Entertainment
The Classic Adventure That Created Indiana Jones, A Rare Perfect Movie
By Jennifer Asencio
| Updated
Before there was Indiana Jones, there was the 1939 classic movie, Gunga Din. The character at the heart of the franchise we know and love is a homage to the swashbuckling heroes of the 1930s and 40s, with Gunga Din so much at the heart of the tribute that one of Dr. Jones’s adventures challenges the same enemies. In 1999, Gunga Din was included in the United States National Film Registry in recognition of its historic contribution to cinema.
Gunga Din is based on a poem by Rudyard Kipling about a brave Indian water bearer who saves a British Army soldier, despite the soldier treating the Indian with colonial contempt and derision. The poem is told from the soldier’s perspective and salutes the water bearer who gave his life to save the soldier’s.
Attack Of The Thuggee Cult
In the movie, there are three soldiers: Cutter, Ballantine, and MacChesney, all close friends and adventuresome enlistees in the British Army, serving in India in the late 1800s. Cutter, played by the classic leading man Cary Grant, is a fortune hunter who is constantly getting into trouble as he seeks treasure in the Indian countryside. MacChesney is in charge of the company’s elephants, including one named Annie, who he treats like his own baby. Ballantine, much to his friends’ dismay, announces that he is leaving the service at the encroaching end of his tour to get married and go into the tea business.
Nevertheless, none of these men are afraid to get into a tumble, so when a British outpost suddenly goes silent, they are sent with troops to investigate. Their group is attacked by the mysterious Thuggee, thought to be a cult to the Hindu death goddess Kali. The squad is nearly decimated, and the British Army has to figure out how to deal with the Thuggee terrorists.
Chemistry Carries The Movie
Lurking on the sidelines is Gunga Din, the titular water bearer, who desperately wants to be a soldier himself. Cutter takes a liking to him, and in return, he tells Cutter about a golden temple in the mountains, igniting the soldier’s lust for treasure. But the quest for fortune and glory brings Cutter and his friends more than they bargained for and could lead to the defeat of the British Army.
The chemistry of the three stars, the smarmy Cary Grant, the burly Victor MacLaglen, and the heartthrob Douglas Fairbanks Jr., is a great deal of what carries the movie, despite it being named for the water bearer. Their behavior toward each other is a dance of manly social maneuvering, complete with teasing, tricking, stealing from, and even fighting with one another, but always loyal to each other to the end.
The Ultimate Boys Action-Adventure Movie
At its heart, Gunga Din is a boy’s action-adventure film about Army guys getting into fantastic adventures. The film also stars contemporary female lead Joan Fontaine, but it is no accident that Annie the Elephant gets more screen time. Even Ballantine has no time for sissy girls when the going gets tough. It is a masterpiece of male bonding, with the trio’s hijinks punctuated by their interactions with one another and how well they know each other, especially in the midst of a fight.
And Gunga Din has a lot of fighting: fistfights, explosive skirmishes, and the final high-stakes battle that pulls out all the stops. Don’t be fooled by the early-Hollywood special effects, because Gunga Din was a large-scale production that was revolutionary for its time. However, it is also very family-friendly despite all the action, since it reflected early Hollywood sensibilities about depicting violence.
A California Adventure
Although the movie was shot entirely in California, its cinematography is so magical that it seamlessly transports the viewer to India’s northwest frontier, so much so that Fairbanks, Jr. once observed that Indian people he met in his travels believed the film was shot in their homeland. From wide shots of mountain vistas and drilling troops in martial exercises to intimate scenes of murder and male bonding, the movie’s camera work is so celebrated that it is studied in film schools to this day and has been required viewing on numerous film sets.
However, Gunga Din is also a product of its time. The role of Gunga Din is played by Sam Jaffe, who is not Indian, nor are the major Indian characters, the Guru or Chota, played by Indian actors. All three wear blackface in the film. This should be taken as a byproduct of the era, not a condemnation of the film, but less educated viewers might judge it harshly through a modern lens.
Gunga Din’s Similarities To Indiana Jones
It’s easy to see this movie echoed throughout the adventures of Indiana Jones. Temple of Doom shares many plot elements and characteristics with Gunga Din, and not just because they share a villainous organization in the Thuggee cult. There are numerous references to events concurrent with the earlier film, including entire characters that are tributes to its ideas: a British soldier defends the Empire’s colonialism, while a mad guru leads the Thuggee in their terrible plan.
