Just before the careening truck chase in Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is asked how he plans to swipe the holy Ark of the Covenant back from the Nazis.

“I don’t know,” Jones says, in Mr. Ford’s belligerent mumble. “I’m making this up as I go.”

Not so for the teenage minds behind the ingenious scene-for-scene remake of “Raiders,” a 1989 do-it-yourself feat and recent cult favorite called “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” that returns this weekend to Anthology Film Archives after a sold-out summer run. Between 1982 and 1989, three teenage Mississippi friends shot, edited, and (most impressive) completed a rousing replica of Mr. Spielberg and George Lucas’s action-adventure classic. Pulling off both fire-defying stunts and word-perfect one-liners, their precocious mix of persistence and planning resulted in not a laughable kitsch item, but a well-crafted mini-blockbuster.

“At first, our parents patted us on the head, like most parents would, and said, ‘That’s cute,'” the movie’s director, Eric Zala, now 37, recalled. Mr. Zala spearheaded the project with friend Chris Strompolos, 36, who took the role of producer — and Indiana Jones. “Around year three, they realized we weren’t going to stop.”

When production began in 1982, Messrs. Zala and Strompolos reeled in classmate Jayson Lamb to man the cameras and the special effects, drew their cast from friends and little brothers, and raised funds from allowances and holiday gifts. And it’s all here: the trap-rigged tomb from the movie’s opening, the snake pit where the ark lies, and even that rough-and-tumble truck chase. Indiana’s trademark weary swagger gets a sweet workout from a boyishly husky Mr. Strompolos, who grows into the routine (and adolescence) on camera. Indy’s old flame Marion (played by Angela Rodriguez) is full of spunk (arguably more than Karen Allen!), and Belloq (played here by Mr. Zala) and the (pint-size) Nazi sadists relish their villainy in speech-team suits.

The young “Raiders” fans (the word hardly seems sufficient) were intent on completing a respectable adaptation, so they demonstrated a professionalism far beyond amateur antics.

“We shot those first opening scenes — the jungle scene, the cave scene, the college scene — over and over and over again, until our degree of suckage gradually decreased,” Mr. Strompolos said. The first year of production was actually given over to sketching out a shooting script, and Mr. Zala kept a shot log through the ensuing years, just like a “bona fide” producer. Graveyard-shift editing marathons at a local TV station took up the final year as the filmmakers labored over Betamax and .75-inch analog tapes.

At an estimated cost of $5,000, the “Raiders” adaptation made necessary substitutions from the Paramount blockbuster. Instead of England, France, and Tunisia, the main locations were “the basement, the backyard, and the U.S.S. Alabama,” Mr. Strompolos recalled. (The credits sweetly thank Mr. Zala’s mother for “the use and destroying of her home.”) The business district of Gulfport, Md., on a Sunday, stood in for Cairo, with all the children in robes arousing the suspicion of local squad cars. “They thought we were shooting kid pornography, which mystifies us to this day,” Mr. Zala said.

It’s charming to see the original film’s comic-relief monkey replaced with a beagle mix (“Snickers”), but the restaging in the “Raiders” adaptation is effective, whether exacting or merely evocative. Indiana’s early meeting in a Cairo café is here, and in the absence of an Egyptian metropolitan backdrop, the scene is resourcefully played with a billowing canvas in the background. But for a later scene involving Belloq and Marion, the young filmmakers precisely imitated a complex shot reflected in a palm-size mirror. Later, they even mimicked Mr. Spielberg’s use of deep staging in a suspenseful ambush. The analog clarity of the original, which lacks the clutter of today’s action films, clearly proved a boon.

Messrs. Zala and Strompolos never intended to show their film publicly (as its muddy video might testify), but a copy eventually screened in Austin, Texas, in 2003. Since then, they have screened it at festivals and institutions across the country and around the world, and eventually at special screenings (by invitation) at Mr. Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic Skywalker Ranch and at Pixar. (Messrs. Zala and Strompolos will appear at select screenings this weekend.) Copyright questions are skirted by the most altruistic means: Revenues from the nonprofit screenings are donated to charity, and the two friends use the film for teaching workshops.

Mr. Spielberg himself received a copy from the head of production at DreamWorks, after director Eli Roth (of “Hostel” fame) brought a bootleg copy to a pitch meeting. What did the one-man Hollywood juggernaut think of this sincerest form of flattery? Mr. Strompolos knows — because he keeps his copy of Mr. Spielberg’s response framed above his desk:

“Dear Chris, Eric, Jayson, I wanted to write and let you know how impressed I was with your very loving and detailed tribute to our ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,'” the letter reads. The director goes on to praise specifics, such as “the smallest detail of Indiana’s voice rising when he says ‘It’s a date, you eat them!’ (Which, by the way is something I asked Harrison to do, and we had to recreate the line in the ADR room.)”

Mr. Spielberg, who subsequently hosted the filmmakers for a private screening of their opus, also wrote that he expected to see their names on the big screen someday. That may come to pass for two reasons. First, Messrs. Zala and Strompolos have formed an independent production company, Rolling Boulder Films. Next year they plan to shop an action film, to be shot, naturally, in Mississippi. And to bring the whole idea of a remake full circle, the heavyweight producer Scott Rudin has picked Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”) to adapt their story for the screen. It’s what Mr. Zala playfully touts as”the major motion picture about these three wacky Mississippi kids who did the shot-for-shot remake of ‘Raiders’ in the ’80s.”

November 15 and 16 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).