Raiders of the Lost Ark burst into theaters in the summer of 1981 like a wall of spikes Alfred Molina forgot was there. More than 40 years later, Indiana Jones remains one of the most iconic child-endangering heroes outside of Batman. Created by George Lucas, the franchise has seen Indiana Jones adventure all across the globe. A fifth new series installment, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is slated to be released on June 30 of this year. Like the Dark Knight, Indy isn’t shy about training child soldiers to assist him in his ongoing crusade, although Indy’s crusade is less about striking fear into the heart of criminality and more about looting the world’s culture and locking it away in his friend’s museum for the benefit of White America.
From the moment he was introduced in the initial 1981 film, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) firmly established himself as a classic rough-and-tumble adventurer who will unflinchingly throw sidekick after sidekick into the meat grinder of misfortune without batting a single rugged eyelash. These sidekicks are frequently children of varying ages, including his fake 11-year-old son Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan) and his actual teenage son Mutt (Shia LaBeouf). But he also employs a rotating stable of one-off partners and mercenaries throughout his escapades, and none of them is more tragic than dear, sweet Wu Han (David Yip). An eternal stickman. A true ride-or-die friend who takes a bullet in his heart so Indy can clownishly ruin a night of live entertainment at Club Obi Wan.
Wu Han's Introduction in 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'
In case you don’t remember, Wu Han was introduced in the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark released three years later in May 1984. During the sequence, Indy trades a priceless urn containing the remains of Emperor Nurhaci to a Shanghai gangster named Lao Che (Roy Chiao) for an extremely large diamond. Because he is a gangster, Lao Che tries to double-cross Indy. Luckily, Wu Han is on the scene disguised as a waiter, and he swoops in with a revolver to back Indy up. Unfortunately, the entire nightclub is distracted by the sound of popping champagne corks, because apparently nobody in the building has ever heard that particular noise before. One of Lao Che’s trigger-happy sons seizes upon this opportunity to surreptitiously blast Wu Han into the next world. A distraught Indy holds Wu Han in his arms as Wu Han speaks his final words: “I followed you on many adventures, but into the great unknown mystery, I go first, Indy.” Then he smiles up into Indy’s face—he actually smiles—and dies.
Surely, a personal tragedy of this magnitude would rock the hero archaeologist to his very core. At the very least it might cause him to question the years he has devoted to the globetrotting theft of antiquity. But Indy never mentions Wu Han again. And I don’t just mean that Wu Han is ignored in subsequent sequels like a Bond Girl. I mean Indy seems to forget Wu Han ever existed during the same scene.
After a wacky, camp-fueled scramble for a vial of antidote sends Indy tumbling out the window and into the backseat of a getaway car, we are introduced to Short Round. Short Round is Indy’s fifth-grade business partner, and it’s worth noting that Indy doesn’t treat Shorty like a kid. He treats Shorty like they met in the back of a police cruiser. This could be misconstrued as “Indy is treating Short Round like an equal,” but after what we just saw with Wu Han, the only way to interpret this relationship is “Indy is treating Short Round like a temporary employee.” Anyway, after briefly shouting at each other, Short Round expertly drives the getaway car to an airfield, where they escape, sort of. And at no point during the drive, or the following plane ride, or the ensuing adventure in the titular temple of doom, do Indy and Short round discuss Wu Han’s death.
It would initially appear that they all came to Club Obi Wan together, because each one of them had a clearly defined “heist” role: Wu Han infiltrated the club as a waiter ahead of time, Indy arrived in a Sean Connery tuxedo to conduct the trade, and Short Round waited outside with a car. But even so, the fact that Indy never mentions Wu Han’s name again, and Short Round never asks where the hell Wu Han is, indicates that Short Round has never met Wu Han before in his life. These three characters were all directly involved in a heist that required a certain amount of planning and coordination, so the only explanation is that Indy deliberately kept them separate like a sitcom character on a date with two different women at the same restaurant.
