Line #30 Recap/YoungIndianaJonesAndTheCurseOfTheJackal


1	->''Now, why don't we have a real adventure, hm?''
2
3	'''''Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal''''' is the first-ever episode of ''Series/TheYoungIndianaJonesChronicles''. It's a feature-length TV movie which served to introduce the character at the two ages he would be portrayed as in the show. First broadcast on 4th March 1992.
4
5	On a visit to a New York museum in 1992, an elderly Indiana Jones meets two truant boys and regales them with stories from his early life.
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7	In 1908, Indy — travelling around the world with his parents — meets Helen Seymour, who is hired to be his tutor. In UsefulNotes/{{Egypt}}, Indy and Helen visit the Pyramids, where they meet UsefulNotes/TELawrence, who invites them to an archaeological dig. There, they meet Howard Carter who is excavating a newly-discovered tomb with the help of his Egyptian assistant, Rashid. The next day, Rashid is found murdered and a valuable jackal headpiece stolen from the tomb. Demetrios, the chief blaster of the excavation, is revealed to be behind this, but he escapes.
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9	In 1916, a teenage Indy travels to the [[UsefulNotes/{{Mexico}} Mexican]] border with his cousin Frank but is captured by revolutionaries led by Pancho Villa. He befriends Remy, a Belgian chef who has somehow fallen in with the revolutionaries. Indy also recognises Demetrios — who is now an arms dealer who does business with Pancho Villa but also spies for the Americans. After learning of the revolutionaries' hypocrisy, Indy and Remy decide to leave — but not before Indy deals with his unfinished business with Demetrios.
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11	In the epilogue, Old Indy reveals to the kids that the jackal headpiece is now an exhibit in the museum.
12
13	!!This episode contains examples of:
14	* AdventureArchaeologist: T.E. Lawrence, one of the classic RealLife examples of this trope, is shown here as a hero and mentor-figure to Indiana Jones, ''the'' greatest fictional example.
15	-->'''Indy:''' I'd like to be an archaeologist.\
16	'''Lawrence''': Maybe you'll add a new page to history. Or discover a treasure beyond price.\
17	'''Indy''': And get rich!\
18	'''Lawrence''': No, Henry. the archaeologists don't get rich. Archaeology doesn't steal from the past, it opens it. So that everyone may learn from its treasures.
19	* AncientEgypt: As depicted from an early twentieth-century archaeological perspective. The Pyramids are visited (and one of them climbed), and Howard Carter excavates a tomb (which is [[CurseOfThePharaoh said to be cursed]], and from which an artefact is stolen).
20	* AndStarring: George Hall, who played Old Indy, is credited thusly.
21	* ArtisticLicenceGeography: Indy and Miss Seymour visit the Pyramids of Giza and wind up stranded in the Sahara after their guide abandons them. But Giza isn't a remote area in the desert — it's a heavily populated suburb of Cairo, with the Pyramids very much on the edge of said suburb, rather than in the middle of the desert (although to be fair, this is neither the first nor the last TV show to imply that the Pyramids are more remote in relation to Cairo than they actually are).
22	** Also, Lawrence is stated to have chased Demetrios all the way from the Valley of the Kings to Port Said. That's about 500 miles; presumably he didn't do the whole thing on his bicycle.
23	* ArtisticLicenceHistory: T.E. Lawrence didn't go to Egypt in 1908 -- he was a student at Oxford University who spent the summer of that year cycling through France, researching castles. He visited Syria the following year to see the Crusader castles, and worked as an archaeologist in the Middle East (including, for a time, Egypt) from 1910 onwards. That said, Miss Seymour (who knows him) does introduce him to Indy as a student at Oxford, which is where she lives.
24	* BadassBandolier: Pancho Villa sports two in an "X" across the body (his trademark), as do most of his gang.
25	* {{Bandito}}: Pancho Villa and his gang.
26	* BarBrawl: Patton initiates one with guns, and kills three of Villa's men.
27	-->'''Indy:''' That guy's nuts!
28	* BlatantLies: Anything Indy and Frank say about their plans to go camping, although they do end up spending a night under the stars.
29	* {{Bookends}}: The Old Indy narrative, which bookends both the 1908 and 1916 sequences.
30	** We also get a subtle one involving pets. At the beginning of the 1908 sequence, we briefly see Indiana, the dog whom Indy nicknamed himself after. Later, Old Indy says he has to go home and feed his cat, who's called Henry. So as a boy, Indy named himself after the dog, and as an old man he has a cat who he's named after himself.
31	* CallForward: A few.
32	** At the end of ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheLastCrusade'', it was revealed that Indy is nicknamed after the family dog. Here, we get to see a young Indy playing with that dog.
