Recap / Young Indiana Jones And The Curse Of The Jackal

Now, why don't we have a real adventure, hm?

Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal is the first-ever episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. 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.

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.

In 1908, Indy — travelling around the world with his parents — meets Helen Seymour, who is hired to be his tutor. In Egypt, Indy and Helen visit the Pyramids, where they meet T. E. Lawrence, 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.

In 1916, a teenage Indy travels to the 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.

In the epilogue, Old Indy reveals to the kids that the jackal headpiece is now an exhibit in the museum.

This episode contains examples of:

• Adventure Archaeologist: T.E. Lawrence, one of the classic Real Life examples of this trope, is shown here as a hero and mentor-figure to Indiana Jones, the greatest fictional example.
  Indy: I'd like to be an archaeologist.
  Lawrence: Maybe you'll add a new page to history. Or discover a treasure beyond price.
  Indy: And get rich!
  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.
• Ancient Egypt: 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 said to be cursed, and from which an artefact is stolen).
• And Starring: George Hall, who played Old Indy, is credited thusly.
• Artistic Licence – Geography: 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).
  • 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.
• Artistic Licence – History: 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.
• Badass Bandolier: Pancho Villa sports two in an "X" across the body (his trademark), as do most of his gang.
• Bandito: Pancho Villa and his gang.
• Bar Brawl: Patton initiates one with guns, and kills three of Villa's men.
  Indy: That guy's nuts!
• Blatant Lies: Anything Indy and Frank say about their plans to go camping, although they do end up spending a night under the stars.
• Bookends: The Old Indy narrative, which bookends both the 1908 and 1916 sequences.
  • 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.
• Call-Forward: A few.
  • At the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it was revealed that Indy is nicknamed after the family dog. Here, we get to see a young Indy playing with that dog.
  • 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 Raiders of the Lost Ark sing when they are digging for the Well of the Souls.
  • Henry Snr. comes across as a Reasonable Authority Figure 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.
  • 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.
  • Another one relating to Last Crusade; this is not the last time that Indy recovers a MacGuffin after a Time Skip, and ensures that it ends up where it belongs — in a museum.
• Chekhov's Gun: 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.
• Chekhov's Skill: 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.
• Continuity Snarl: 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?
  • 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).
• Contrived Coincidence: Conveniently for Indy, Demetrios has a bullwhip in his house.
• Cool Old Guy: 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 ), he is not averse to a little fun, like sliding down the bannister.
• Cool Teacher: Helen Seymour becomes this to Indy.
• Cunning Linguist: 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.
  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.
• Curse of the Pharaoh: 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.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: 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.
• The Determinator: 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.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Even as a kid, Henry Jones Jnr. prefers that people call him "Indy".
• Early-Installment Weirdness: 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.
  • 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 Translation Convention for the most part.
  • 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.
• Everyone Went to School Together: 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.
• Eyepatch of Power: 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 Eyepatch After Time Skip; since Indy still has both eyes in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is set in 1969, this injury must have occurred after that date.
• Final Boss: Demetrios. The episode climaxes with Indy breaking into his house, finding the jackal — and fighting him for it.
• Foreshadowing: Plenty.
  • 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 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ^note  in which it is claimed that the journal fell into the hands of the KGB in 1957, thus creating a minor Continuity Snarl, for if that were so, how could Old Indy be looking through it in the early 1990s? .
  • 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.
  • In 1916, Indy reads about the fighting on the Western Front in a newspaper. It won't be long before he gets to experience that for himself.
  • One of the girlie pictures Indy and Frank look at is of Mata Hari.
  • In a Real Life 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.
  • Lawrence admits to being prone to exaggeration, something his Real Life detractors would often accuse him of doing.
• Framing Device: 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.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: Indy is somewhat prone to this sort of language in the 1908 segment. Justified, since he's nine years old.
• Historical Domain Character: The show starts as it means to go on. The young Indiana Jones encounters T. E. Lawrence, Howard Carter, Pancho Villa and a young George S. Patton. He does not actually meet General Pershing, although he is also portrayed here.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: 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.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: 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.
• I Choose to Stay: When Villa angrily orders him to go home, Indy — inspired by the revolutionaries — volunteers to join Villa's band. This will not last.
• Joisey: Downplayed. Old Indy reveals that he is from New Jersey — he was born in Princeton, where his father was a professor.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Indiana Jones has a hero, and his name is T.E. Lawrence.
  Old Indy: "Don't forget me", he cried, as if I ever would. The man was a hero even then.
• MacGuffin: The jackal headpiece — which is eventually revealed to be on display in the museum that Indy and the kids are visiting.
• Magnificent Moustaches of Mexico: Naturally, Pancho Villa and his bandits all have these. Even Remy.
• Mood Whiplash: The episode as a whole is very much a two-parter — a murder mystery in Egypt, followed by a Western in Mexico.
  • In the former, the mood turns sour when Rashid is killed.
  • 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.
  • 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.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: 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.
• Noodle Incident: It is not stated how Demetrios lost his right hand at some point between 1908 and 1916.
  • 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 re-editing of this series, which saw the Old Indy scenes get dropped.
• Red Herring: 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.
• Riddle for the Ages: What does Frank tell Indy's dad?
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: 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.
• Shout-Out: When Lawrence reveals to Indy that he has a pistol, he quotes from the poem "Vitae Lampada" by Henry Newbolt.
  Lawrence: "Play up, and play the game", eh?
  • Also, a murder mystery at an archaeological dig in Egypt may put some viewers in mind of Agatha Christie, whose second husband was a noted archaeologist and who set a few of her novels in the Middle East (Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, etc).
• Sombrero Equals Mexican: There are no prizes for guessing the revolutionaries' choice of headgear, in contrast to Indy's trademark brown fedora.
• Stuff Blowing Up: 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.
• Tactful Translation: While with Pancho Villa and the revolutionaries, Indy is tasked with translating the Title Cards 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.
  Title Card: To the Halls of Montezuma! US troops sweep into Mexico.
  Indy: US troops ... pay a courtesy visit to Canada.
  Card: General Pershing: "We shall soon have that cowardly bandit Pancho Villa on the run."
  Indy: It says General Pancho Villa ... is a great man.
• Tempting Fate: 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.
• Time Skip: From 1908 (with Corey Carrier as Indy) to 1916 (with Sean Patrick Flanery as Indy).
• Villain Ball: 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.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: 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.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: 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 .
• What the Hell, Hero?: 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.
• Young Future Famous People: Of the Real Life people Indy encounters, T.E. Lawrence (shown as a student visiting Egypt six years prior to World War One) and George Patton (depicted as a junior officer serving on Pershing's campaign against Pancho Villa) count as this.