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Producers are keeping details of the fourth installment of the Raiders franchise close to the vest—one extra who blabbed its secrets to a local paper was famously poisoned to death by what are suspected to have been a plate of bad dates—but even George Lucas can't help but spill a few beans when asked by an MTV News reporter about the crystal skulls that drive the movie's plot:

"I think this is actually better, it's up there with the Ark of the Covenant," he declared of the fourth film's "McGuffin" (a term coined by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an object which drives a film's plot). "Sankara Stones and the Holy Grail were a little tough, but I think this time we've really got a great one.

"The skulls themselves are real and a lot of the stuff in the movie is real, just like in the other movies," Lucas continued. "We don't base it on a lot of phony-baloney stuff. It's all based on at least true mythology that exists today that ... a certain amount of the population actually believes in."

To see the series's neck-wattled spiritual shepherd reduced to a gushing fanboy over the mythical objects—which experts say could be feasibly imbued with anything from ancient Mayan voodoo powers to extraterrestrial supercomputer capabilities—should be enough to reassure legions of Indy fans concerned the plot of his latest adventure may suffer out of the starting gate from a tchochke over-reliance. Now they can move down the list to other fears, like their first glimpse of Harrison Ford's saggy torso or the possibility of an unannounced ethnic-stereotype sidekick popping up for comic relief.