The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992-1996)

Starring: Sean Patrick Flanery, George Hall, and Corey Carrier
Grade: B-

When George Lucas creates something or is a part of cinematic greatness in any way, he usually goes all-in and tries to find any possible way to explore the concepts that are attributed to him, at least partially. The imaginative filmmaker looks for every avenue to try and expand on the initial story due to his passion for it, even if the success or reception of it is mixed. Audiences are well aware of how he continued to meddle or add to Star Wars, turning it into the multimedia phenomenon that it was. Actually, we are still seeing the repercussions of it today. Not only with Disney’s ownership of the intellectual property but with how franchises in general have tried to follow the blueprint Lucas came up with. With Indiana Jones and his love for this particular concept, Lucas seemed to have a similar mindset. Instead of getting our wish of Indiana Jones sequels throughout the 1990s, fans of the beloved cinematic legend were instead treated to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a big-budget action-adventure television show detailing the exploits of the protagonist in his early years. All of it was spearheaded by executive producer George Lucas who created the show and helped come up with a lot of the basic plots for the writing team to go off of. Regardless of what we have determined to be the final verdict of the show’s grade, this is not a George Lucas bashing session. He came up with the outline for the franchise, and his undying passion for the series may not be Star Wars level but it’s close, as evidenced in how detailed this TV series is. He wanted to continue the Indiana Jones series because he loved it. If they couldn’t secure Harrison Ford for a film sequel since he was one of the most in-demand A-Listers of the 1990s, this was the next best thing. Would we have rather they just waited until he was available for a movie, so we didn’t have to sit through this? Absolutely, but here we are. At the same time, what else were they supposed to do? The creative minds of the franchise who were trying to keep the memory alive didn’t have much of a choice otherwise. It had to be a prequel series to maintain continuity and to avoid messing with the timeline of the movies, especially if they wanted it all to be canon.

This way, the writers could have carte blanche on whatever they wanted to do with the character without messing with what we love about the character in his prime. In the meantime, this show was made to satisfy audiences temporarily until everything aligned for a film to be made again. How were they supposed to know it was going to be another decade-and-a-half until Ford was free to make sequel? This definitely wasn’t the plan going into it, and it’s hard to say if the show ultimately worked out, but that’s just how it happened.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles has a similar format from episode to episode. It starts with a 93-year-old Indiana Jones (Hall) in the present day interacting with the regular populace who has no idea who he is or what he has done. With his eyepatch and glasses laid on top, the sweeter old man finds ways to tell his life story by his memory being jogged from what he sees in front of him. In one instance, Jones is at a donut shop, sees a worker be rude to some old lady as he blames her for getting her own order wrong while arguing that he had a bad day, and Jones stepping in to choke him with his cane to tell him a story about a real bad day, when he was fighting in the Belgian Army but was temporarily placed under Captain Moreau’s French command that eventually led to a lot of lives lost and himself being captured (Somme, Early August 1916). At the end of the episode, Jones is taken to jail for technically assaulting the guy, and it sets up the next episode where the story is continued. While in jail, he tells an inmate about his time when he was in a German prison camp and his many escaped attempts where he buddied up with a young Charles De Gaulle (Germany, Mid-August 1916). At the same time, other episodes could be as simple as Jones seeing young kids in a museum who don’t seem interested in history until he tells them a story from his past (Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal). It may sound unrealistic that the older Jones opens and bookends each episode by trapping some poor random citizen in a 45 minute or so story in real time, but it’s actually fairly realistic when you think about how talkative old people in general are with strangers and how if you give them an inch, they will go a mile in referencing something from their past. It’s why Jones relating his interaction with a mail woman to when he led a daring spy mission into Austria to help aid Emperor Charles I during the Sixtus Affair and failing is a rambling conversation an old man would have with an attractive stranger just trying to go about her workday (Austria, March 1917). Nevertheless, this is the format followed throughout each episode. Once the older Jones sets things up, the episode goes to the moment in question. Depending on the story for that particular episode, the star is either Indiana Jones at the age of 8-10 (Carrier) or when he’s at the age of 16-21 (Flanery).

