A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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 ey...

(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 s...

In March of 1992, Lucasfilm Ltd., Paramount Television, and ABC Television gave viewers the first episode of  The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles , a series which explored the formative years of Henry Jones, Jr. a few decades before the events depicted in the  Indiana Jones Trilogy . Part  Indy  prequel, part history lesson, this was one of the rare television projects personally overseen by George Lucas, and it was intended to entertain fans of the archaeologist/adventurer while at the same time introducing many of them to important persons with whom a young Indy might have interacted with as he followed his father, Professor Henry Jones, Sr., and mother Anna on a global lecture tour as a ten-year-old, then later getting into more Indy-like situations during World War I and the post-war Jazz Age. The idea of Lucas' fictional hero interacting with real historical characters wasn't new; in 1989's  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , the Man with the Hat ...

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...

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 entert...