33	** When Indy arrives at the Egyptian dig site, he passes a group of diggers whose work song is the same as the one the diggers in ''Film/RaidersOfTheLostArk'' sing when they are digging for the Well of the Souls.
34	** Henry Snr. comes across as a ReasonableAuthorityFigure who allows his son plenty of leeway (in the first segment he lets him go to the Valley of the Kings with Lawrence, and in the second he has no objections to Indy and Frank's proposed camping trip), which is how he remembers himself as a father in ''Last Crusade'' — even though their relationship is clearly strained by the 1916 segment due to the death of Indy's mother, which is stated to have happened three years previously.
35	** Indy and Remy riding off towards the rising sun is reminiscent of Indy, Henry Snr., Sallah and Marcus riding off into the sunset at the end of ''Last Crusade''.
36	** Another one relating to ''Last Crusade''; this is not the last time that Indy recovers a MacGuffin after a TimeSkip, and ensures that it ends up where it belongs — in a museum.
37	* ChekhovsGun: Demetrios's flare pistol, which he fires to (presumably) signal the all-clear after he oversees a controlled explosion at the dig, becomes significant when Lawrence ponders who other than Pierre would have had ready access to magnesium powder, some of which was found on Rashid's body.
38	* ChekhovsSkill: Linguistics. Inspired by Lawrence, Indy clearly learned some Arabic in Egypt. This enables him to realise that Claw, the one-handed arms dealer in 1916, is actually Demetrios after he uses an Arabic word when berating Pancho Villa's prisoners.
39	* ContinuitySnarl: If Indy's mother died three years before 1916 (ie. in 1913), where was she in the prelude to ''Last Crusade'', the events of which occurred in 1912?
40	** Could be that she was seriously ill by that point, although quite how the family moving out to Utah would have helped is a Headscratchers in and of itself (that move, revealed here to have been temporary, would make more sense in terms of Henry Snr. wanting to take a sabbatical after being widowed).
41	* ContrivedCoincidence: Conveniently for Indy, Demetrios has a bullwhip in his house.
42	* CoolOldGuy: Old Indy, who is keen to teach the young kids about the importance of studying history. And, despite his age (92 [[note]] the bookend part of this episode is set in March 1992 and Indy states that he was born on 1st July 1899 [[/note]]), he is not averse to a little fun, like sliding down the bannister.
43	* CoolTeacher: Helen Seymour becomes this to Indy.
44	* CunningLinguist: Lawrence, who impresses Indy with his fluent Arabic, is keen to impress upon his young friend the importance of learning the local language wherever he goes. This clearly rubs off, as he recognises Demetrios in Mexico after the guy uses an Arabic word.
45	-->'''Lawrence''': Henry, wherever you go, and whatever countries you visit, learn the language. It's the key that unlocks everything, the most important thing of all.
46	* CurseOfThePharaoh: Kha was a high-ranking official rather than a Pharaoh, but there's still a curse on his tomb. Indy is for a time convinced that this is why Rashid was killed — until Lawrence admits he overdid it when telling him late-night ghost stories about cursed tombs and the spirits of the dead.
47	* DefrostingIceQueen: Indy and Helen Seymour, towards each other. At first, he doesn't like her and she doesn't even want the job of being his tutor, but things get better. The fact that she turns out to have strong adventurous streak (the trip to the Pyramids and the idea of climbing one of the smaller ones are both her ideas, and she's just as excited as he is to visit the Valley of the Kings with Lawrence) definitely helps.
48	* TheDeterminator: Indy, and it gets him into more trouble than he bargained for. By attempting to recover ''all'' of the robbed woman's clothes that the bandit steals, he ends up in Mexico — and a prisoner of Pancho Villa. He quite possibly gets this from Lawrence, who chased Demetrios from the Valley of the Kings to Port Said — a distance of around 500 miles. Speaking of whom, Indy will not leave Mexico until he's dealt with Demetrios and recovered the jackal headpiece — which ultimately ends up in the museum in New York where Old Indy is telling his story to the kids.
49	* DoNotCallMePaul: Even as a kid, Henry Jones Jnr. prefers that people call him "Indy".
50	* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: This, the first episode, is one of just four episodes from the first two series that was initially released as a feature-length TV movie (although ultimately, all 26 episodes would be re-edited into TV movies). It is also the only time in the show that the adventures of Young Indy (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Younger Indy (Corey Carrier) feature in the same episode.
51	** Much of the 1916 sequence is in Spanish with English subtitles, both from the Mexican characters and Indy himself. This contrasts with the subsequent episodes, which relied on TranslationConvention for the most part.
