In the coming weeks, leading up to the opening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I'm going to be taking a look back at previous adventures of Doctor Jones. But we won't be starting with the "beginning" and Raiders of the Lost Ark...we'll be starting with the "beginning" and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
On March 4, 1992 ABC broadcast the two hour pilot to entitled The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles entitled Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal. The pilot had two segments to set up the premise of the series. In the first half, which takes place in Egypt in 1908, 9 year old Henry Jones, Jr. (Cory Carrier) is travelling with his father Professor Henry Jones (Lloyd Owen), his mother Anna Jones (Ruth de Sosa) and his tutor Miss Helen Seymour (Margaret Tyzack). While there, Indy befriends a young T. E. Lawrence and also meets Howard Carter as they open a mummy's tomb. There is a murder and talk of a curse. Indy and "Ned" (as young Henry calls his new friend) solve the crime, but the murderer escapes with an artifact. The second half finds Indy (now 17 and played by Sean Patrick Flannery) in Mexico in 1916. Indy is visiting family in New Mexico when he is kidnapped by Poncho Villa, gets involved in the Mexican revolution, meets both General Pershing and a young George Patton and finds the stolen artifact from his Egyptian adventure eight years earlier. The episode has a framing device of a "present day" ninety-one year old Indiana Jones (now with an eye patch and played by George Hall) relating his past adventure to a couple of jaded youths.
The "formula" of the series is set up nicely. Episodes after this were all "told by" old Indy and featured either young Indy or teen Indy in a foreign place and meeting famous historical figures. George Lucas had planned on about 70 episodes to bring us up to the time of the movies, but the show didn't make it that far. ABC had ordered 28 episodes and broke them up into 2 seasons. Four episodes never made it to air. ABC Family (then The Family Channel) ordered 8 more episodes which were delivered as "two hour" movies. The reason for this change was Lucas had started re-editing all the episodes (including the 4 unaired ones) into the new movie format. All of the scenes featuring old Indy were deleted and some new footage was shot to bridge any gaps. The original two hour pilot was broken up into two new movies.
Today, the series is available on DVD only in the movie format. Three box sets cover all 22 movies and add on an amazing amount of extras that focus on the historical aspects of the series. Today we're looking at the first box set entitled The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Volume 1: The Early Years.
The first of the seven movies in this set is My First Adventure and it starts the same way the series did when it aired on ABC (without the old Indy frames). From Egypt, we follow the Jones family to Tangiers where young Indy gets caught up in the slave trade.
The second movie Passion for Life starts off in Paris where young Indy meets a young Norman Rockwell and the two boys wind up in a battle between a brash young Picasso and an older Degas over who is a better painter. The Jones family then moves to British East Africa where Indy tries to stop Teddy Roosevelt from killing an endangered species.
The third movie, Perils of Cupid, finds the Jones family in Florence where Indy's mother is romanced by Puccini (thus really setting the stage for the relationship between his parents only hinted at in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Professor Jones appears again). Later in Vienna, Indy falls in love with Sophia, the daughter of Archduke Ferdinand and meets a trio of psychologists in Frued, Adler and Jung.
The fourth film, Travels with Father, finds Indy running away from his family while in Russia and meeting Leo Tolstoy. Later, in Greece, Indy and Professor Jones visit a Greek mountain monastery and get trapped in the "elevator" on the way down forcing a father/son bonding moment.
The fifth one, Journey of Radiance, first finds the Jones family in Benares, India where Indy befriends Jiddu Krishnamurti. Later, while travelling in Peking, Indy gets Typhoid and almost dies.
The sixth film, Spring Break Adventure, starts off the adventures of teen Indy as he and girlfriend Nancy Stratemeyer meet Thomas Edison and foil a plot to steal his plans for an electric car (well...I guess "foil" is subjective since in reality Edison's dream is prety much dead in our present day world). The second half, finds Indy being sent to New Mexico and we get the second half of the original pilot episode with Pancho Villa. At the end of that episode, Indy goes off with his new Belgian friend Remy to enlist in the Belgian army and fight in World War I.
The final film in the first set, Love's Sweet Song, starts as Remy & Indy arrive in Ireland and wind up working in a pub to make money so they can get to London. While there, Indy gets involved with a girl whose brother is part of the Irish resistance movement (and meets playwright Sean O'Casey as well as William Butler Yates). When Remy & Indy arrive in London, Indy meets a sufragette (played by a very young Elizabeth Hurley), visits his old tutor Miss Seymour (who forces his to write a letter home so his father will stop worrying) and meets a young Winston Churchill.
The series of films start off interestingly enough, but the stories involving the young Indy get a bit boring at times and seem to serve as jumping off points for people to learn more about the historical figures involved. Once we get to the teen Indy, the show's pace and excitement greatly picks up. While we only get two movies featuring him, they are a good tease for what will come next in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Volume Two: The War Years.
The extras are all historical based documentaries and they are plentiful. The seven films each appear on their own DVD, but there are FIVE other DVDs that also feature extras (some are related to a movie on a previous disc as there was so much material they had to go to a second disc as each documentary is about 30 minutes long and some of the movies have 5 or 6 related pieces). This is one case where there may be too much as I only did some sampling of the historical pieces instead of trying to slog through all of it. But what I did watch seemed very interesting.
The biggest (and really only) disappontment with the DVDs is the lack of the old Indy vignettes from the original ABC broadcasts as even a supplement somewhere.
Next we look at Volume Two.
Be seeing you.
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