All The Tropes

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Difference between revisions

Page Discussion

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (view source)

Revision as of 23:22, 12 December 2023

48 bytes added ,  5 months ago
no edit summary
VisualWikitext
m (revise quote template spacing)
No edit summary
 
(7 intermediate revisions by 5 users not shown)
Line 5:
A television series featuring the adventures of the silver-screen archaeologist [[Indiana Jones]] in his childhood and teen years, wherein he had a [[The Gump|remarkable tendency]] to keep encountering famous people and events. The series was conceived and produced by the films' co-creator [[George Lucas]], who drafted a 70-item timeline of interesting moments in Indy's young life for writers to take story ideas from.
 
It originally aired from 1992 to 1993, taking the form of hour-long episodes, as ''The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles''. The series principally showcased Indy at the ages of 9-10 (as played by Corey Carrier) and 16-up (as played by Sean Patrick Flanery). The Carrier episodes focus on Indy touring the globe alongside his parents as part of a world lecture tour given by his father, a noted medieval scholar. The Flanery episodes primarily deal with Indy's service in [[World War OneI]], in just about every theater you can think of. In each episode, Indy would meet some famous person from the early 20th century, and learn some sort of moral lesson. Yes, Lucas very openly envisioned the series as edutainment.
 
Notably, the show aired in an extremely [[Anachronic Order]], with Carrier's and Flanery's episodes often alternating. This may have hurt the series in the long run. The writers produced scripts for three seasons' worth of episodes, including some stories that would introduce more characters from the films. However, the show was cancelled after its second season, before those episodes could be shot. Nonetheless, four additional TV movies were later broadcast from 1994 to 1996, which incorporated some material from the various unproduced scripts (though not from the ones which featured more of the films' characters, sadly).
 
George Lucas prided ''Young Indy'' on managing a film-level quality production on a television budget, helped by revolutions in digital technology, and he has said that the show was partly a test to see how far he could take the later ''[[Star Wars]]'' prequels. Also like ''[[Star Wars]]'', the series was subject to subsequent [[Re CutRecut|furious re-editing by Lucas]], the new cuts first showing up during re-airings in the late 90s.
 
This re-cut version, with new footage added and other parts removed, is the only one currently available on DVD: it's known as ''The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones''. The ''Adventures'' combines the original ''Chronicles'' episodes into two-hour tele-movies, two shows per film (often in a quite different, and much more strictly chronological, order than in the original airings). Again, some of the newly shot material was based on the unfilmed ''Chronicles'' scripts.
Line 15:
A notable proportion of Indy fans, regardless of their opinions of the series as a whole, refuse to accept the ''Chronicles'' frame story, which depicts Indy as a 93-year-old man (played by actor George Hall) pottering around suburbia and boring people with reminiscences of the days when he was young and interesting. (It may or may not be significant that the old-fart-Indy sequences were the main thing edited out of the ''Adventures'' version of the series.)
----
{{tropelist}}
=== ''Young Indiana Jones'' provides examples of: ===
 
* [[Anachronic Order]]
Line 21:
** The four old soldiers still fighting on the Allies' side in Africa in ''The Phantom Train of Doom'' movie.
** Old Indy taking a cane against some rude young ice cream cashiere in ''Verdun 1916''.
* [[BLAMNon Sequitur Episode]]: "Transylvania, January 1918". It comes out of nowhere and even years later still makes no freakin' sense. (In the original, never aired cut, the Transylvania episode was told as a ghost story by the old Indy to some children in Halloween. So there was the possibility that it was completely made up. But then the new cut had to screw it completely...) It does, however, feel closer in tone to the movies which often have supernatural shenanigans and goings on.
* [[Breather Episode]]: "Barcelona: May 1917", in which Indy meets a bunch of bumbling international spies (led by [[Monty Python]]'s Terry Jones) and "Prague: August 1917", in which Indy embarks on a quest to install a telephone in his room...and meets [[Franz Kafka]].
* [[California Doubling]]: Yes and no. Most of the series was shot in London, South Africa, Spain, Morocco and the Czech Republic, but they still managed to send the actors to many actual locations and film more than the [[Establishing Shot]] there.
Line 41:
* [[The Gump]]: Befriending T.E. Lawrence, drinking with Picasso, losing his virginity to Mata Hari, inspiring ''the'' [[Red Baron]] to paint his plane red, helping Lawrence of Arabia take Jerusalem, killing [[Dracula]], and hunting Al Capone: just some of the ''less'' extreme contrivances in young Henry Jones Junior's life. If he or she's famous in the 20th century, Indy has probably met, befriended, fought, fallen in love with, killed or slept with that person. Ah, the life of a historical edutainment hero.
* [[How Unscientific]]: The Transylvania episode.
* [[I Am'm Dying, Please Take My MacguffinMacGuffin]]: The... Eye... of the Peacock! THE EYE... OF THE PEACOCK!!
* [[I Know Karate]]: Indy himself briefly, Northern-Style Kung-Fu to be exact, on the South-China seas.
* [[Improbable Aiming Skills]]: Selous destroying an entire train in East Africa, with a single shot, from about a mile away!
* [[In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous]]: Even that 6 years-old you saved from a plague-strikenstricken village in the Congo.<ref>He is Barthelemy Boganda, the first president of the Central African Republic.</ref>
* [[Line-of-Sight Name]]: When joining the Belgian Army underage under an assumed name. Remy points out how dumb this is and explains that he didn't even have to do it in the first place as the Belgian army at the time accepted almost any able-bodied volunteer regardless of age or nationality.
* [[Musical Episode]]: Both "Mystery of the Blues" and "The Scandal of 1920"
Line 55:
* [[The Other Darrin]]: T. E. Lawrence is played by two different actors.
* [[Pocket Protector]]: In the episode "Oganga".
* [[Re CutRecut]]: In the original ''Young Indiana Jones Chronicles'', each show began and ended with short scenes featuring a 93-year-old Indy (with an [[Eyepatch of Power]]) circa 1992. He'd narrate adventures from his youth--theyouth—the titular "Young Indy" stories, here told in flashback--toflashback—to basically anyone who'd bother to listen (and some who didn't). However, in the later ''Adventures'' re-edits, the Old Indy segments were edited out entirely. Instead, newly shot linking footage, starring the other original members of the Young Indy cast (that is to say, the characters from the around-WWI era) was used to bridge the gaps.
* [[Recycled: the Series]]
* [[Red Right Hand]]: By the time Indy meets Demetrios again in Mexico, he has lost a hand and is nicknamed "Claw".
Line 69:
 
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Young Indiana Jones{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:The Nineties]]
[[Category:World War OneI]]
[[Category:Edutainment Show]]
[[Category:American Series]]
▲[[Category:Young Indiana Jones]]
[[Category:TV Series]]
[[Category:Indiana Jones]]
[[Category:The Full Name Adventures]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The}}
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1105921...2040957"