Everybody shut up and sit down, I wanna talk about Indiana Jones for a sec--
Yeah so I did not know this until my cinephile nerd friend told me, but starting in 1992, there was an on-and-off TV series about Indiana Jones's childhood that slaps infinitely harder than it ever had any right to, for just a few of the following reasons:
It was, in fact, one of George Lucas's personal passion projects, not a third-party cash-grab. Lucas wrote a complete timeline of Indy's childhood leading all the way up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and there were roughly 70 episodes planned in total. Unfortunately the show was canceled after 31 episodes.
Part of the reason for its cancellation was that each episode cost about $1.5 million--which was an insanely high budget for the time.
You absolutely see the money at work in the finished product though. Almost everything was filmed on-location. Some of the shots feature literally hundreds of background extras, all in period-accurate costumes. Every scene feels immersive and authentic.
The show was intended to be primarily educational--as in, Lucas wanted it to be something that would be shown in classrooms. You'd think that would make it insanely boring and patronizing to its younger audience, but it actually weaves the educational bits so seamlessly into the story and character development that you don't even notice it's there most of the time.
The acting is actually good??? Corey Carrier was about ten years old when he got the part of little Indy, and it's genuinely one of the best child actor performances I've ever seen. He was later succeeded by Sean Patrick Flanery, who played teenage Indiana.
The other reason the show was canceled was due to poor ratings. Not because the show is actually bad, but because it's so different from what people expected from the Indiana Jones IP. There's actually very minimal action, and the focus is instead on character drama and existential questions about human nature.
Oh you think I'm exaggerating? There is literally an entire episode dedicated to the idea of man's struggle to define and comprehend God, which tackles questions of healthy and constructive vs. blind and destructive faith, the common threads between the major world religions, and how the understanding of God as something divinely good should (and does) motivate people to be good to one another in turn.
Also an episode about Indy's father being distant and how this impacts him and his mother. Mrs. Jones has an affair with an Italian playwright and it nearly destroys their family entirely. But the writing and characterization is so nuanced that you can understand and even sympathize with BOTH of his parents.
In other words, the characters are all flawed and behave like real human beings, rather than mouthpieces to deliver exposition or spell out major themes.
Some episodes will present two sides to a given issue or idea, and then simply invite the audience to come to their own conclusions, rather than telling them what they're "supposed" to think.
A huge chunk of the show is just really well-written and directed conversations between characters. It's deliberately slow in a good way, without wasting any time or disrespecting its audience. I think it's just because I'm Extremely Strange, but I actually enjoy this show more than the movies for that (movies are still great though, don't get it twisted).
Basically I've spent all summer grappling with the reality that this show is insanely good, yet most people don't know that it even exists. So I'm sticking it on my Tumblr fridge on the off chance that it piques someone else's interest. At the moment, the only place you can find this show is either YouTube or the high seas, but maybe if enough people clamor hard enough, Lucasfilm will finally give it a proper blu-ray release (probably not, but I refuse to stop demanding more physical media for the sake of preservation).
