Save your money for something good and enjoyable

not horrible nor great

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

When I first Saw The Young Indiana Jones chronicles . I was impressed with the fact it had old Indy tell us the stories. something that has been left off the DVDs sadly. But even without old Indy. We see Henry Jones Jr. shaping into the hero he becomes. George Lucas once said he had Indy's life plotted out. And that Indiana Jones had a extraordinary life. From the Very First episode we see Young Indiana Jones strike up a life long friendship with Lawrence of Arabia. Well before fame found him. The shows introduce historical figures and Indy interacts with them. And it's a lot of fun. Lucas had Indy's life plotted out right up to the Raiders of the Lost ark. And according to him he's got it well plotted after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Lucas carefully arranged the show to fall into three segments. 1) The Early years. Which deals with Ten year old Indy's adventures. And shows him getting all sorts of advice and we see Young Indy develop traits well know he will use. The adventures are more of a philosophical nature mostly.2) The War Years. This deals with Indy's service during WWI and the trench scenes are gut wrenching. You want realistic here it is. Volume two is action packed but the weak side is it deals with too much of Indy's romances.3) The Years of Change. The War is over and Indy returns home only to find nothing has changed. and so he goes to school to become the archaeologist he is today. But he takes several detours along the way. Including a stint in Hollywood. The best thing here is Indiana Jones and the mystery of the blues. Harrison Ford reprises the role of Indy in the beginning and end. But the story is filled with everything you would expect from 1920's Chicago. Including A young Eliot Ness. You like the movies watch the series. You like Indiana Jones watch the series and see how a hero is shaped into becoming the Hero he is. This is maybe one of TV's finest shows ever put out there.

In fact one of the best things on television ever. The production values! The world locations! The casts! The action sequences! The star directors involved! Did George Lucas personally spend half his vast fortune providing the budgets? Indiana Jones, as a young man or child, has a series of adventures, highly entertaining ones as he gets older and takes part in various revolutions and the First World War, and on the way encounters many of the great or notorious figures (and important ideas) of the early twentieth century. He has romances with Mata Hari and a suffragette played by Elizabeth Hurley. His mum is chatted up by Puccini, his dad teaches him about democracy in Athens. He befriends Tolstoy, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Kafka, Erich von Stroheim and Lawrence of Arabia to name but some. Even as a reasonably educated grown-up I learned a lot, in particular about lesser-known fronts of WWI; but all in the form of thrilling Boy's Own adventures - some of the war episodes especially are as good as any film.Amid uniformly excellent casts Sean Patrick Flanery as the university-aged Indiana and Lloyd Owen as his father must be singled out. But almost every role is filled by someone great, usually a stalwart British character actor. (To give some idea of the expense and trouble that must have been gone to, Harry Enfield, then already a huge star here, appears in one episode as a chauffeur who if I remember rightly doesn't even talk.) Really this is the best thing George Lucas has ever done. (I hope at some point he does something similar for other periods of history - I would love him to get the rights to the Flashman books, for example.) Tremendously entertaining, and a good thing to get hold of for a youngster you'd like to learn a bit of history.

In terms of production values and what you see on screen, this show is excellent. Lucas and Spielberg have clearly thrown money at this project and it's all up there. Excellent cinematography, great costume and set design, some very good action scenes (the WW1 trench scenes are very well done), great use of locations but...............The show stinks. Lucas and Spielberg have shown, yet again, throwing money at a project and indulging the art department do not make for good entertainment. Young Indiana Jones, as played by both actors is deathly dull and very irritating. I cannot believe this person will grow into Harrison Ford's portrayal of the character. River Phoenix showed some wit and gave Indy a resourcefullness, cunning and never say die attitude. In this show, Indy just blunders from situation to situation, never learning and never growing as a character. He just stumbles around as a goofy American kid bumping into famous historical figures.And that's another irritating point about the show. We get treated to yet another rent-a-British-character-actor in period costume saying "hello, I'm Franz Kafka", "I'm T.E. Lawrence", "I'm Charles DeGaulle" and we the audience are supposed to wink at the screen and go "oh isn't that clever how they've woven young Hitler into the story". No, it isn't clever, just cringeworthy; it treats real life and people with a sneer as though they are merely worth a walk on part. The scripts are generally very poor, the dialogue risable and the acting bad; you expect more from a quality European supporting cast but somewhere, and I suspect it's from the directors and producers, it turns into bad pantomime. The history, such as it is, looks good on the surface but reeks of being gleaned from a junior school starter book on the Edwardian and WW1 era. Once again, Hollywood's master cheese makers, Lucas and Spielberg show they are incapable of really getting to grips with real cinematic themes. Set it in the past, show how silly the Europeans were back then, avoid any profundity and just let the dollars pour in.

I caught a few episodes of this on video and, while I thought the production values impressive and the action sequences fairly decent for TV, the project falters just where it needs to be the strongest: namely, in its depiction of Indiana Jones. I can't tell if it's due to the acting limitations of Sean Patrick Flanery or to George Lucas's conception of the character, but as presented here Indy is something of a bore. He is portrayed as too much the naïve and wide-eyed innocent, when what's needed is some of the humor and edginess that River Phoenix brought to the part in the beginning of "Last Crusade." Without a compelling lead - and one who at least has a nodding resemblance to the character we know so well from the movies - the storylines and historical backdrops just become incidental and sink from our memories without a trace.