"Nuke the Fridge" the New "Jump the Shark"

I see the Razzie awards are out and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull is nominated for Worst prequel, remake, rip-off or sequel.

When I was 12, Raiders of the Lost Ark came out and forever after nothing has compared to the movie experience I had then. I was completely blown away.

The sequels pretty much sucked, but I had to watch them.

So I had to give Crystal Skull at try. Early in the movie, Indy hides in a refrigerator on a nuke test site in Nevada. The atomic bomb goes off, and Indy is blown a few miles up and out, and lands inside the intact fridge in the middle of the desert. No damage. He opens the door, walks out a bit woozy, dusts himself off and moves on.

At this point I said f-ck this and my wife and I agreed to turn it off. I simply couldn't go on. We have had jokes about it ever since.

'There's nothing on tv, do you want to try watching the Indiana Jones movie again?"

"No way, not after that f-cking fridge thing."

Well it turns out we weren't the only ones. I'm delighted to find out that the term "Nuke the Fridge" has now become a popular term like "Jump the Shark."

Nuke the fridge is a colloquialism used to refer to the moment in a film series that is so incredible that it lessens the excitement of subsequent scenes that rely on more understated action or suspense, and it becomes apparent that a certain installment is not as good as previous installments, due to ridiculous or low quality storylines, events or characters.

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.

Fans of the Indiana Jones series found the absurdity of this event in the film to be the best example of the lower quality of this installment in the series, and thus coined the phrase, "nuke the fridge".