"Look at the kitty over there, George, do you see the kitty? If you're a good boy you can go pet the kitty, George."

George Lucas is currently busy traveling across the country as part of his it’s-okay-to-see-me-as-a-human-being tour, which is actually a brilliant PR move, but we’ll get to that later. First, a bit of pointless minutiae about Indy 4. A few years back, the internet quickly swooped on “nuke the fridge” as an easy shorthand for everything that was wrong with Indy 4, even though that scene wasn’t even the tenth dumbest that happened in that movie. Previously, Spielberg had said it was his idea, telling Empire “Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea.” Now, in a lengthy NY Times profile, George Lucas says the idea was his, and I believe him, because slug people aren’t capable of guile:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”

In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

Was there also a dossier about using a snake for a rope? About surviving six trips down a waterfall in a row? About Shia Labeouf being able to lead an army of monkeys through the trees? Let’s not split hairs, that whole movie was really dumb. But back to the George Lucas world tour. He’s been busy painting himself as an old-fashioned romantic, too naive for this mean, modern world, but determined to keep up the fight for the downtrodden. It’s hard not to admit that he’s been partially successful.

Lucas’s films are relentlessly — and to some, maddeningly — old-fashioned and naïve. “If it’s a popcorn movie,” Lucas told me, “it needs a lot of corn.”

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Among people who cover movies for a living, kissing Steven Spielberg’s ass and bashing George Lucas are almost equally popular. So it’s not that surprising that when people talk about Indiana Jones 4, they tend to blame all the worst stuff on George Lucas, even though Spielberg has sole directing credit. (Personally, I blame everyone from the grips down to craft services for not jumping in to stop that piece of sh*t. That whole crew are like Anne Frank’s neighbors, if you ask me.). But according to Spielberg, who recently sat down with Empire, the moment people frequently point to as the worst of the film — the nuke the fridge scene — was actually his idea.

“I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been… I sympathise with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”

“The gopher was good. I have the stand-in one at home. What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying “jump the shark”. They now say, “nuked the fridge”. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”

“I sympathise with the MacGuffin people, but y’all gopher haters kin kiss mah ass, nah mean?”

People picked up on the nuke the fridge thing because it was a catchy phrase, but I wouldn’t even consider that worthy of being in the top five dumbest moments of Indy 4. There was the scene where Shia LaBeouf flies into a tree and ends up swinging through the treetops with his monkey army, there was the moment when Indy got stuck in quick sand and they threw him a snake for a rope, there were the fire ants, the raft that went over the waterfall like six times with an 80-year-old man in it with no consequences other than wet hair, etc. etc. Trying to assign blame to Lucas over Spielberg is like arguing about whether Himmler was worse than Goering. I’m still pissed that everyone accepts that it was a terrible movie now with no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s still tracking 77% recommended on RottenTomatoes. SEVENTY-SEVEN F*CKING PERCENT! Among people who review films for a living! All this means is that you won’t be able to trust the reviews for War Horse in the next few months, because a person who couldn’t recognize that Indy 4 was a terrible film when it came out has lost all credibility in regard to Spielberg. TO THE QUICKSAND WITH ALL OF YOU! REMOVE THEIR SNAKE ROPES!

That's an actual toy that people wasted $175 on.

Yesterday, news hit that actress and filthy rich woman Gwyneth Paltrow had saved a woman’s life on 9/11 because she almost hit her with her Mercedes, causing the woman to miss her train that would have taken her to the World Trade Center, where she worked on the 77th floor. So because of a complete coincidence and terrible female stereotype reinforcement, Paltrow gets to pat herself on the back while idiots call her a hero. I bring this story up because now George Lucas can do the same.

Last weekend, Janice Harms of Clara City, Minnesota was answering nature’s call, when her house exploded, sending her flying from the bathroom to the kitchen. Surrounded by flames and imminent death, Harms crawled into her refrigerator and hid there until she was discovered by rescue workers.

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Anyone involved with the creative decision making on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull should be embarrassed at the unintentional joke of a movie they put out, but at least they have a sense of humor about the whole thing.  As long as they can make money off it, anyway.  This is the Indiana Jones Nuke the Fridge action figure from Sideshow Collectibles in conjunction with LucasFilm, and it can be yours for just $174.99.  I hear for an extra $100, you can watch George Lucas stuff the money in the bullfrog pouch underneath his chin and angrily demand more cat burgers.

The Nuke the Fridge moment famously spawned a catch phrase, but as I’ve said many times, that was far from the most laughably stupid moment of the film.  Things that were worse:

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Back in the olden days, "jump the shark" was the phrase used to describe a moment when a franchise went bad.  Here on FilmDrunk, we use the phrase "durst" or "dursted", in honor of Fred Durst.  But look out, vernacular, there’s a new kid in town. Via Urban Dictionary:

The word for June 03 is nuke the fridge
Nuke the fridge is a colloquialism used to delineate the precise moment at which a cinematic franchise has crossed over from remote plausibility to self parodying absurdity, usually indicating a low point in the series from which it is unlikely to recover. [SPOILER ALERT]
The term comes from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which, near the start of the movie, Harrison Ford’s character survives a nuclear detonation by climbing into a kitchen fridge, which is then blown hundreds of feet through the sky whilst the town disintegrates. He then emerges from the fridge with no apparent injury. Later in the movie, the audience is expected to fear for his safety in a normal fistfight.
Guy 1: "Wow. Did you see the new Indy movie? What the hell was that? It was like I was having some kind of flu induced absurdist nightmare."
Guy 2: "Yep… did or did not that series permanently Nuke the Fridge?"
Guy 1: "Oh, totally Nuked the Fridge! But I guess Spielberg is happy as long as he has the money of the people who trusted him." 

I don’t have much to add to this, but I’d like to come up with a term to describe the moment at which a crappy movie becomes so crappy that it transcends its crappiness and becomes awesome.  I’m thinking maybe "tossed the elephant".  As in, Boy, Wicker Man really tossed the elephant when Nic Cage punched that lady while dressed as a bear. Or, For me, Bangkok Dangerous tossed the elephant when Nic Cage fed that elephant. 

Thanks to B-ryce for the tip