Having read this morning’s riff about my difficulty with the idea of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull beng based “on some creative-bedrock level” upon a ride at Tokyo’s DisneySea theme park, the pic’s screenwriter David Koepp wrote a little while ago to emphasize that Indy 4 “is not based on a theme park ride. Never heard of the ride, never went on the ride, nobody ever talked about the ride.

“Which is not to say that if the ride had swell ideas in it, we wouldn’t have been above pilfering them and smacking them down in a movie, but we didn’t. So don’t call us diseased. We thought up our own story. You still might think it sucks in the end, but at least it’ll be original suckage.”

Just to be clear — I wasn’t presuming that the Crystal Skull screenplay is literally based on the ride, but that it appears, as I put it, to be some kind of “conceptual outgrowth” in the same way that the Pirates of the Caribbean films started out as a theme-park ride.