Stephen Spielberg has repeatedly said that Temple of Doom is his least favorite film in the franchise, calling the 1984 sequel too dark and horrific and saying it “out-poltered Poltergeist.” This is disappointing because Temple of Doom is a loving tribute to the film that inspired it, putting Indiana Jones into the role of Cutter as he seeks “fortune and glory” by hunting down the Shankara Stones for a small Indian village. From there, the adventure Indy and his friends go on is, in essence, the same one as Cutter and Din’s trek out to the golden temple.
Unfortunately, Gunga Din is not streaming free on any major services. However, it can be streamed for a fee on Amazon, and it’s well worth buying the DVD, especially since it is a fun movie for the whole family.
Gunga Din created the framework for most of the action-adventure movies you love today. Best of all, it’s endlessly rewatchable as a self-contained, neatly wrapped package that requires no embellishment, gritty remake, or computer-generated action.
Entertainment
New safety rules for under-16 Snapchat users
Snapchat is rolling out new content-sharing protections for 13- to 15-year-old users.
The platform announced Wednesday that younger teens will get a “friends-only” experience for their Spotlight posts. That public feed consists of vertical videos short-form similar to Instagram Reels or TikTok.
The new rules make Spotlight content posted by 13- to 15-year-olds visible only to the user’s mutually accepted friends. Previously, under-16 users could post to Spotlight, without attribution to their profile.
“This allowed teens to participate, while helping to protect them from potentially unwanted contact that can come with public posting,” the Snap Company said in its announcement.
Under-16 Snapchat users will have a dedicated profile space for certain content.
Credit: Courtesy Snapchat
Now younger Snapchatters will get a space on their profile for creating, saving, and sharing Stories and Spotlight Videos with only their mutually accepted friends. Teens ages 16 and 17 can share content publicly with some safeguards.
“This new experience is designed to encourage creativity and self-expression within a trusted audience,” the company said.
Age checking on Snapchat
Currently, Snapchat relies on self-attested age and age inference, but safety advocates generally say social media platforms need high-quality age assurance to ensure their safety measures are effective.
When Mashable tested Snapchat’s age attestation prior to the announcement, we found that Snapchat defaulted user age to 18 years old.
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With the new policy, if Snapchat determines a user is under 16, despite their stated age, that minor will be shifted into the friends-only sharing setting. That change will appear in the Snapchat app if they choose to post a Spotlight video.
Snapchat safety concerns
Last week, the advocacy groups Heat Initiative, Anxious Generation, ParentsTogether Action, and Design It 4 Us published the results of a survey of teen Snapchat users, alleging that the platform’s safety measures aren’t effective enough.
A third of the poll’s 1,016 respondents said they’d seen or received unsafe content or messages in the past week. More than half said they’d had at least one such experience in the past year.
The top three types of dangerous experiences reported by up to a third of teens were unwanted contact, bullying, and sexually suggestive content and messages. More than 40 percent of respondents who’d received unwanted messages believed the sender was an adult.
A Snap Company spokesperson told Mashable that the report “does not fully reflect the significant investments Snap has made to help protect young people.”
In the blog post Snap published Wednesday, the company noted that it works to prevent the delivery of friend requests from potential strangers, and that the platform doesn’t allow teens to be messaged by anyone they haven’t added as a friend or who’s not in their phone contacts. Additionally, when teens accept a stranger as a friend, Snapchat is designed to send warnings when minors begin chatting with that user.
“After years of advocacy by parents, kids, and experts, it’s encouraging that Snap is finally making some changes to try to prevent young children from posting in adult spaces, which has put kids in danger on the platform for years,” Brooke Istook, president and chief strategy officer at Heat Initiative, said in a statement to Mashable.
Istook added, however, that “fundamental dangers for kids that are baked into Snapchat’s design” remain unaddressed, including the facilitation of unsafe connections between teens and adults and the algorithmic recommendation of unsafe content.
Snapchat has been the target of youth safety activism and the target of legal action, like many major social media platforms. In January, Snap settled a lawsuit brought by a teenager who claimed that Snapchat’s design features, like algorithmic recommendations, led to addictive use and mental health harms. Soon after, Snap introduced new parental controls for teens.
UPDATE: Jun. 10, 2026, 8:27 a.m. PDT This story has been updated to include a statement from Heat Initiative.
Entertainment
Using Claude Fable 5 means your data will be collected. It’s not optional.
