Decades before Be Kind, Rewind, a bunch of kids lovingly recreated Raider of the Lost Ark:

“…One of the strangest permutations of ’80’s nostalgia to hit movie screens—the now-notorious Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a 100-minute shot-for-shot amateur-video remake of the 1981 Spielberg-Lucas adventure flick, created over a span of seven years by a group of kids in small-town Reagan-era Mississippi. More talked-about than seen,The Adaptation arrives at Anthology Film Archives this Friday for a rare two-day run. Filled with ingenious contraptions and overweening jerry-rigs,The Adaptation remakes Raiders on less than 1/2,000th of Paramount’s original $20 million budget, conjuring exotic locales out of cardboard sets in parents’ basements, casting tweens in Boy Scout uniforms as Nazi bad guys, and rolling a gigantic hand-crafted boulder through the family garage to create the film’s signature scene. Nothing short of slapdash spectacular.”

Now they’re asking for help to fill in the project’s one missing scene—and they’re just $2,700 from their $50k goal with three days left:

[Via Sean Parent]