In The Nineties, George Lucas produced "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" for television. I've never seen this show and have resisted looking into it further, out of fear that it sucked, royally. Has anyone here ever watched it at all, or enough to have formed an opinion on the quality of this series?
I remember watching it. When they did the WWI stories, those were great. Sometimes scary. Those set after are ok. The ones with Kid Indy, meh, I have no memory of. That said, Lucasfilm has done some changes, of course, so they aren't as they aired. Each used to be introduced by Old Indy. But, then when it was released on video, stories were combined into two hour things and had new framing scenes added. I'm not sure what is on the DVDs and netflix. For network television of their time, they were enjoyable.
The little kid stories weren't terrible, but I loved the kafka episode just after world war 1, because I was super confused why the episode in question was almost identical to one of the 12 Tasks of Asterix.
The entire series has been released on DVD in 3 box sets called "The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones". The first set deals with Indy's childhood years (when he's around 8), the second set deals with the war years, and the third set takes place after WWI. The episodes have been edited together into chronological movies, so especially with the first box set, the first part of the movie might have the actor looking like a 6 year old, and then the second half the actor looks two years older. There were new connecting scenes filmed, plus about 6 TV episodes were shot after the cancellation to create the movie versions to wrap up storylines. The scenes with Old Indy were not included (not even as bonuses), but the bookend scenes with Sean Patrick Flannery on the one episode with child Indy were kept. "The Kingdom Of The Zcrystal Skull" made a few references to the series.
There was an episode of Breaking In, the Christian Slater Sitcom about a wacky crew of Security Consultants, where for one episode (IMDB says 2?) we became aware of a years old black budget created through an accounting loophole from having an imaginary employee on the payroll called "Mister Jones" who would randomly pay for parties and gifts for the minions without the extravagance "seemingly" effecting the bottom line... Although after the business is sold between season one and season two, to assholes, a situation rises where "Mister Jones" has to prove that he exists to the new owners. Through some cunning real time blue screen technology, one of the cast's comical characters superimposes the the face of Sean Patrick Flannery (Teen Indy from Chronicles of Indiana Jones.) over his own and then seduces/catfishes a nosey busy body forensic accountant played by a stuffy British Blonde bombshell trying to rumble their good thing, during a series of video dates where he falls head over heals for her even though she thinks that he is Indiana Jones, when he is clearly not.
I thought the YIJC episodes about WW1 were quite good--not just educational for younger viewers but also very moving. I remember one about the battle of Verdun that I thought was particularly good.
Was that the one with the trenches? Still remember that scene, when he's crawling through trenches with bodies.
I'll tell you this story about TYIJC: I used to get home at about ten past five or something, and I'd channel surf late into this show about this kid who was in WW1. It seemed like this fantastic, smartly written show- the first time I surfed into it, I thought it was a movie. The second time I surfed into it I was like: "Hey! It's a series!" and it was really good. It took me several episodes to figure out that it was about Indiana Jones. So, I can testify that, even divorced from it's source material, it's pretty good.
I liked the inclusion of a much older modern day Indiana Jones who was in his early 90s. I wonder if he's dead by now. He'd be 115 otherwise.
He might be. That version of Indiana Jones has been completely wiped from all current versions of the series.
Don't go in expecting it to be like the movies. It's much more about historical fiction...Indy participating in early 20th century events and meeting famous and influential people, sometimes before they were famous and influential.
A problem with the dvds is that, obviously, when 2 50 minute episodes have been turned into a tv movie, tge pacing is a bit off even when there was a linkage to start with. The actual two parters come out fine, the totally unconnected pairs can feel very poor.
The DVD releases aren't strictly the stories as they originally went out, George Lucas took the opportunity to rearrange the order and re-edit them to be more cohesive. He also took out all traces of the linking scenes featuring George Hall as the 93 year old eyepatch wearing 'contemporary' Indy. Ultimately I think he made the right call, I remember the actual broadcast versions being very bad but the DVD releases are much better. A rare example of Lucas having the right idea in revisiting the material with a modern eye. I have no doubt there are purists out there who miss the bits he cut out, though. I guess those people will have to be satisfied that clip reels of the Elderly Indy scenes have been preserved on Youtube etc. Upon rewatching them on DVD it often surprised me in places how closely it adhered to the characters in the movies at times (even if the show often failed to capture the movies' spirit; then again the series belongs in a different genre to the films). There's a scene in the Greece episode where Henry Sr is explaining the creation of democracy to little Henry Jr, and I remember totally digging that scene, I thought the characters tallied perfectly with the ones we 'later' see interacting in "The Last Crusade". There was just something about how they were written in that scene which really hit the sweet spot. Harrison Ford himself appears as a guest spot in one episode ("Mystery of the Blues").
Actually, I remember getting tired of the WWI episodes after a while. I wanted Indy to be having different adventures, not stuck in one long one. That said, the Battle of Verdun was stunning, and the episode where he's in London, falling in love with a young Liz Hurley as Zepplins bomb the city, was quite good. Incidentally, in the "Old Indy" framing story for that ep, Jane Wyatt played the aged Liz Hurley.
Sadly, I missed that episode. I actually bought the 2-part comic-book adaptation so that I'd have the story. (Yes, they did comics adapting the episodes.) The Old Indy frame sequences were insisted on by the network, and weren't part of the series as Lucas imagined it. So when he got the chance to present the series his way, he eliminated them. I suppose they were kind of gratuitous, although I really liked George Hall as Old Indy. Nope, except maybe for some occasional things that characters believed were paranormal or cursed or something but that behaved perfectly normally. The series was much more educational and naturalistic than the movies, set in something much closer to the real world. In fact, I recall reading a comment recently from one of the people involved with the show (Rick McCallum, mayyyybe?) that you could look at YIJC as being the life story of the "real" historical figure that the movie character was a fictionalized version of. Yeah, I did feel it went on rather long. I think that was the first time I saw Hurley, and I was utterly enraptured with her there. I was really disappointed when it turned out he never saw her again, because it meant she couldn't come back for more episodes.
I just rewatched a clip of old Indy on youtube, remembering how I liked them.... They have aged very poorly. They come off as "You lousy kids, let me tell you how things were done in MY day..." Of course, given how Indy is in Kingdom....