Young Indiana Jones: Harrison Ford does a cameo in Mystery of the Blues (review with link)
In the middle of the 1991-92 TV season (March 1992, to be precise), ABC and George Lucas's Lucasfilm Limited attempted a daring experiment; to give viewers a mixture of educational material - primarily focusing on early 20th Century history - and entertainment (edutainment for short) in a series titled The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Like Lucasfilm's current Cartoon Network animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was an anthology; instead of being a linear narrative which starts in 1908 and ends in 1923, the series jumped around the timeline and alternated episodes with preteen Indy (played by Corey Carrier) and teen/young adult Indiana/Henri Defense/Henry Jones, Jr. (Sean Patrick Flannery).
Each episode was "framed" with prologues and epilogues set in the series' "present day" and starring George Hall as "Old Indy", a 90-something retiree who still wore his trademark fedora but also sported an eye patch just like famed film director John Ford (who, incidentally, is one of the historical figures who makes a major appearance in the Young Indy straight to video "movie" Hollywood Follies).
Because the three Indiana Jones features then in existence were still relatively fresh in the public's eye and fans were constantly asking director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas if there would be a fourth movie, ABC and Lucasfilm had high hopes that The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles would have healthy ratings. Indeed, Lucas had story ideas for 70 episodes altogether, some of which would introduce characters such as Rene Belloq and Abner Ravenwood, who were either seen or prominently mentioned in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The series earned decent but not spectacular ratings during its first season, but ABC decided that it was too expensive to keep on the air with lowering ratings, and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles limped off the air with just 31 aired episodes, not even half of Lucas' hoped-for 70-show-run. (Sadly, not even a once-in-a-blue moon TV appearance by Harrison Ford as 50-year-old Indy could save the series from cancellation.)
Over the years, Lucasfilm managed to keep the young Indy series in video's equivalent of life support. In the late 1990s, Paramount Home Video re-released the Chronicles in tandem with re-issues of the feature films, going as far giving the Harrison Ford flicks "chapter numbers" on the boxes' spines to make them fit into the series' timeline.
Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues
Also known as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Mystery of the Blues
Written by Jule Selbo, based on a story by George Lucas
Directed by Carl Schultz
Formats Available: VHS (as Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues); DVD: Disc 6 of Volume Three: The Years of Change (as Chapter 20: Mystery of the Blues)
Although many of the 22 "movies" that make up the 2007-2008 The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones DVD box set were cleverly edited "splices" of two separate episodes of the series' original 1992-1993 incarnation and thus were never seen quite like that on ABC, 1993's Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues - along with a couple of other movie-length episodes - did air on network TV as they are presented on the DVD.
Written by Jule Selbo (The Flash, Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal) and directed by Carl Schultz (Treasure of the Peacock's Eye), Mystery of the Blues was broadcast in March of 1993 as the second season's fifth episode.
Mystery of the Blues follows the format of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles by sandwiching its main story - set in Chicago in the year 1920 - between two "bookends" which feature an older version of Indiana Jones reminiscing about his youth after some emotionally-relevant incident triggers off a memory of that time.
As mentioned earlier, these prologues and epilogues usually starred the late actor George Hall and took place in the series' "now" time of the early ‘90s; the "old Indy" bookends were deleted when editor T.M. Christopher revamped the majority of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles into the 22-chapter Adventures of....series.
Mystery of the Blues, however, retains its bookends because they are set in 1950, not the early 1990s, and also because the Indy doing the reminiscing is played by the original personification of the character - the feature films' Harrison Ford.
Grey Cloud: [looking at the Indian pipe] This is probably the most sacred relic in my people's past.
Indiana Jones - age 50: [having found a soprano sax] Well, here's a sacred relic of my past.
The frame story - which perhaps was conceived and shot to convince ABC's executives to not cancel the Chronicles - takes place in Wyoming in 1950 (seven years before the events of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). It's a typical Raiders of the Lost Ark scenario, with Prof. Henry Jones, Jr. and his friend Grey Cloud (Saginaw Gtant) right smack in the middle of a car chase on a snowy road.
It seems that a gang of unscrupulous robbers had stolen a peace pipe from Grey Cloud's Native American tribal grounds, but somehow Indy - in typical fashion - managed to recover it shortly before the episode's beginning. Now the robbers want the pipe back and are in hot pursuit of the now-bearded professor of archaeology and his friend.
The car chase ends abruptly when Indy's car runs headlong into a snow bank and its two occupants flee to a cabin which happens to belong to the resourceful Dr. Jones. A snow storm is coming, so Indy and Grey Cloud settle in for the night to await the dawn - and the expected face-off with the band of thieves.
The "flashback" which is the heart of the story begins when Indy, rummaging in his cabin for something to kill time with, finds his old soprano saxophone, which he's had since his days as a student at the University of Chicago.
Indiana Jones - age 50: Reminds me of working my way through the University of Chicago.
Grey Cloud: You playing that?
Indiana Jones - age 50: No... no, I was a waiter.
[narrating as the scene shifts to Chicago, 1920]
Indiana Jones - age 50: But that's an art in itself. You know, you don't start at the top. You work your way up. Perfect your style. Till you are at the top, like Colosimo's Restaurant. The best food, the best service and the best jazz in Chicago. I was crazy about jazz
As a result of young Indy's (Sean Patrick Flannery) estrangement from his widowed father, the young archaeology major has had to get a job as a waiter in a Chicago restaurant owned by "Big Jim" Colosimo (Ray Sierra), a fiery-tempered but fair employer who recently married a young singer named Dale Winter (Jane Krakowski) and, this being Chicago in the Prohibition era, head of one of the mob factions fighting for control of the city's illegal booze and prostitution rings.
The unusually complex story - once intended to have been two separate Chronicles episodes - has an A plot which involves Indy's inadvertent involvement in a murder investigation which seeks the answer to the question "Who Shot Big Jim?" Here, Indy cajoles his nerdy, anal-retentive roommate Eliott Ness into helping him solve the mysterious gangland-style murder; along the way, Indy and the future Untouchables leader are assisted by Ernest Hemingway (Jay Underwood), a young reporter Indy met during his tour of duty on the Italian front during the Great War.
Comments
Post a Comment