Bullwhip in one hand, relic in the other and his fedora hanging on for dear life, Indiana Jones in action is a spectacular sight on the big screen.

His exploits also play out to a spectacular sound, thanks to one of the most memorable film themes to come out of Hollywood.

Composer John Williams has had enormous hits over his career, including the scores to the "Star Wars," "Superman" and "Jaws" blockbuster franchises, but with his soundtrack to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, he discovered a particularly rich treasure.

Foremost is "The Raiders March," the film's main theme that appears whenever Harrison Ford does a heroic deed and essentially symbolizes Indiana Jones. The march is action distilled into musical notes; it is adventure personified. A trumpet fanfare belts out a soaring strain over the syncopated pulsing of a full orchestra. The melody is then varied as more instruments join in and the volume increases to climactic cadences.

If Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created a paean to the action-packed Saturday-morning serials of their youth, Williams reached back to the lush orchestral film scores of the 1940s and '50s. It rings again in the ears of moviegoers thanks to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" -- although to many of us, the tune is so catchy it never really left.

For all of Williams' notorious penchant for rather obvious influences from classical music's past -- you can hear traces of Holst, Beethoven, Strauss, Orff and more in his film scores -- he clearly is a master of how to exploit the orchestra to grand cinematic effect.

At the least in "The Raiders March" he drew upon the rich history of thematic personifications of heroism, such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

"Some of these films by Spielberg and Lucas have 90-100 minutes of music -- it's almost like writing an opera, if not in quality, certainly in quantity," he once said.

But no music would survive two hours of variation if it weren't substantive to begin with, and "The Raiders March" turned out to be as resilient as Indiana himself. Indy wouldn't be the same without it.