The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

[Allyn Gibson]

I remember one about the battle of Verdun that I thought was particularly good.

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.)

Illustrated by Dan Berry! I used to have those, too.

The amount of time spent on World War I in the series doesn't bother me. As a proportion of Henry Jones Jr.'s life at the time, World War I was a hefty percentage of time. What does bother me, but I accept it because it's part of the fiction, is how he seemed to be able to go anywhere and do anything during the war. "Okay, which front is he visiting this week?"

 

[Guy Gardener]

He fought the Mexicans in Mexico and the Germans in Germany, while serving in the cavalry and the airforce when he wasn't a spy, while never forgetting that Laurence of Arabia was his favourite Uncle and mucked around with him for a tot.

Hmmm...

I never really made it to the end.

Did young Indiana Jones ever encounter any Mystical artefacts or Aliens?

 

[Christopher]

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..."

And I have the impression that their production values were kind of bare-bones compared to the episodes they framed, which may have been one of the major reasons Lucas didn't like them.

 

[FPAlpha]

I hazily remember this show and how excited i was back then when it aired.

It was very good and the war years didn't shy away from showing the brutality and inhumanity of war. I also liked Indy meeting historic people (kind of like Forrest Gump) who weren't historical figures back then.

I remember that Indy was present at the armistice talks after WW1 and a scene where some Vietnamese were trying to get rid of the french colonial power by attending the conference and demanding their independence via diplomatic means.

They nearly get laughed out of the conference and at the end of the episode we learn that the name of one of the vietnamese was Ho Chi Minh.

This is why i like the show so much.. it sure presented history in a dramatized way and may have taken their liberties now and then but in the end it educated people about historical contexts and claims that if only people would learn from history they could prevent future desasters.

 

[Captain Craig]

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 own them and like any series it has it's ups/downs.
However I feel there are more ups and as an overall series is quite enjoyable. The 10yr old Indy stories are a bit harder to swallow even if you allow for the "boys will be boys" mischievous axiom. Late teen Indy are the ones that really shine the most and there are more of them.

When Lucas put them out though he took out the intro that each episode had. Where old, one eyed, cane wielding Indy spoke to a museum intern about artifacts which set up each episode. Lucas stated he was removing that version from canon. Old one eyed, cane propped up Indy.

On the Wiki page it says that a planned 3rd season was going to be post WWI and introduce Indy to Abner Ravenwood and of course his young daughter. Too bad that ABC didn't renew it.

 

[The Old Mixer]

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..."

And I have the impression that their production values were kind of bare-bones compared to the episodes they framed, which may have been one of the major reasons Lucas didn't like them.

And very underwhelming....Here's Indiana Jones getting into an altercation with a punk at a donut shop....Here's Indiana Jones mediating a dispute over a parking space....

 

[Lance]

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..."

And I have the impression that their production values were kind of bare-bones compared to the episodes they framed, which may have been one of the major reasons Lucas didn't like them.

And very underwhelming....Here's Indiana Jones getting into an altercation with a punk at a donut shop....Here's Indiana Jones mediating a dispute over a parking space....

My favorite is the one where he gets arrested for trying to get his parcel back out of a busy street mail box, which IIRC went something like this:


POSTAL EMPLOYEE: Sir, what ARE you doing?!

INDY: I put the wrong package in there!

POSTAL EMPLOYEE: Sir, stop that right now! Tampering with US Mail is a Federal Offence!

INDY (sighs): Gee, it was never this hard back when I was a spy in the first World War!

POSTAL EMPLOYEE (incredulous): *You* were a spy?

INDY: Yes! Let me tell you all about it.....

(**Fade to flashback**)


Subtle they certainly weren't.

 

[Professor Zoom]

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..."

And I have the impression that their production values were kind of bare-bones compared to the episodes they framed, which may have been one of the major reasons Lucas didn't like them.

Production value... meh... fine for a 90s show. It was more tonally. It actually didn't make Indy come off as very ... Indyish.

 

[tomswift2002]

One other thing Lucas did right when he re-edited the series was that he went back to the original 16mm negatives and rescanned everything and re composited the SFX on film, since the original versions had been edited and composited on videotape. So if Paramount/CBS/LucasFilm/Disney ever wanted to do a Blu-Ray release, they could. May not look as sharp as a show shot on 35, but a Blu-Ray would be possible.

 

[2takesfrakes]

I know they couldn't have used Sean Connery as Indy's dad, but is Henry Jones, Sr. featured alot? That would be interesting! I can only imagine that's why Indy's at most of these places, is because his father had business there, of some kind.

 

[The Old Mixer]

He is featured a lot in the early episodes with the younger Indy, and the actor playing the younger version of Henry Sr. does a pretty good Connery impression while not coming off like a parody. He's also something of (mostly-offscreen) presence in the later episodes, as Indy was still a minor when he ran away from home to enlist in WWI.

 

[Mr Light]

I just watched the Transylvania episode on Netflix and that certainly seemed paranormal to me. People were floating and freezing and catching on fire and the "vampire" fell five stories to the ground and survived.

 

[I Grok Spock]

I just watched the Transylvania episode on Netflix and that certainly seemed paranormal to me. People were floating and freezing and catching on fire and the "vampire" fell five stories to the ground and survived.

Yep, I think that was the one episode of the show that had something clearly supernatural.

I enjoyed the series, but I never felt I was watching the early adventures of Ford's character. The various guest actors were a pleasant surprise (the aforementioned Liz Hurley, Jon Pertwee, Daniel Craig, Terry Jones, Christopher Lee, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Paul Freeman - though not as Belloq).

I recently rewatched the DVDs on my HD screen, and the effects didn't great.The digital ones were pretty obviously standard res.

 

[Christopher]

I enjoyed the series, but I never felt I was watching the early adventures of Ford's character.

Which fits the premise I mentioned above, that Ford's character was a fictionalized version of the "real" Indiana Jones played by Carrier and Flanery. Sort of like how that Real Ghostbusters episode explained away the movie as an in-universe fictionalization of the actual origin of the Ghostbusters, accounting for the differences between the movie and the show.

 

[davejames]

As a teenager at the time I frankly found most of the show to be pretty dull. I certainly loved the idea of seeing Indy in the middle of real historical events, but the stories just dragged way too much. It felt like the show was more interested in simply giving dry history lessons than in making these events really come alive in a compelling way.

Which is a shame, because Sean Patrick Flanery was a just about perfect young Indy. And was pretty convincing and fun to watch whenever he did get something cool to do.