The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One

Posted by Mister Hand (misterhand@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 23, 2007

George Lucas has a talent for ideas. When those ideas are molded by the right collaborators, awesome things can happen on film.

For instance, some twenty-five odd years ago, George was talking to a friend of his by the name of Philip Kauffman. He told Kauffman about an idea he had to resurrect the old serial films with an archaeologist hero. The hero would have grand adventures while on the trail of discovering magical artifacts. Lucas said he envisioned it as a series of movies to rival the James Bond franchise. Lucas told Kauffman that the first movie would find our hero on a quest to locate the holy grail.

Kauffman told Lucas that sounded great–except for the holy grail part, which Kauffman said was a horrible idea. He believed a quest for the holy grail would be boring. Kauffman said he had been reading about the lost Ark of the Covenant, a more obscure relic from the Old Testament that was legendary for being the literal “seat of God.”

The rest is history. Raiders of the Lost Ark became one of the finest films ever made, and a good deal of the credit goes to Kauffman (who wrote and directed films such as 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Right Stuff, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Further credit for Raiders goes to expert direction by Steven Spielberg, and a standout screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and directed films such as The Accidental Tourist and Silverado. (Kasdan also wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back and was a collaborator on Return of the Jedi.)

After wrapping up the first Star Wars trilogy, Lucas distanced himself from the kind of collaboration that made Raiders and Empire possible. Releasing tomorrow on DVD for the first time, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (originally titled The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) was Lucas’ first attempt to create a back story for a character that seemingly didn’t need one. After all, what do we need to know about Indiana Jones except that he’s built of pure awesome and hates snakes?

But whereas the second Star Wars trilogy seems today like a cynical marketing stunt, Young Indiana Jones was borne of a much more noble ambition: to bring history to life as seen through the eyes of the future bullwhip-wielding, snake-hating, fedora-wearing archaeologist with a penchant for facial stubble.

The results were mixed. First, the good:

Shot on locations in exotic locales all around the world, Young Indiana Jones looks like nothing else you will see on T.V. The stories are elevated by the sense of being in places that most of us will never get to experience in real life. We don’t see establishing shots of pyramids in Egypt and then cut to a studio somewhere in Burbank where stage hands have painted faux-hieroglyphics on a wall. We see Indy actually climbing the pyramids against the backdrop of the Egyptian desert.

Another consistently good quality boasted by the show is the music. I always thought Laurence Rosenthal (the composer) was sort of a hack, but I have to give him his props here. Throughout the run of the series, the music is first rate.

Alas, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones is not all good. In fact, some of it (especially in the beginning) is quite bad. Audiences in the early nineties didn’t quite know what to make of the show when it debuted on American television. Despite a marketing blitz that promised this would not be the swashbuckling Indiana Jones of the popular film trilogy, many were turned off by the series’ lack of wall-to-wall action.

But don’t get the impression that the series is utterly devoid of bullets and bombs. To the contrary, there is some impressive action to be found in some of these episodes. The bad news is, we don’t get to the real action until Volume Two is released some time later this year.

The shows have been re-edited for this DVD release to form ninety minute “chapters.” Each disc contains one chapter which is actually two episodes smashed together. The first half of this collection focuses on nine-year-old Indy and the second half focuses on teenage Indy. You might not make it very long through the nine-year-old Indy episodes if you don’t know that the teenage episodes, for the most part, are far better. Just remember that once you have gotten to teenage Indy, that’s the last you’ll ever see of nine-year-old Indy. And that’s a good thing. Even though some of the nine-year-old Indy episodes are very good, you’re going to want to see teenage Indy kicking some ass.

The basic conceit of the show is that, as a nine-year-old boy at the turn of the century (remember, Raiders was set in 1936), Indy (played by Corey Carrier) accompanies his father on a worldwide lecture tour to discuss his theories and writings on Medieval culture. This takes Indy to the far corners of the Earth where, traveling on the intellectual circuit, he has the opportunity to meet many historical and artistic icons of the day, including T.E. Lawrence, Howard Carter, Sigmund Freud, Giancomo Puccini, and even Archduke Ferdinand.

Then, as a rebellious teenager, Indy (played by Sean Patrick Flanery), goes to Mexico where he joins Pancho Villa in his Mexican Revolution. In a letter to his father, he explains himself by saying, “Dear Dad, I have joined the Mexican Revolution. Sorry about high school. Take care of Indiana.”

