Indiana Jones is back in theaters — and while he isn’t stealing the Vulcan’s torch, there is an Alabama connection in his newest adventure.

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” opened Friday in theaters, with Harrison Ford reprising his role as the whip-cracking, globe-trotting archeologist Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. Phoebe Waller-Bridge co-stars as Jones’ goddaughter, Helena, with Toby Jones and Antonio Banderas also starring.

If you’re trying to avoid spoilers, you might stop here.

Alabama comes in once we encounter the villain — Jürgen Voller, portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen. The character is later identified as Professor Schmidt, who teaches at “Alabama University.”

Voller first encounters Indiana Jones in Germany in 1944 in the movie’s first third, only later to reappear as “Professor Schmidt” in New York City in 1969 on the day that the Apollo 11 astronauts are given a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Manhattan. That’s also the day that Dr. Jones retires from teaching at Hunter College.

Why is Schmidt at the parade? Because he was supposedly instrumental in bringing the moon landing to a successful conclusion.

Later, as Voller’s ominous plan takes shape and he is taken by the CIA, he says, “I’m not going back to Alabama!”

Voller was partially inspired by Wernher von Braun, the pioneering and revered late director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. A handsome, charismatic face of rocketry and science, von Braun guided America’s Apollo 11 spaceflight mission to the moon.

In the process Huntsville became “The Rocket City.”

But von Braun’s legacy is complicated. Earlier in his life, he’d been a member of the Nazi party and during World War II developed the V2 rocket, which killed tens of thousands of people. He was taken into custody after the war by the U.S. military in a highly classified program that spirited other German scientists to America and out of the reach of the Soviet Union.

A bio on NASA’s website reads, “Von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer, yet was also arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 for careless remarks he made about the war and the rocket. His responsibility for the crimes connected to rocket production is controversial.”

And von Braun was instrumental in the transformation of one Alabama university — University of Alabama in Hunstville. In 1961, von Braun asked the Alabama Legislature to provide funding for a research institute with advanced engineering and science programs, the UAH Research Institute.

It’s not the first time von Braun has inspired pop culture. He was a key plot point in the Amazon series “Hunters,” which depicts a band of vigilante Nazi assassins.