The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones
Vol 3: The Years of Change
Starring Sean Patrick Flanery
Paramount Home Video
Release date: April 29, 2008
For those of you who want more of the legendary action-adventure hero Indiana Jones, originally brought to life by Harrison Ford in the original Indiana Jones film trilogy, then the collected three-volume DVD boxsets of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones are an essential possession.
Ford’s portrayal of Indy would lead you to believe that the archaeologist/adventurer was born with that self-assured, cocky attitude, not to mention with a bullwhip and pistol in hand. But in the episodes of Young Indy — the series created by executive producer George Lucas in the early 1990s — we find out how Indy went from a precocious child, to an ambitious teen, and by the series’ end, to a 21-year-old worldly man. Unfortunately, the series was cut short before we could see TV’s Indy final transformation into the scruff-faced whip-snapping film icon.
If you didn’t catch the first two DVD volumes — which collects the majority of the series which ran on ABC from 1991-1992, and begins with Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr. at 9 years old — let me catch you up a little. As a small child, Indy travels with his scholarly parents to Egypt where he first meets T.E. Lawrence, the future Lawrence of Arabia. On a later adventure, Indy meets Norman Rockwell, Picasso, Freud, and Tolstoy, and is even kidnapped by Pancho Villa! As a teenager, Indy leaves his home in Princeton, New Jersey — against his father’s wishes — to enlist in the Belgium army during World War I. While overseas, he spends time on the battlefield and as a POW, and eventually works for the French as a spy, infiltrating enemy lines.
In this third and final volume of the series — The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Vol. 3 – The Years of Change — the teenaged Indy, played by Sean Patrick Flanery, is on a espionage mission in Italy. While there, he meets the young future author Ernest Hemingway, with whom he shares a rivalry with over a beautiful girl. Here we see not the suave, self-confident guy we all know and love, but rather a naive and wild-eyed boy. Yes, he’s worldly and has had notorious run-ins with nearly every famous person of the early 20th century and took part in several major historical events at that time. But life has not hardened this Indy, nor has it destroyed his youthful optimism.
By the third episode, the war is over, freeing him to go treasure-hunting to exotic islands, where we learn of his desire to return home to study archaeology at the University of Chicago. But before doing so, Indy once again finds himself at a most significant place in time — in Paris during the Treaty of Versailles, where he’s working as a translator. It’s here that Indy witnesses, firsthand, racism and bigotry as it relates to world politics.
Once home, we really learn of his adult relationship with his difficult-to-please father, Henry Sr., who was first played by Sean Connery in the third Indiana Jones film. But Indy is not the boy who ran off to war years before, and the world is not the idyllic place Indy once remembered. Civil change is about to begin, as is the Jazz Age and the birth of Hollywood — all, of course, in which Indy plays an integral role.
Even with all Indy’s been through, the hard times have not harden him, they’ve only served to build his character. The young Indy falls in love a lot and breaks a fair share of hearts, but always apologetically. By the series’ untimely end, Indy is still not parallel to his big-screen counterpart. This is because George Lucas had planned to continue the show until Indy was 24 and had already sketched out a way to bridge the gap between TV’s young Indy and the professor of heroic archaeology who faces the Nazi raiders of the Ark of the first film.
If you can look passed Indy’s coincidental liasions with famous people and his convenient involvement in world-defining events, which are admittedly not always so historically accurate, you’ll find this series thoroughly enjoyable as is. Though, it’ll probably leave hankering for more.
A noteworthy episode you won’t want to miss is “Mystery of the Blues,” which guest-stars Harrison Ford as a 50-year-old Indiana Jones telling the tale of how he got into jazz and blues, and the difficulties faced when racism reared its ugly head.
DVD Bonus Features
It’s obvious this 10-disc DVD boxset is a must-have for fans. But it’s also perfect for the amateur historian or history buff in general. That’s because this boxset not only features seven feature-length episodes, but also 30 new documentaries which detail the real-life events behind all of Indy’s adventures.
In over 25 hours of footage, which were originally designed to air along with the episodes on television, we get to learn about Earnest Hemingway, The Ottoman Empire, and even Dracula. Right after viewing the multi-part episode arc about the Jazz Age, you get the real deal with several documentaries about the time, including one about Louis Armstrong. After Indy makes a name for himself on Broadway and in Hollywood, you can explore the lights of Broadway and the world of filmmaker John Ford.
These documentaries also help clarify some of the details within each parent episode which might have been too confusing to follow, and more than make up for the artistic license taken by the Young Indy storytellers.
For a full episode guide to this volume, as well as a complete listing of all the documentaries, see the DVD release news, ‘The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones’ Vol. 3 – The Years of Change Coming to DVD.
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