Anthropic just released its most powerful public model yet — Claude Fable 5. However, along with the model’s release, the AI giant also made a significant update to its data retention policies.
Fable 5 was released to the public on Tuesday. Fable 5 is a “safe for general use” version of Anthropic’s most powerful model, Mythos, which has been restricted from public use due to its potentially dangerous cybersecurity capabilities. Anthropic created a set of safety guardrails for Fable 5, and its benchmarks blow away much of the competition, per Anthropic.
But it looks like Anthropic has also blown away its data retention policies for Fable 5.
“To ensure we’re responsibly deploying Mythos-class models, we are requiring limited data retention and review as part of our safety work,” reads an update on Anthropic’s official Claude support page. “Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, Mythos-class models are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes, on every platform where these models are offered.”
The update was first noticed by Jun Park, the CEO of AI training company hillclimb.
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“New policy from Anthropic: if you use Fable/Mythos, they collect your data. No exceptions. Not even for enterprise partners,” Park posted on X.
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This change is significant for Anthropic’s enterprise and API customers, says Jessica Eaves Mathews, a lawyer who specializes in copyright, trademark, and AI law.
In a post on Mathews’ Substack (as highlighted by CyberNews), the lawyer explains how Anthropic already retains user data for 30 days under its free and paid consumer plans. However, Matthews says this change nullifies part of any agreement Anthropic has with its enterprise and API partners.
“Every other Claude model available through the API, including Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5, can operate under Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreements,” Mathews writes. “Fable 5 cannot. If your organization previously had a ZDR agreement with Anthropic, that agreement does not apply to Fable 5 traffic. This is a policy change that overrides existing enterprise commitments for this specific model class.”
Mathews says that any organization that believed that their data would not be stored by Anthropic should know that there is now a “mandatory exception” for Fable 5 and all future Mythos models.
While Mythos-class models seem to be quite powerful, companies should know about the change in Anthropic’s data retention policies and make adjustments where necessary.
Entertainment
Tons of Fitbits are on sale ahead of Prime Day
Best early Prime Day Fitbit deals at a glance:
Amazon’s Prime Day sales event is right around the corner (I can’t believe it’s that time of year again!), and I’m genuinely shocked by the deals we’re seeing this early in the game.
Usually, Amazon doesn’t put Fitbits on sale until the very last minute, and then they’re gone. (And some years, they don’t go on sale at all.) But right now, we’re seeing all-time lows on select Fitbit models, including the Charge 6.
Here are the best early Prime Day Fitbit deals you can shop right now:
Best deal overall
$99.95
at Amazon
$159.95
Save $60.00
Why we like it
The Fitbit Charge 6 isn’t the newest Fitbit on the market, but it still has (almost) everything you’d need in a smart wearable. (I say almost because the Fitbit Charge 6 doesn’t have an altimeter, but if you’re not a trail runner, this probably isn’t a deal breaker.)
The Charge 6 tracks your calories, steps, sleep, heart rate, and more. It also has built-in GPS, 40+ exercise modes, a seven-day battery life, and includes a three-month Google Health Premium (formerly Fitbit Premium) membership. Once the three months are up, you’ll need to either cancel or renew for $9.99 per month or $99.99 annually.
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Right now, you can get the Fitbit Charge 6 for $99.95 at Amazon. This is the lowest price we’ve tracked on this model since its release in 2023.
Best runner-up deal
Why we like it
If you’re willing to spend a little bit more, the Fitbit Versa 4 is on sale for $149.95. This isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen (it was $104.96 in April 2024), but it’s still a pretty good deal.
Unlike the Charge 6, the Versa 4 has an altimeter and Bluetooth wrist calling. So, if you’re looking for a wearable that acts more like a smartwatch, the Versa 4 might be the better buy. That said, it doesn’t have the more “serious” health sensor that the Charge 6 does (e.g., ECG and EDA).
The Versa 4 also comes with three months of Google Health Premium.
Best budget deal
$79.95
at Walmart
$89.95
Save $10
Why we like it
If you’re just looking for something that’s affordable and efficient, the Fitbit Inspire 3 is your best option at $79.95.
It’s a no-frills fitness tracker that’ll give you the basic features you need to stay on top of your health. It can track your heart rate, steps, and stress levels. (It also offers menstrual health tracking, which is nice.)
You’ll also get 10 full days of battery life and, like the other models mentioned above, three free months of Google Health Premium.
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