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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