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.