Being a massive Indiana Jones fan or at least Harrison Ford’s portrayal of the iconic character, a prequel is already a hard sell. Seeing other actors in the role never feels right, let alone seeing three portray the hero in question. Because of this, the worst of three is Corey Carrier. To be fair, the performance itself is solid. For a child actor, Carrier does a great job with what is asked of him. The problem isn’t with him. The problem is that we just don’t care. Adult fans that grew up with Indiana Jones in the 80s don’t want to see the adventures of an 8-year-old, and kids themselves will more than likely be bored with his “adventures” just as well. It’s not the fault of Carrier. You can only do so much with this young of a version of Jones. He’s not getting into fist fights or shootouts. It’s literally just him exploring and learning about different cultures. Now, this does help flesh out the character well because it explains how knowledgeable Ford’s Indy is, as him learning from tutor Miss Helen Seymour (Margaret Tyzack) year-round and traveling with his father Henry (Lloyd Owen) and his mother Anna (Ruth de Sosa) to all these different countries because Henry is asked to teach everywhere explains how well cultured and studied Jones is at an early age. Nevertheless, the episodes with kid Indy are the worst, and it’s not even close. The quality of the production isn’t bad in the slightest. It’s just uninteresting. With old Indy, it’s just jarring to see. For fans, it’s hard to conceptualize Jones in his 90s, but after watching the series in full, it works in terms of continuity better than I gave the show credit for with hindsight being 20/20. The writers behind Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny may not have had The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in mind, but it sort of works out as if they did. With Jones finally shedding away his cynicism due to his final adventure with Helena Shaw and reconnecting with the love of his life in Marion in the final minutes of Dial of Destiny, it’s presumed that the 80-something-year-old Jones is able to move on and enjoy his retirement age years. In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the older Indy segments have the character’s age range from 93-94 in its seasons. The character being gracious in these older years and utilizing his day educating random people and lovingly talking about the past seamlessly aligns with the character arc Jones faces in Dial of Destiny and what is foreshadowed.

So, credit goes to the writers of the final film because it all worked out. Whether it was intentional or not, George Hall’s portrayal of Indy’s final years on the planet technically bookended the saga as a whole rather seamlessly. That’s pretty cool, all things considered. Even so, it should be no one’s surprise that the brunt of the show’s entertainment is completely centered around the young adult Indy, played by Sean Patrick Flanery and his immaculate 90s hairdo. As much as we want to hate this show’s existence, Flanery’s portrayal of the courageous, intelligent, and good-hearted hero makes it nearly impossible. From fucking off and joining the Belgian Army under a fake name (London, May 1916) to befriending and learning jazz under Sidney Bechet (Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues), Flanery depicts the nature of young Indy brilliantly to the point where we can see the skeletal outline of what he would eventually become at his peak.

Through no fault of the people in front of or behind the camera, the main problem with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is that it’s just not what we ultimately want. Everyone who begrudgingly tuned into the show because of the lack of Indiana Jones content in the 1990s were either superfans of the franchise or casual viewers that remembered how cool Harrison Ford was in the titular role. The show being better than what we may have given it credit for since we were watching it reluctantly in the first place is a plus, but the series only reminded viewers that as fun as the show can be, Ford isn’t there. When Ford isn’t there, the magic isn’t there either. It’s why an episode like “Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues” is uneventful for the most part but also contains the arguably the best moment in the series, where Ford makes a one-off appearance to set up the story and we get to see the character in 1950 Wyoming during the winter time donning a beard. The spark is there as soon as Ford’s aura graces the screen, but then he pulls out a fucking clarinet and we get this ridiculous story about him being a huge fan of early 20th century jazz, despite it never being a topic of discussion previously. This goes along with the other major issue with the series, which is its unbelievability of circumstances. Though George Lucas utilizing the show as a partial history lesson for young viewers is a heartfelt idea, it puts Indiana Jones in the most random situations possible to meet about a thousand historical people in time seemingly by chance, which would in effect make him either the luckiest person on the planet, an unlikable trust fund kid because his father being so successful put him on a path that no one could ever dream of, or “The Most Interesting Man in the World”, beating the Dos Equis guy. Just for Lucas to get his dream of this being somewhat educational, we’re led to believe that Jones lead the greatest life anyone has ever lived meeting and becoming surprisingly good friends with T.E. Lawrence (Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal, Palestine, October 1917) and meeting some of the most famous people of the 20th century like Pablo Picasso (Barcelona, May 1917, Paris, September, 1908), filmmaker John Ford (Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies), Leo Tolstoy (Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father), Winston Churchill (London, May 1916), and Albert Schweitzer (Congo, January 1917), and a load of others.