52	** The first time Indiana Jones shoots someone, his first reaction is to ''apologise''. His victim, who is wounded rather than killed, then ''tries to attack him'', and it falls to Remy to finish him off.
53	* EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: A variant — Henry Snr. hires Helen Seymour to be Indy's tutor because she was ''his'' tutor back in the day. It later transpires that she used to be Lawrence's tutor as well.
54	* EyepatchOfPower: Old Indy sports one of these over his right eye, complete with a nasty facial scar trailing out from beneath. Because of the large time gap between the present-day (well, 1990s) ''Chronicles'' framing segments and the 1930s-set films, this is also an EyepatchAfterTimeSkip; since Indy still has both eyes in ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheDialOfDestiny'', which is set in 1969, this injury must have occurred after that date.
55	* FinalBoss: Demetrios. The episode climaxes with Indy breaking into his house, finding the jackal — and fighting him for it.
56	* {{Foreshadowing}}: Plenty.
57	** The journal Henry Snr. gives Indy to record his adventures is the one seen being opened by Old Indy in the opening credits. It's also seen in several later episodes and is alluded to in several other media in the Indyverse — and eventually formed the basis of a tie-in book, ''The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones'' which was published in 2008 to coincide with the release of ''Film/IndianaJonesAndTheKingdomOfTheCrystalSkull'' [[note]] in which it is claimed that the journal fell into the hands of the KGB in 1957, thus creating a minor ContinuitySnarl, for if that were so, how could Old Indy be looking through it in the early 1990s? [[/note]].
58	** As is the case in several later episodes, teenage Indy is shown to be writing a letter to Ned, and referring to letters Ned wrote to him.
59	** In 1916, Indy reads about the fighting on the Western Front in a newspaper. It won't be long before he gets to [[Recap/YoungIndianaJonesAndTheTrenchesOfHell experience that]] [[Recap/YoungIndianaJonesAndTheDemonsOfDeception for himself]].
60	** One of the girlie pictures Indy and Frank look at is of [[Recap/YoungIndianaJonesAndTheDemonsOfDeception Mata Hari]].
61	** In a RealLife example, Carter shows Lawrence and Indy a clay seal bearing the name of Tutankhamen. This leads to a brief discussion on the prospect of discovering his tomb, which Carter would do in 1922.
62	** Lawrence admits to being prone to exaggeration, something his RealLife detractors would often accuse him of doing.
63	* FramingDevice: In the then-present (dated specifically to March 1992, when this episode was first broadcast), Old Indy regales two young truants with stories from his youth. By the halfway-point, they're eager for more.
64	* GoshDarnItToHeck: Indy is somewhat prone to this sort of language in the 1908 segment. Justified, since he's nine years old.
65	* HistoricalDomainCharacter: The show starts as it means to go on. The young Indiana Jones encounters UsefulNotes/TELawrence, [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Carter Howard Carter]], [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Villa Pancho Villa]] and a young UsefulNotes/GeorgeSPatton. He does not actually meet [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Pershing General Pershing]], although he is also portrayed here.
66	* HoistByHisOwnPetard: The ultimate fate of Demetrios, who's killed when his house gets blown up by his own explosives. Which were ignited as a result of him trying to set Indy on fire after the latter got doused in petrol in the climactic fight.
67	* HormoneAddledTeenager: The only reason why Indy and his cousin Frank go to Columbus is because they want to "see the ''senoritas''" -- in other words, to try and visit a bordello just across the border.
68	* IChooseToStay: When Villa angrily orders him to go home, Indy — inspired by the revolutionaries — volunteers to join Villa's band. This will not last.
69	* {{Joisey}}: Downplayed. Old Indy reveals that he is from New Jersey — he was born in Princeton, where his father was a professor.
70	* TheKnightsWhoSaySquee: Indiana Jones has a hero, and his name is T.E. Lawrence.
71	-->'''Old Indy:''' "Don't forget me", he cried, as if I ever would. The man was a hero even then.
72	* MacGuffin: The jackal headpiece — which is eventually revealed to be on display in the museum that Indy and the kids are visiting.
73	* MagnificentMoustachesOfMexico: Naturally, Pancho Villa and his bandits all have these. Even Remy.
74	* MoodWhiplash: The episode as a whole is very much a two-parter — a murder mystery in Egypt, followed by a {{Western}} in Mexico.
75	** In the former, the mood turns sour when Rashid is killed.
76	** In the latter, Indy and the other prisoners are subject to a firing squad — but just before the order to fire is given, Pancho Villa himself puts a stop to it. José, the man who arranged the firing squad, subsequently embraces Indy and befriends him.
