take back"??
You would think that to honor the Hebrew God, as he said, you would give him something, instead of taking away.
'Blues
Originally posted by IndyBlues Is it possible the old man screwed up his lines, and he was supposed to say "add" one Kaddam, instead of "take back"??
You would think that to honor the Hebrew God, as he said, you would give him something, instead of taking away.
'Blues
Good idea, but all of their lines revovled around that and it made sense.
My solution is that it was an honest mistake by Speilberg or Lucas and noone noticed it. This small mistake does not take away from the greatness of the movie.
If you go to www.moviemistakes.com you will find that almost every great movie has tons of mistakes. For example SPR has over 100 mistakes if I remember correctly. (Wierd thing is, all of the not so famous movies have very few mistakes. Figures )
I've watched this scene several times, and every time I've noticed something very peculiar...
When talking about kadams, forget the length of the stick for a moment, and look at the slab full of holes (or something like that) where Indy sticks up the pole... he checks his whatever booklet he has and then starts following the long line of holes down with his finger. At one spot you notice a hole that's clearly been cleaned recently, but Indy does not stop there, but goes down a couple more holes, then stops at one that is still full of sand and cleans it. Then he juts the pole in there. Perhaps this is what they meant with taking back one kadam... not the length of the stick in your hand, but the right spot in the slab you're meant to put it in. Belloq was digging in a wrong place because he had put his staff into a marker that was too high on the slab.
It still doesn't completely clear up all the stick talk, but could very give further explanation to the whole scene (and thus the odd length of pole as well).
The only hole in Finns theory, is when Indy says to Sallah,
"Belloqs staff is too long" I figure he says this because of the fact that Belloq didn't have the info to know to remove 1 Kaddam from the length.
Altho, it is very possible that Sallah is one of those Cliff Clavin type of guys who just spouts out info thinking no one else will know what the heck he is talking about, and Indy and the Old man don't want to break his stones and tell him he's talking out of his keister.
How bout this guy's....He Had the wrong height! The Ark the found was a supernatural fraud or detour. The fourth Indiana Jones....Raiders Of The REAL Lost Ark
Yeah, as I told, it does not clear out the stick talk, but I've still wondered why in the heck did Indy obviously not stick his pole in the same hole Belloq had used. (And down with dirty answers, please.)
One possible explanation is that they simply first mistook the length of one kadam (or rounded it up heavily - if it's for example about 15 inches, not 12), so that would make it more explainable... (but I in fact hate it when I have to explain a film mistake by something we don't really see on screen).
Originally posted by Finn why in the heck did Indy obviously not stick his pole in the same hole Belloq had used.
I had always assumed that the holes in the floor were a sort of calendar thing to compensate for the movement of the earth. Since Indy was in the map room a few days after Belloq, he shifted a few holes over.
Originally posted by Junior Jones
I had always assumed that the holes in the floor were a sort of calendar thing to compensate for the movement of the earth. Since Indy was in the map room a few days after Belloq, he shifted a few holes over.
Yeah, sounds reasonable.
But unfortunately that still doesn't explain the staff problem…
I have a suggestion to the Staff of Ra problem. Let me hear what you think of it:
The old man says, the staff should be 6 kadams/72 inches tall. Right. Then he says to "take back one kadam to honour the Hebrew god, whose Ark this is".
I don't agree that by "taking back" you subtract one kadam. You add one instead. _You_ take back the kadam, thus _you_ add it to the height of the staff.
Mr. Ford is just about 72 inches tall - and then you see him with the staff, it is about one foot taller than him. Altogether, this amounts to 7 kadams/84 inches.
Regarding the use of a different hole than Belloqs (yehyeh, bring it on ), Indiana dusts off some sand from the stone model, revealing some hieroglyphs - something Belloq obviously did not do (as the sand then would not have been there). There is no apparent explanation to what these glyphs mean, but my guess is, that they are the ones telling Indy to move back the staff to holes on the model. After all, there are _not_ 12 inches between Belloqs and Indys holes, so the "take back one kadam = place the staff differently" does not make any sense to me.
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How about this one..