Apparently, he just happens to randomly run into all of them over his lifetime, even managing to have Eliot Ness as a roommate (Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues). Are we kidding? What? Then, when he gets older and becomes an archeologist and goes out of his way to have these expeditions in the movies, he doesn’t run into any famous figures? What, did his luck run out? This series didn’t “jump the shark” or “nuke the fridge” in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. No, it started with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Jones nearly saving all of Austria (Austria, March 1917) and running into a man who may or may not be the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler (Transylvania, January 1918), along with running into Ernest Hemmimgway in the span of a few years is about as believable as Jones surviving an atomic bomb in a lead-lined fridge at this point, so miss me with that shit. You either accept it all or none of it. If the stretching of the believability of this character happened to this extent with this show, I don’t want to hear anyone coming for Crystal Skull, a movie that I will defend to my dying day. Regardless, this is just a part of the gripes involved with the show and its existence. The fact that there is only so much time on this planet and we didn’t get a single Indiana Jones movie between 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to 2008’s Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is bullshit, especially when we only got this show and one singular appearance of Jones as the character in the entire 90s decade and it was wasted one one of the more boring episodes no less. Instead of getting Harrison Ford to kick some ass in his 40s and 50s on the big screen, we had to wait until he got into his 60s and 80s. You can see why that would be frustrating, which is why if I could trade this show’s existence for two more movie sequels starring Ford, it wouldn’t even be a question. In hindsight, I’m sure Jones would have loved to trade off Six Days, Seven Nights, Random Hearts, and What Lies Beneath for two surefire, money-making, Indiana Jones blockbuster to close out the 90s. As fans of the franchise and Ford himself, we sure as hell would have made that trade in a heartbeat.

A lot of the best episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles revolve around the protagonist’s time in the Belgian army, as it’s probably the series’ apex in terms of pure excitement and action. There is the two-episode arc of Jones rightfully defying General Joseph Joffre and realizing how difficult a position of leadership in the military is in “Verdun, September 1916” and “German East Africa, December 1916“. Jones’s first mission as a spy (Austria, March 1917), a fantastic World War I trench warfare episode (Somme, Early August 1916), Jones having another spy mission where he goes undercover at the ballet in one of the funnier episodes of the series (Barcelona, May 1917), Jones and Remy finding themselves in the middle of the Easter Rising insurrection (Ireland, April 1916), Jones reuniting with T.E. Lawrence in Beersheba (Palestine, October 1917), and two TV films that accompanied the series as essentially elongated episodes in the search for the Peacock’s Eye diamond (Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye) and Jones on another spy mission that gets him captured by the Red Baron (Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen).

For better or worse, fans and audiences alike have to treat The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles as canon. Annoyingly, it demystifies the Indiana Jones character to an unbelievable degree. Instead of making him the cool, relatable, badass who makes stuff up as he goes along, the television series serves to show that Jones is only able to be who he is by living the most implausible, far-fetched life that anyone who has ever lived, as he was lucky enough to get world experience that no person in world history has ever gotten. It does explain a lot but makes the character as a whole less relatable, undermining the cool factor of the character and franchise as a whole. When one takes the TV show into account and sees firsthand what he went through in his earlier life, it almost makes you take a second look at the movies and realize that the bad guys really never stood a chance because they were apparently facing one of the greatest and most impressive human beings to ever live. Do you see why what we’re saying? The budget is utilized well, the lore is well-written, and the acting and action to a degree is great, but it lessens the power of the movies by showing us how the sausage is made. After watching it, the effects of the well-intentioned but entirely unnecessary show are basically irreversible. Even if the overall quality is solid, the show not existing in general would have been preferred, as the lasting legacy of the films would have been strengthened because of it.