This is where we get to see Indy riding a horse, donning a fedora, shooting people, and blowing stuff up real good. This is where the show really comes alive. He even swings a bullwhip before it’s all over. Before you get to that, though, you’ll have to endure forty minutes of Indy helping Thomas Edison recover stolen invention plans from German spies, which is the most god-awful episode in the whole collection.

But once you get to Pancho Villa, it’s pretty much all good. After deciding Villa’s war is “the wrong war” for him, Indy is off to Europe where he will enlist to fight in World War I. This collection includes the episodes where Indy has to work as a bartender in Ireland to catch a ferry to London. There he finds himself falling in love with a conductor on a double-decker bus (who also happens to be active in the women’s suffrage movement). Volume One ends when Indy boards a train bound for the front lines in what would ultimately be the most destructive war in the history of the world.

The collection definitely has its ups and downs, and if you don’t understand why it’s a big deal when young Indy sneaks the Archduke Ferdinand’s daughter away from her minders to taker her ice skating, or just what sort of hell Indy is in for when he gets to the trenches to fight the Germans, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones may not be your cup of tea. And even if you’re a history buff (like me), you’re still going to have to slog through some serious crap to get to the good stuff. With that in mind, I’m going to cut straight to Upside/Downside portion of the review to give you a brief description of the good and bad episodes:

The Upside: “A Passion for Life,” on disc two, features nine-year-old Indy. The first half is set in Africa and works on almost every level. Indy meets Theodore Roosevelt and observes the exotic wildlife that only Africa can offer. He also befriends a small boy from an African village. I cannot emphasize enough how much the location shooting contributes to making this something special, the kind of thing we never saw on T.V. before, and will probably never see again. Even the African natives are authentic, giving the story its legs. It gets a little preachy in the end, but that’s wholly forgivable. In the second half, young Indy goes to Paris, where he receives a brief lesson in French Impressionism, encounters a teenage Norman Rockwell, and finds himself at odds with a pistol-wielding Pablo Picasso. This is a much different adventure from what came before, as Indy tours the seedy underbelly of Paris’ nightlife. It all makes for a very enjoyable disc.

On disc four, we have “The Perils of Cupid.” The first part of the episode is pretty good. Nine-year-old Indy discovers love when he falls for Archduke Ferdinand’s daughter in Vienna. Alas, it is not to be. Fortunately, Indy has Sigmund Freud (played wonderfully by Max Von Sydow), Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler to give him some much-needed advice for the lovelorn. Yes, it sounds utterly ridiculous when pared down to three sentences, but it works, believe it or not. And through a lively dinner table conversation we get a concise and intelligent breakdown of the differences between these men’s philosophies.

And then we have the teenage Indy episodes, which are all great, except for the first half of “Spring Break Adventure,” which is terrible.

The Downside: On disc one, we have “My First Adventure.” In the first half, nine-year old Indy meets T.E. Lawrence and Howard Carter in Egypt. An unearthed tomb invokes a centuries-old curse and a perplexing murder mystery. Except it’s not really all that perplexing, really. What at first works very well as a true-to-life adventure in the Valley of the Kings eventually becomes something that doesn’t work at all. But the worst part is when, in the second half, with no transition whatsoever, our cute nine-year-old Indy is suddenly presented to us as a gawky pre-teen. One minute little Indy is having an adventure in the desert and then, after a train ride to Arabia, he’s had a disturbing growth spurt. But he’s still trying to act like the cute little nine-year-old we came to know in Egypt. The result is profoundly creepy.

Also, the second half of “The Perils of Cupid” is pretty bad. While in Florence, opera giant Puccini attempts to seduce Indy’s mother. This portion of the episode is pretty much as dull as it is weird. And there’s a bit that involves Galileo’s telescope in a museum that stretches credulity to the breaking point.

On the Side: Over the course of three seasons, Young Indiana Jones was nominated for 23 emmies and won ten. Pretty much anything you would want to know about this show–trivia, the original order the episodes aired, which episodes never aired, and a comprehensive list of all the historical figures Indy encountered over the course of three seasons, can be found in this Wikipedia article.

Grade: B

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