The Young Someone Chronicles

With Disney about to release the final Indiana Jones film, they've finally managed to get the rest of the film series onto Disney+. I doubt Paramount was willing to let it go so Disney must have paid a fortune and it's likely temporary. But along with the films is something Paramount doesn't seem to care much about, at least not enough to put on their own Paramount+ service, and that's The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Disney+ really feels like a logical home for it, too, since it's always kind of felt like a Disney Channel series--a watered down, slightly more moralistic version of a popular franchise.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, produced sporadically throughout the '90s by George Lucas, who struggled to keep the expensive series alive, is a lot better the better you succeed at getting the Indiana Jones movies out of your mind. As a series about an adventurous lad who happens to run into nearly every prominent historical figure alive in the early 1900s, it's not bad, and sometimes excellent.

A few days ago I watched Love's Sweet Song, which combines the episodes "Ireland, April 1916" and "London, May 1916". The Ireland segment shows Indy in his early '20s, portrayed by Sean Patrick Flannery (who always seems more like a young Mark Hamill than a young Harrison Ford), in Ireland witnessing the Easter Rising. This was shot in 1993, three years before Neil Jordan's Michael Collins. The episode features John Lynch playing the real playwright Sean O'Casey along with a few other prominent figures in Ireland at the time, even a brief cameo from Yeats. Indy is able to discuss similarities in the Irish Revolution to the Mexican Revolution he took part in in the previous episode. And if that's not enough of a whiplash for you, Indy goes from dodging British troops in this story to the gentle romantic episode of "London, May 1916" in which he falls for a young Elizabeth Hurley playing a suffragette.

What a difference a month makes. Don't get me wrong, the episode's really sweet and genuinely effective. Both episodes are good, especially if you can forget about the first when you're watching the second. And all the episodes are better if you can forget Sean Patrick Flannery is supposed to be Indiana Jones. And I think that's the central problem of the series. For a story that's supposed to be partly inspired by 1930s serials, it's almost an anti-serial. Every episode really needs to be taken in isolation, which makes Lucas' decision to re-edit the originally 45 minute episodes into feature length television movies particularly unfortunate. It doesn't help that Flannery is noticeably older in the linking segments, his hair is longer, and his hat looks cheap and stupid.

What, did you get that at Disneyland?

And as good as the London segment is, it feels rushed to fit his great romance with Elizabeth Hurley into the time span allowed. If only this were a story that could continue from episode to episode. It would have been better if Lucas had kept to the original format with an elderly Indy framing the stories as his recollections. You could blame any problems on his faulty memory, then. Even the idea that he used to look like Sean Patrick Flannery could've been put down to his modesty when we all know he actually looked like River Phoenix.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is available on Disney+ in the US.

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Rebounding bottle horns could doink the fight.
And how's the bull to stop a poignant prim?
Decode a flipping pocket crime to light.
And squirrelly shops enjoy the sexy trim.
Perplexing tinsel rafters drop the house.
Devalued shorts display the wealth of borg.
Excessive ears destroy the living mouse.
A lazy hill defends the puppy warg.
Reveals of knifes could cut the scene in half.
Reproofs in idle moods condemn the tongues.
Repenting witches crack the golden calf.
A breathing bounty graced the sailor's lungs.
Abridging stars connects the burning gas.
Redemption false confers a phony pass.

From Ice Cream to Revolution

Edited together with the story about Thomas Edison's electric car for the home video release of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is an episode where Indy goes to Mexico and falls in with Pancho Villa. Indy goes from being a soda jerk in a cosy relationship with a pretty redhead to learning some of the hardships of warfare with a new Belgian companion. Along with the constant appearances by famous historical figures, the complete reshuffling of the deck every episode really undercuts the tension. Otherwise, though, this is a really good episode.

It turns out Pancho Villa is unknowingly working with an Egyptian whom Indy remembers from an earlier episode, both for having murdered an acquaintance and for lifting a valuable artefact. This episode feels more like a proper Indiana Jones story than any other.

And it works as a story about him as a younger man. We see him learn lessons about killing and fighting to survive. I wish he'd known better than to wear a black coat with a brown hat, though.

The climax of the episode even sees him getting another impromptu lesson in using a whip in a fight. I didn't mind Sean Patrick Flannery so much in this episode but I still wish it could have been River Phoenix instead. You could look at River Phoenix and imagine him growing up to be Harrison Ford. I can't see that at all in Sean Patrick Flannery. He has a completely different kind of face and voice.

George Lucas came up with the story for this episode and executive produced without directing or writing. Which may really be the best role for him, most of the time. Whatever his own faults, I think he was good at steering other people away from theirs.

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So soggy figs congeal in steaming bowls.
To cut a pizza slice the wolves would run.
To gut a piece of ice they'd hold the sun.

Indy on Tap

My internet has been really bad all weekend so last night I had to watch something off a disk. As it happens, three spools of my old DVRs from when I was pirating things all the time arrived in a box of my books so I watched an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I burned to disk nine years ago. It was a 1993 episode directed by Joe Johnston, known for directing The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger, so he's no stranger to early 20th century American fantasy.

This episode finds Indy (Sean Patrick Flannery) in high school and working as a soda jerk. His girlfriend is Nancy, played by Robyn Lively, just two years after she was on Twin Peaks. Nancy and Indy are a sweet couple and very supportive of each other as they investigate the theft of Thomas Edison's plans for an electric car.

It turns out the plans were stolen by an oil company. I wonder if this idea came from screenwriter Matthew Jacobs or from George Lucas. It seems pretty prophetic now, in any case.

It's odd we never see or hear about Nancy again and, yet, that was also part of the magic of Indiana Jones. There were so many characters and aspects of his life that are peculiarly isolated to individual stories, especially his love interests, much in the mould of James Bond. Which is one of the reasons Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels like it's so much on the wrong foot.

One of the remarkable things about The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was how distinct every episode was, with every story introducing new locations, characters, costumes, and props. No wonder it was so cost prohibitive. It occurs to me, too, that the absence of real story arcs runs quite contrary to modern television tastes, not to mention the serials that originally inspired George Lucas. Even though I enjoy watching an episode now and then, they never end stoking a compulsion to immediately see the next one.

We get a dinner scene at Indy's house where we can see his family has black servants. That could never be presented without comment to-day. If it were the BBC or Netflix, the racial demographics of the party guests and servants would probably be measured to precise percentages, realism be damned. You could say that Indiana Jones is a fantasy, but that argument feels particularly odd considering Lucas obviously intended the show to be partly educational, which is why things like Edison's electric car are included (Edison really did try to develop an electric car). But apart from any such considerations, it's nice to see that, in the 90s, filmmakers were still able to present negative aspects of a period without artificially moralising about them.

I never really saw Indiana Jones in Sean Patrick Flannery. This is one of the rare episodes where he actually wears the hat and it always looks terrible on him.

His face was made for a straw boater.