Is Indiana Jones 5 Erasing The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from Canon?

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Sunday, May 5, 2024

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones

A product of early ‘90s television, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which aired from 1992 to 1993, is a curious relic of pop culture since it seems to only be remembered by older millennials of a certain age… and George Lucas.

Produced by Lucasfilm and Amblin Television as both an expansion of intellectual property—with Ford and director Steven Spielberg at the time seeming generally done with the franchise after 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade—as well as educational, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is one of the more ambitious TV shows ever produced as children’s entertainment. Episodes would jump between years and decades in young Indiana’s life, alternating from his childhood (where he was played by Corey Carrier) and his truly willful adolescence (as played by Sean Patrick Flanery), and with little in the way of interstitial narrative connecting the episodes from week to week.

In this way, the series could reveal that young Henry and his father explored the Pyramids of Giza with T.E. Lawrence before he became the Lawrence of Arabia, and as a young man Indy spent his college nights at the University of Chicago listening to jazz legends like Louis Armstrong. It was even revealed that he first ran away from home as a teenager because he was enlisted (kidnapped, really) by Pancho Villa’s army. Later, he fought in World War I on the Somme and spied on the Bolsheviks ahead of the February Revolution.

It was a veritable history lesson about world events during the first half of the 20th century. And through it all, the only connective tissue is how the episodes were often framed in the present as the reminisces of an ancient, and nearly hundred-year-old Indiana Jones. Played by George Hall as an eccentric and slightly kooky statesman, Old Man Indy came with a mysterious eyepatch as well as a childlike glee shimmering from the other pupil as he scared kids at the local museums by recollecting his previous life.

It was in this way that Lucas turned Indiana Jones into a kind of Forrest Gump character before the movie Forrest Gump even came out, suggesting Indy was there for countless major turning points in history from the beginning of the 20th century to its ending.

The Young Indiana Jones Is Still Canon

Of course some might dismiss the idea that the events of a major film franchise should be beholden to the narrative plotting of an early ‘90s TV show that only a subset of fans remember. However, one of the most important such fans was Lucas, who as the creator and executive producer of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles went out of his way to explicitly keep the old show as canon in the films.

Danofgeek

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