The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, season 1
The show The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles originally aired from 1992 to 1996, with Corey Carrier playing the future archaeologist from age 8–10 and Sean Patrick Flanery performing the role for ages 16–21. In 1999, these episodes were then combined with new bridge material and unused older clips and reissued as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, which consisted of 22 ninety-minute ‘movies,’ some more obviously cohesive than others. That’s the format that’s both easiest to access today and the most complete, albeit at the loss of the bookend scenes with George Hall as an elderly Jones reminiscing about his past. (I did briefly consider reviewing them all as separate films, but I think I would go insane. And in the final analysis, they do function more as a TV series than as a sequence of discrete pictures.)
I haven’t seen the original Chronicles, but from what I can tell, the re-edit was a good choice. Although the transition from the first half of a story to the second is sometimes a little awkward, the Adventures version reorganizes the narrative into a chronological one, rather than bouncing back and forth between Carrier and Flanery or around the latter’s own timeline from week to week. This has the effect of dispensing with the weaker childhood plots sooner, after just five episodes, as well as emphasizing the serialized elements that get a viewer more invested in the character’s ongoing journey.
It remains a bit of a strange series — one that I almost like more as the tale of a random young man of the era and not the junior iteration of the part originated by Harrison Ford (who does pop in for a brief appearance near the end, along with the only inclusion of the familiar John Williams soundtrack). This whole enterprise was clearly inspired by the prologue with River Phoenix as a 14-year-old Indy in The Last Crusade, and yet it rarely feels as though it’s setting up the adult hero as neatly as that short flashback did. Teenage Indiana has the iconic hat now, but he doesn’t use the whip or engage in much treasure-hunting. Instead he runs off to join the Belgian army — under the assumed name of Henri Defense for some reason — to fight in World War I, which ends up occupying the majority of the runtime. In consequence the Germans are often the de facto antagonists, and in my opinion that muddies the evil of the Nazis from the big-screen adventures. Our protagonist should oppose them for their ideology, not just because his country is at war with theirs! At least he’s still given the opportunity to stand up against bigotry at times, especially after finally returning stateside.
The writers also have the character meet a staggering number of real historical figures, from Teddy Roosevelt to Ho Chi Minh, with several like T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway recurring throughout the program and Edith Wharton and Mata Hari each serving as a passing love interest (the adolescent Jones being apparently quite the inveterate womanizer). This is again a pretty significant change from the films, in which the adventurer only ever momentarily brushed up against Hitler! And in yet another divergence, the supernatural is limited to an eerie encounter with a gentleman who might be an immortal Vlad the Impaler, whereas Ford dealt with such mystical powers on every single occasion.
In short, there’s simply not a lot here that directly speaks to its own source material, although the hero’s frosty relationship with his academic father translates well, with Lloyd Owen doing a capable rendition of a young Sean Connery. The last few installments after the war help to narrow the gap too, even functioning as backstory for the gem from the beginning of Temple of Doom. (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would later link back to the show in turn, mentioning a connection to Pancho Villa that we see firsthand here.) On the other hand, characters that would logically fit into a prequel are utterly missing — there’s no Sallah, or Belloq, or Marion, or anyone else that the title figure canonically knows before the start of his movie experiences.
And yet, taken on its own terms, I can’t deny that this series is a lot of fun. I like seeing the wartime espionage scrapes that ‘Defense’ gets himself into, and I enjoy the educational aspect surrounding the various celebrities and their settings. The history isn’t always entirely accurate, particularly where it has to bend to accommodate the fictional Jones, but it’s all roughly true, and it reminds me of the pure historical serials that classic Doctor Who used to produce, with nary an alien invader in sight. (We even have a couple Doctors here: Colin Baker and Jon Pertwee both show up, among other notables and early-career actors that are neat to spot.) The serialization is more of a factor than was common in a production of this time too, and the scripts don’t shy away from heavy subjects like Paul Robeson facing racial slurs or Indy’s Irish republican friends getting gunned down in front of him by the British.
I assumed as I watched that I would ultimately give this program a 3-star rating, but the closing stories up through Indy entering college to study archaeology improve to a degree that I’m left feeling charitable towards it overall (ignoring the two subsequent summer excursions into showbusiness, which are more farcical and again not especially Indiana Jones). It’s deeply uneven and not at all what we’d expect from a modern franchise project, but it has enough charms for me to land on a 3.5, rounded up.
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