77	** In the movie scene, the revolutionaries are genuinely moved by the silent film even though it is about an American soldier going off to war. Then they see the newsreel about Pershing, and are angry — so angry they shoot the place up.
78	* NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished: Indy only gets captured in the aftermath of Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus because he tries to help a woman whose clothes get robbed by one of Villa's men; he gives chase, and ends up south of the border -- which is where he gets taken prisoner.
79	* NoodleIncident: It is not stated how Demetrios lost his right hand at some point between 1908 and 1916.
80	** Same goes for how Indy lost an eye; this has not been explained anywhere in the Indyverse. That said, it is ambiguous as to whether it was later {{Retconned}} out by the late-1990s [[ReCut re-editing]] of this series, which saw the Old Indy scenes get dropped.
81	* RedHerring: Pierre, the photographer, comes under suspicion of having killed Rashid and stolen the jackal headpiece, although it doesn't take Lawrence long to realise that the culprit was actually Demetrios.
82	* RiddleForTheAges: What ''does'' Frank tell Indy's dad?
83	* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Indy becomes disillusioned with Pancho Villa after seeing his men loot a village and steal chickens from an elderly peasant, who later tells Indy that every politician and revolutionary tells him they want to help him, but all they do is steal his chickens. Indy, who has already realised that Pancho Villa's revolution is not ''his'' revolution, is therefore already thinking of leaving when Remy tells him that he too wants out — after seeing the cinema newsreel, he wants to go back to Europe and fight for his own country. Indy goes with him.
84	* ShoutOut: When Lawrence reveals to Indy that he has a pistol, he quotes from the poem "Vitae Lampada" by [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Newbolt Henry Newbolt]].
85	-->'''Lawrence''': "Play up, and play the game", eh?
86	** Also, a murder mystery at an archaeological dig in Egypt may put some viewers in mind of Creator/AgathaChristie, whose second husband was a noted archaeologist and who set a few of her novels in the Middle East (''Literature/DeathOnTheNile'', ''Literature/MurderInMesopotamia'', etc).
87	* SombreroEqualsMexican: There are no prizes for guessing the revolutionaries' choice of headgear, in contrast to Indy's trademark brown fedora.
88	* StuffBlowingUp: That flatbed full of explosives does plenty of damage to the walls of Ciudad Guerro. The American biplane follows this up by dropping a few bombs on the place. Later on, Demetrios learns the hard way that storing explosives in your house and trying to deal with intruders by dousing them with petrol and attempting to set fire to them is probably not the smartest move.
89	* TactfulTranslation: While with Pancho Villa and the revolutionaries, Indy is tasked with translating the {{Title Card}}s of captured American silent films and newsreels. When the reel turns to the revolution from an American perspective, Indy attempts to play off the footage as respectful to Pancho Villa, but fails; the revolutionaries shoot up the theatre.
90	-->'''Title Card:''' To the Halls of Montezuma! US troops sweep into Mexico.\
91	'''Indy:''' US troops ... pay a courtesy visit to Canada.\
92	'''Card:''' General Pershing: "We shall soon have that cowardly bandit Pancho Villa on the run."\
93	'''Indy:''' It says General Pancho Villa ... is a great man.
94	* TemptingFate: General Pershing says of Pancho Villa that he will "whip his ass" for raiding into US territory. In fact, the 1916-17 US incursion into Mexico would end in failure.
95	* TimeSkip: From 1908 (with Corey Carrier as Indy) to 1916 (with Sean Patrick Flanery as Indy).
96	* VillainBall: Demetrios grabs hold of this when he tries to stop Indy stealing the jackal headpiece. Dousing an intruder with petrol and then ''setting light to your own house'' in an attempt to kill him his a dumb move even if said house is not being used to store several boxes of dynamite.
97	* WeHardlyKnewYe: José befriends Indy shortly after his capture (having previously tried to shoot Indy and the other prisoners, only to be ordered not to by Villa!) but dies of the wounds he sustains in the attack on Ciudad Guerro; Indy and Remy comfort him in his final moments. He is never referred to by name, and was actually listed as "Francois" in the credits, although later media names him as José.
98	* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: We don't know what happened to Indy's cousin Frank after Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus [[note]] in the computer game ''The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Revolution'', Frank is killed if the player decides ''not'' to help retrieve the robbed woman's clothes [[/note]].
99	* WhatTheHellHero: When Lawrence ''really'' gets into telling Indy stories of ghosts and cursed tombs, Helen Seymour invokes this trope in a non-verbal way in order to try and get him to lay off. He doesn't pick up on it, and only realises he went too far after Rashid is murdered and Indy seems to seriously believe that the curse had something to do with it.

Context Recap / YoungIndianaJonesAndTheCurseOfTheJackal