Trivia / The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

• Ascended Fanon: The eyepatched Indy of the Chronicles was originally proposed as a narrator for the opening and closing "bookend" scenes of an Indiana Jones series proper Expanded Universe novel. Lucas rejected the conceit for the novel, reasoning that "no one wants to see an old Indy," only to turn around and "borrow" the idea (right down to the eyepatch) in his new TV series... only to end up hating the idea again and erasing the framing device from future releases.
• California Doubling: Yes and no. Most of the series was shot in London, South Africa, Spain, Morocco and the Czech Republic, but they still managed to send the actors to many actual locations and film more than the Establishing Shot there.
• The Cast Showoff: One episode features a brief snippet of Indy singing in the bathtub as he cleans up for a date. Another is about him learning to play soprano sax in Chicago at the height of the Blues craze. Sean Patrick Flannery is an accomplished musician, as he proves here.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Sean Patrick Flanery, playing Young Indy, was a decade older than his character.
  • Corey Carrier got in on it as well, albeit unintentionally. When the episodes were recut and put together in more chronological order, episodes that were supposed to be chronologically one right after the other (but were filmed years apart) show how much Carrier grew during the series. The first two episodes are Egypt and Morocco, and Carrier looks about a foot taller in the second.
  • In the episode "Vienna, November 1908", Carl Jung is played by Ernst-Hugo Järegård, who was then aged around 64. While Järegård's Jung◊ does resemble the real Jung◊, in November 1908 he was only 33 and looked more like this◊.
  • In the same episode, 13-year-old Amalie Alstrup plays Princess Sophie. At that time Sophie would only have been 7.
• Fake Nationality: Hoo boy...
  • Jon Pertwee, Daniel Craig and Adrian Edmondson all played Germans (in different episodes, mind you).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original cuts featuring Old Indy, as shown on TV, are available on VHS but didn't get a DVD release due to George Lucas recutting the hour-long episodes into two-hour long films.
• The Original Darrin: Claude Giraud dubbed adult Indy in French for Mystery of the Blues. He was Indy's French voice in Raiders of the Lost Ark before being replaced by Francis Lax (Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy) for Temple of Doom and by Richard Darbois (Harrison Ford's most prominent French dub actor) for all the movies from Last Crusade onwards.
• The Other Darrin:
  • River Phoenix was first offered the role of Young Indy, to continue from Last Crusade. He declined, as he didn't feel television had anything to offer his career.
  • Lloyd Owen replaces Alex Hyde-White as the younger Henry Jones Sr.
  • T. E. Lawrence is played by two different actors.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: For Harrison Ford's cameo in "Mystery of the Blues", Indy has a beard because Ford filmed his scenes while on a break from filming The Fugitive and could not shave it for contractional reasons.
• Screwed by the Network: British viewers never got to see the Corey Carrier episodes, as The BBC refused to broadcast them for reasons never fully explained. The Sean Patrick Flanery episodes, meanwhile, never got a regular place in the schedules.
• Underage Casting: Lloyd Owen (then in his mid-to-late 20's) plays Henry Jones Sr. in both eras of the show, when the character would have been in his mid-30's/40's. While in Last Crusade the age gap between the actors playing Indy and his father was only 12 years (which is why Connery initially hesitated to accept the role), the situation is even more ridiculous here: Flanery is actually several months older than Owen.
• Unfinished Episode: Among the episodes being prepped when the series was cancelled were an adventure starring Even Younger Indy (aged 5), and Indy's first meetings with Abner Ravenwood and René Belloq (the latter in a story also involving a Crystal Skull).
• What Could Have Been:
  • George Lucas had plans for a third season, which had to be thrown out after the show was cancelled in 1993 after two seasons. Had it been renewed, Season 3 would explored the beginnings of Indy's career as an archaeologist (the timeline of the actual show ends with him as a college student in 1920), and would have introduced a few characters from the films such as Indy's mentor Abner Ravenwood and his rival René Belloq. We would have also seen more of Indy's war service, and several Noodle Incidents (such as Indy's talk of having flown across Australia with Harry Houdini) would have been shown. The entry for the show's episode list on the Other Wiki lists a total of 17 planned episodes, ranging from 1905 to 1921.
  • River Phoenix and Harrison Ford were originally approached to play the younger and elder Indy respectively. However, Phoenix wasn't willing to return to television after spending much of his early career on sitcoms and Ford felt, at least at the time, that television had nothing to offer to his career. Despite rumors that Sean Connery's son Jason Connery would take the role, they would be respectively replaced by Sean Patrick Flanery and George Hall, with Corey Carrier joining in as Indy during his childhood.
  • There are rumors that Clint Eastwood was approached to guest star in the show as "Illinois Jones", Indiana's elder brother during the show's early development, but Eastwood declined the offer despite being offered $10 million for the role. Dark Horse Comics did publish a comic, Indiana Jones and the Sargasso Pirates, about Indy encountering a con artist pretending to be his older brother, New Jersey Jones. Indiana Jones exposes the conman by telling him he was an only child.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Paul Freeman (Belloq) as real-life explorer Frederick Selous in two episodes.
  • Actors would often play multiple roles in the series; sometimes this could get a little confusing. The most iconic example is Vic Tablian, who already had two different roles in Raiders (Barranca and the Monkey Man). Here he plays villain Demetrios in the two-parter "The Curse of the Jackal" and an Armenian saboteur in "Istanbul, September 1918".

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