When Disney acquired Lucasfilm to the tune of over $4 billion in 2012, it wasn’t just the Star Wars franchise that the Mouse House secured. The production company is also home to the Willow and Indiana Jones properties, and while the former recently returned with a Disney+ TV series that only lasted a season (for now) to accompany the original movie, there’s been no representation of the latter on the platform. That will soon change though, because ahead of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s arrival to the 2023 movies calendar, Disney+ subscribers will be able to stream the first four Indiana Jones movies starting May 31. However, it’s the addition of the much-lesser know TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles that has me more excited.
I’ve been an Indiana Jones fan since I was in middle school, and as such I’ve owned all these movies in various forms over the years, not to mention have periodically watched them on cable. So while it’ll be nice to have Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the Disney+ library, I’m already covered on that front. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, on the other hand, is not part of my collection. I don’t remember when exactly I learned about the TV show’s existence, but by the time I’d expressed a morsel of interest in checking it out, the DVD set was hard to track down. Making matters worse, I never ran into Chronicles while channel-surfing, so I’ve only ever dipped my toes in this corner of the franchise by viewing a few bootleg copy episodes uploaded to YouTube years later.
Granted, this series, as well as the Indiana Jones movies, have been available to stream with a Paramount+ subscription in more recent years, but that’s one of the streaming services I haven’t made the jump to yet, so it being added to Disney+ has me jazzed to finally check it out in full. For those who don’t know about The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the show originally aired 28 episodes in ABC from 1992 to 1993, followed by four made-for-TV movies for the then-Family Channel between 1994 to 1996. It follows Indy adventuring around the world in his youth, with Corey Carrier playing him as a young boy and Sean Patrick Flanery playing him from ages 16-21. Each of the episodes as they originally aired were also bookends by George Hall as an eyepatches, nonagenarian Indy recollecting his life experiences to people he ran into in the then-contemporary 1990s.
Carrier’s Indy got into adventures while traveling around the world with his mother, father and tutor, while Flanery’s Indy went on his own journeys starting during World War I. But it wasn’t just a matter of the future archaeologist globetrotting; he also ran into all kinds of historical figures, from Theodore Roosevelt and Leo Tolstoy to Ernest Hemingway and Al Capone, like he was the Forrest Gump of the earth 20th century. So even before Indy started looking for artifacts and treasures, he was leading quite the eventful life, almost to an absurd degree.
There has been debate over whether The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is canon or not, and now that Disney owns the Indiana Jones franchise, it’s possible that the company may ultimately deem it non-canon it ever decides to do tell its own stories featuring young Indy. But even if that ends up being the case someday, I’m still looking forward to going through it, because along with being an Indiana Jones fan, I’m a sucker for action/adventure stories set in the first half of the 20th century. One thing I’ll be interested to see is if Disney+’s version of the episodes retain those George Hall bookends, or if the platform will just have the versions from the VHS and DVD releases that took them out. At the very least, the bookend from “Mystery of the Blues” better not be gone, as that featured Harrison Ford briefly back in the role.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the four Indiana Jones movies will make an excellent appetizer to the main course that is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which we know hits theaters on June 30 following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. While it’d also been reported that Disney+ was developing its own Indiana Jones TV series, that project has apparently been scrapped.
