A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2007 Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount Home Video In the early 1990s, after the success of  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , producer George Lucas came up with an ambitious project: a 70-episode live-action TV series chronicling the adventures of a young Henry (Indiana) Jones, Jr. as a pre-teen boy and a restless adolescent, taking the future archaeologist on a globetrotting journey of self-discovery and preparing him for his raid on the Lost Ark and other "rare antiquities" in the three Steven Spielberg-directed movies.  Lucas assembled a creative team that included top-notch writers (Frank Darabont, who would later write  The Shawshank Redemption  and  The Green Mile , wrote five episodes), directors (Mike Newell, Nicolas Roeg, Simon Wincer), and a crew that would later be better known for its work on the  Star Wars  prequels - designer Gavin Bocquet, cinematographer David Tattersall, editor Ben Burtt, and producer Rick McCallum, plus a small army of actors, ext

On September 18, 2012, almost a year after Lucasfilm Limited (LFL) and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released Star Wars: The Complete Saga on Blu-ray, LFL and Paramount Pictures released Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures, a five-disc box set which, for the first time ever, includes all four Indy films in the Blu-ray format. Like its Star Wars counterpart, Indiana Jones: The Complete Adventures features each of the George Lucas-produced, Steven Spielberg films ( Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ) on its own Blu-ray disc, along with a fifth disc which contains a mix of all-new extra features and "carryovers" from the 2003 and 2008 DVD sets. I've been a fan of "the Man in the Hat" since Raiders was released in June of 1981, and even though I already own the four films of the series and the three Adventures of Young Indiana Jone

After the cancellation by ABC of his ambitious and expensive television series,  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,  executive producer George Lucas tried several methods to save the show and give viewers - especially pre-teen kids and young adults - its trademark mix of education and entertainment. For instance, after ABC axed  Young Indy  from its lineup (citing the show's lavish budgets as its primary reason), Lucasfilm Limited produced four made-for-TV movies which aired on cable's Family Channel over a two-year period (1994-1996).   Another life-saving measure was the hiring of film editor T.M. Christopher, who not only had worked with Lucas as an editor on the Classic  Star Wars  Trilogy, but also with Milos Forman in cutting 1984's  Amadeus. Christopher was tasked with re-editing 44 episodes of  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles  and fashioning 22 "movies" out of them by marrying chronologically-close stories together into a (hopefully) seamless na

Blogger's Note: This review was written originally for Amazon sometime in November of 2003, then updated (twice) for Epinions. It is not about the four-movie box set which was released in late 2008 after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, nor is it about the soon-to-be-released Indiana Jones Blu-ray box set. Since the advent of the Digital Video Disc format in the late 1990s, there were two long-awaited movie trilogies: the Classic Star Wars films and the Adventures of Indiana Jones. The former was first released in September of 2004, but the daring fedora-wearing archaeologist had almost a year's headstart when Lucasfilm and Paramount Home Video released a 4-disk set in November 2003. The Adventures of Indiana Jones  box set consists of the first three films of the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaborative creation, 1981's  Raiders of the Lost Ark , 1984's  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Cru

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils of the Desert Formats Available: VHS (1999) DVD (2007) Chapter 15: The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils of the Desert (Disc 8, Volume Two – The War Years) Written by: Frank Darabont Directed by: Simon Wincer Palestine : October 1917: Having completed several intelligence-gathering assignments in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, young Indiana Jones (Sean Patrick Flanery), known to his superiors in the Belgian army as Capt. Henri Defense, has been reassigned to the Middle East to assist the Allied war effort there. As in the African theater of operations, the Anglo-French endeavors in Arabia and Palestine are considered a “sideshow to the main show” of the battlefields in Europe; Britain wants to protect the Suez Canal and her links to India from interference by  the Central Powers, while France seeks to expend her sphere of influence in the region, aided and abetted by her British allies. To acc

In March of 1992, almost three years after the premiere of Steven Spielberg's  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade  and 16 years before the release of  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , George Lucas, Amblin Entertainment, and the ABC television network attempted to create a 70-episode television series that would explore the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of the globe-trotting archaeologist/adventurer best known for being an "obtainer of rare antiquities" imbued with supernatural properties.  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles  was a collection of one-hour episodes that skipped back and forth in the chronology of Indy's formative years, some featuring a very young "Junior" (Corey Carrier), with most starring Sean Patrick Flanery as Indiana Jones between the ages of 16 and 21.  Part Indy prequel, part history lesson, this was one of the rare television projects personally overseen by Lucas, and it was intended to enterta

Ever since I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in the spring of 1981, I have been a huge fan of George Lucas’s Indiana Jones, the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding, fast-quipping globe-trotting archaeologist-spy-soldier of fortune who risks life and limb going after “rare antiquities” imbued with supernatural powers. Like many Raiders fans of my generation – I was in my teens when that first George Lucas-Steven Spielberg collaboration was released – I loved that film and its two sequels partly because of the non-stop action set pieces, partly because John Williams had composed a kick-butt score, partly because they mixed elements of the old Saturday matinee serials and the James Bond flicks, but mostly because Harrison Ford was so likeable playing the Man in the Hat. Now, even though I own all four feature films and the three Adventures of Young Indiana Jones box sets, I only own a few of the novels and novelty books which fill in some of the gaps in Indy’s long car