A new generational marker in pop-culture slang is upon us.
There is ample evidence that “jump the shark” — which emerged from a 1980s dorm-room discussion of a particularly ridiculous episode of the TV show “Happy Days” — has gone mainstream, and then some. New York Times columnists casually invoke the phrase to describe things that they perceive as being past their prime. Last week, the Motley Fool Web site used it to speculate that the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting might have lost its mojo, much the way that Fonzie, the leather-jacketed lothario on “Happy Days,” did when he water-skied over a shark.
In recent weeks, a similarly ridiculous episode — in this case from the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — has produced a similar term, “nuked the fridge,” that is gaining traction online. A Google search comes up with 64,000 hits.
In “Indiana Jones,” the hero’s improbable achievement was to survive a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. Hence, “to nuke the fridge” means to introduce a wildly implausible element to a once-respected franchise, or more generally, to signal the abandonment of past standards of quality.
Newsweek has already chronicled the new phrase, describing it as a synonym for “movie-franchise meltdowns.” The Web site Urban Dictionary has taken note of it. There are already Web sites under the names nukedthefridge.com and nukingthefridge.com that hope to take advantage of the burst of notoriety; the latter says “nuke the fridge” is a term “used by movie fans and critics alike to denote the point in which a film or television program veers off into the realm of the ridiculous and stupid.”
Jason Nicholl, a 37-year-old high school teacher who runs one of the sites, said he went to a message board shortly after the new “Indiana Jones” film was released and saw that the phrase had already caught on. He thought it was likely to be more than a passing fad.
“‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show,” he said, adding that “nuke the fridge” was a “new, fresh take.”
If you haven't seen the flick, the fridge scene is goofy. Indy is trying to escape from some Russian baddies. He hides in a fake suburb built to study the effects of nuclear blasts.
A nuke is about to go off. He casts about for a place to hide and crawls into a fridge. The camera coyly gives us a glimpse of a label that assures us it's a lead-lined fridge.
Ka-boom. The suburb is incinerated -- although not at such a high temperature that it would bake Indy as he hid in the fridge.
Incredibly, the fridge appears to be blown miles away. Although it's bouncing down a hill, the fridge door never pops open. When Indy pops out, the mushroom cloud is still generating, yet apparently there isn't enough radiation to kill him on the spot.
However, the time was 1957, and the yields weren't that high at many of the open-air nuclear detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site. I don't think many of the soldiers exposed in the 1950s died on the spot, but a large number did eventually succumb to cancer.
Here is the latitude and longitude for the site: 37° 7′ 0″ N, 116° 3′ 0″ W. Plug them into Google Earth to look at blast craters. Navigate to the northeast to find Area 51, if you're so inclined.
All that aside, The Crystal Skull failed me in the most crucial way: It failed to entertain.
It was predictable in a bad way and never managed to bring me into the spirit of the adventure.
In some ways, nuking the fridge was the least of its problems.
However, I like the phrase. Now let's see if it has legs! :)