A quarter of a century ago, the fantastic story of “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” began and now finds a happy ending thanks to the viral power of the Internet.

By now, the story of how a troupe of pre-teens from Mississippi made a shot-by-shot remake of the classic adventure film from George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg in the 1980s is pretty well known — the young filmmakers, who are now in their 30s, have met the two directors and have even touched the actual idol prop used in the original film, during a visit to Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. But the movie itself has only been seen by a chosen few, at film festivals and special events (like Sprockets in Toronto), in part because it is an obvious copyright violation.

More recently, copies of the movie have started popping up on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks, but they are hard to come by. As a taste, here’s the first 10 minutes of the movie — thanks to a link from Panopticist.com (turn the sound up, because it’s very faint through most of the clip). And remember that these kids are 11 and 12, that they made or bought all the props, and that they dug tunnels for months in order to film the opening scene. Even the storyboarding for the movie took over a year (and making the boulder took four).

See also the feature article in Vanity Fair, “Raiders of the Lost Backyard.”