Young Indiana Jones Volume 3: The Years of Change. Out today. (******6/10)
The Young Indiana Jones series is reasonably entertaining, and reasonably good. Poorly plotted, hastily thrown together, and fairly implausible, but they’ll do. Especially for young kids who already love the movie series. Sean Patrick Flannery plays the young Indy, and he is pretty good (although for really good Sean Patrick Flannery, I would recommend going the Boondock Saints route instead). Every episode, he is getting himself into some kind of trouble at some moment in history, which is yet another reason that kids should be watching it. They might actually learn something. And the box set of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three: The Years of Change has some nice bonuses. Every one of the ten discs has some great special features, documentary-style historical featurettes on whatever subject was dealt with in that disc’s episode.
This whole series was originally a TV show, running one-hour episodes produced by George Lucas during a three-year run. 44 episodes were produced, but not all of them made it onto television. So for their release onto DVD, the 44 episodes have been partnered up (sometimes bizarrely) into 22 full length feature movies.
The first disc, Tales Of Innocence, concerns Young Indiana Jones meeting Young Ernest Hemingway, and fighting with him over a girl. Much as I respect the work of Indiana Jones, my money’s on Hemingway here. I mean, dude. He’s Ernest freakin’ Hemingway. The man’s man. Nobody’s gonna take a beautiful woman from Hemingway. Although according to the people who do Young Indiana Jones, Hemingway’s kind of a sissy, and spends a lot of time simpering and writing poetry. The documentary is a little more accurate. In this episode, he also joins the French Foreign Legion and meets Edith Wharton. There are features on them as well. Which is pretty much the way the rest of the series goes through ten more discs (which is like twenty more episodes). Indy meets someone famous, either clashes with that person or becomes friends, and then halfway through he goes off elsewhere and meets some other famous people, and then the episode ends.
This would be a terrific series for kids to get into, simply because they would learn a lot more about history than they would watching The Fairly Odd Parents or Bratz. And the special features ARE the best part of the show, because they are…well…more historically accurate.