Wu Han Was the Original Short Round
Now, Indy doesn’t treat any of his other sidekicks this way. He doesn’t try to keep Sallah separate from Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) or his dad Henry Sr. (Connery) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; nor does he try to quarantine Mac (Ray Winstone) from Mutt, Marion (Karen Allen), or Ox (John Hurt) in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, even though he absolutely should have. Moreover, with the exception of Mutt (who is his biological son), every one of Indy’s other allies is somebody relatively close to his own age. In contrast, Wu Han is visibly several years younger than Indy (the character’s age is never stated, but David Yip is 9 years younger than Harrison Ford), not to mention Short Round, who is a literal child.
“So what?” you bray like an absolute fool. “What are you implying?” Well I’m glad you asked, hypothetical dissenter, because I think these context clues indicate that Wu Han was the original Short Round. Indy recruited him as a kid and brought him along on adventures for a few years until ultimately getting him murdered by gangsters in a penthouse nightclub and never thinking about him again.
The first piece of evidence is the age difference. Indy has clearly been kicking it with Wu Han for a while, because Wu Han mentions their “many adventures” as his heart shatters from the force of both Lao Che’s bullets and Indy’s indifference. Wu Han also has a childlike demeanor about him in his death throes; he’s extremely excited about dying before Indy, even though their age difference makes that event depressing and unnatural. Wu Han’s gleeful acceptance of his own destruction suggests that a major part of Indy’s training includes convincing his child sidekicks that getting killed before him is totally awesome so they shouldn’t feel bad about using their bodies to shield him from machine gun fire. Remember, Indy is saved from Belloq’s Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark by a literal human shield made of Sallah’s children. And Wu Han has a small but noticeable scar on his forehead that doesn’t look terribly old, so we know Indy regularly puts him in danger.
But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence to suggest that Wu Han was merely Short Round 1.0 is the fact that, much like Wu Han, Short Round is never seen or heard from again in the franchise.
What Happened to Short Round After 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'?
Temple of Doom is chronologically the first Indiana Jones film (it takes place a few years before Raiders of the Lost Ark), so Short Round’s absence for the rest of the series is extremely conspicuous. Not only was Short Round not around to help Indy recover the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, but he wasn’t invited to Indy and Marion’s wedding at the end of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The only reason he wouldn’t have been present for any of those adventures or to see Indy finally get hitched is if he somehow miraculously escaped the clutches of his surrogate father, or if he got shot to death in a nightclub while Indy was busy with a Looney Tunes chase against several gangsters for a bottle of antivenom. I choose to believe the latter, because it’s funny. (A third possibility is that Glare-ison Ford, A.K.A. Indiana Groans, A.K.A. the crankiest action hero in history, simply forgot to invite Short Round to his wedding, but that doesn’t explain his absence from the other two films.) So, what happened to that kid, Indy? More importantly, how many Short Rounds have there been?
Temple of Doom takes place in 1935. Raiders takes place in 1936. In the span of a single year, Indy has settled down into a cozy tenured professorship at Marshall College, with no sign of Short Round anywhere in sight. Incidentally, Indy moves from Marshall College to Barnett College in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which takes place in 1938. That means something happened during the two-year interim between this film and Raiders of the Lost Ark to force Indy to switch jobs, and apparently Marcus Brody had to jump ship with him. It’s weird. Indy's back at Marshall by 1957, when Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes place, and Marcus presumably returned at some point as well because there’s a big-ass statue of him in Marshall's commons. (Marcus’ bronzed head comes within a centimeter of pulverizing a man’s groin during a whimsical car chase.) What’s going on there? Why did Indy and Marcus have to flee Marshall College? Did Indy start a fight club? A child fight club, somewhere at Marshall? Is that why he and Marcus had to relocate to Barnett for a few decades until the heat died down? Is … is Short Round buried underneath that Marcus statue? Please understand I never want these questions answered; I’m just happy they exist.
Indy essentially has the same relationship with Wu-Han and Short Round (and with the rest of the orphans he’s presumably conscripted) as the vampire girl has with her fake dad in Let the Right One In - “You’re with me until you get too old or die, at which point I will swap you out for a new henchman.” It was arguably for the best that Mutt didn’t meet Indiana Jones until he was an adult, because there’s an extremely nonzero chance he would’ve been brutally killed at age 12 somewhere in a forbidden temple.
You can check out the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the latest installment in the Indiana Jones series, below.