Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones Click here to read Premiere's June 1988 Cover Story about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

George Lucas gave Indiana Jones fans whiplash earlier this week by announcing he was ready to start production on Indy IV — with Steven Spielberg as director and Harrison Ford reprising his role as the snake-hating archaeologist — for a May 2008 release. Can we believe it this time?

Talk like this has been going around for years. Here's a gem from Spielberg, in an interview with an Italian newspaper in 2000: "Actually, I have to answer the same question all the time: 'Dad, when are you going to film a new Indiana Jones movie?' But tonight I want to make a promise. Indiana Jones is coming back soon."

Yep, that was seven years ago.

But now the chatter seems more official. Lucas, in preparations for his role as Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade on New Year's Day, made an offhanded aside to an Associated Press reporter that Indy IV is "going to be the best one yet." This kind of talk from the man himself set off a surge of Internet speculation over the weekend, and on January 2 Lucasfilm put out an official, terse press release confirming the release date.

Since the last of the Indy trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was released in 1989, rumors have been thick about a fourth installment. The problem over all these years, according to Lucas & Co., has been getting the script right. (While specifics of the script on this go-around — written by Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, and War of the Worlds scribe David Koepp — are being kept on the down-low, Lucasfilm did say that "it will be shot on undisclosed locations around the world as well as in the United States." Well, that narrows it down.)

Movies stuck in development hell for years are nothing new to Hollywood, but the saga of getting Indy IV rolling is most memorable thanks to the number of A-list writers that have been linked to the project over the years.

The rumors really started revving up in the mid-1990s, when Lucas served as executive producer for TV's Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam (The Lost Boys) was working on a draft for theaters. But all hopes of an imminent return to the big screen were pretty much squashed when Lucas decided to revisit another set of characters he loves: the Star Wars world. In early 2000, Ford sighed to a reporter, "We wait long enough and I'll play his father."