The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones

Season one (8 episodes)

This was a Christmas present from Mette's parents and I've now watched all the episodes. The first six episodes follow Indiana Jones as a young boy and are not quite as boisterous as the later episodes. The last two episodes follow Indy as a late teenager, having run away to join the Mexican revolution and then the First World War. Each episode is strangely divided into two separate adventures which makes for an interesting format. I've never seen television presented like that before.

A lot of people have complained over the way George Lucas edited out certain parts of this production. Originally each episode was introduced by the character of Indiana Jones as an old man, looking back over time, and those book ends (as they were called) have been removed. On the whole this doesn't seem to have effected the presentation much, except in the very first episode which ends very abruptly, and I assume that 'old Indy' would have related the conclusion of the adventure in the original format.

Youngest Indy with Tolstoy

I really like this series and I intend to buy the next season as soon as possible. There are 12 DVD's in the box and the extra disks contain a lot of historical documentaries that follow the adventures and explain who the famous people Indiana Jones meets are and Indy meets a lot of famous people. In season one, he's met TE Lawrence, Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, George Patton, Giocomo Puccini, Howard Carter (who discovered Tutankhamun's tomb), Norman Rockwell, William Butler Yeats, Edgas Degas, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Edward Stratemeyer, Pancho Villa, Thomas Eddison, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sean O'Casey, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, Jiddu Krishnamurti and several leading members of the Theosophic Society. I still haven't seen the historical documentaries. I intend to watch/listen to them as I paint in the future. There's loads to keep my restless mind occupied whilst my fingers get on with painting.

Teenage Indy, the revolutionary

The acting is fairly middle of the road. Nothing brilliant like Harrison Ford alas, and not much to show that the Young Indiana Jones is going to grow up to be the confident character Ford made famous. As a boy Indy is fairly extrovert but adolescence seems to sap his vitality and Sean Patrick Flanery who plays Indy as a young man seems to have been asked to play the character as slightly naive, and much prone to gawping. I think this is a device to allow Indy to meet and be lectured by a long range of famous people, but its a bit weird that having met such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso and Leo Tolstoy in his younger years, Indiana Jones still seems in awe of some of the lesser characters he meets along his way.

Never mind. It works for me.