As the first of the Flanery-led Young Indy telefilms -- inadvisably patched together from two episodes of the early 90s series -- this feature is just mind-numbing in its choppiness.
A bit of history is in order: the second half of this telefilm, taking place in Mexico, originally aired as the second half of Young Indy's two-hour premiere, featuring Corey Carrier in the first half and using an Egyptian artifact as a loose central piece to tie the episode together. Confused? You should be. In the late 90s George Lucas decided to take the one-hour, standalone episodes of the original series and edit them into a series of 2-hour films, creating new footage in the meantime to bridge the gaps between episodes that clearly didn't belong together. This volume is the ultimate example of this.
While the second half deals with Indy joining up with revolutionaries in Mexico, the first half finds him thwarting spies in Indy's hometown of Princeton, New Jersey with assistance from -- wait for it, wait for it... -- Nancy Stratemeyer, the inspiration of Nancy Drew. Intriguing as it is to see Teen Indy's life before World War I, the entire Princeton episode is mostly dreadful, forcing awful cameos by historic figures into Indy's life in ways that just don't work. While the cameos in the series overall could be described as misguided at best, at least later volumes integrated them in a way that it didn't feel so, well, awkward.
Still, the lowest point of this compilation video by far is the additional footage of Flanery that was filmed years later to bridge the gap between the two episodes. Flanery magically ages nearly a decade in this footage and just looks old, tired, and uncomfortable in a scene in which the then-34-year-old actor is supposed to be playing a 16-year-old schoolboy. It's simply embarrassing.
Lucas' reimagining aside, the second half is by far the superior one, if for no other reason than it introduces Ronny Coutteure as Remy, Indy's Belgian friend who appears in a good portion of the series, and sets Indy on a course for enlisting in World War I, which is arguably the backdrop for the best of the Young Indy episodes. It's actually a very decent introduction to Indy's World War I adventures and is easy to see why Lucas & Company envisioned it as such in the first place, rather than the tedious Princeton affair that now precedes it.
A bit of history is in order: the second half of this telefilm, taking place in Mexico, originally aired as the second half of Young Indy's two-hour premiere, featuring Corey Carrier in the first half and using an Egyptian artifact as a loose central piece to tie the episode together. Confused? You should be. In the late 90s George Lucas decided to take the one-hour, standalone episodes of the original series and edit them into a series of 2-hour films, creating new footage in the meantime to bridge the gaps between episodes that clearly didn't belong together. This volume is the ultimate example of this.
While the second half deals with Indy joining up with revolutionaries in Mexico, the first half finds him thwarting spies in Indy's hometown of Princeton, New Jersey with assistance from -- wait for it, wait for it... -- Nancy Stratemeyer, the inspiration of Nancy Drew. Intriguing as it is to see Teen Indy's life before World War I, the entire Princeton episode is mostly dreadful, forcing awful cameos by historic figures into Indy's life in ways that just don't work. While the cameos in the series overall could be described as misguided at best, at least later volumes integrated them in a way that it didn't feel so, well, awkward.
Still, the lowest point of this compilation video by far is the additional footage of Flanery that was filmed years later to bridge the gap between the two episodes. Flanery magically ages nearly a decade in this footage and just looks old, tired, and uncomfortable in a scene in which the then-34-year-old actor is supposed to be playing a 16-year-old schoolboy. It's simply embarrassing.
Lucas' reimagining aside, the second half is by far the superior one, if for no other reason than it introduces Ronny Coutteure as Remy, Indy's Belgian friend who appears in a good portion of the series, and sets Indy on a course for enlisting in World War I, which is arguably the backdrop for the best of the Young Indy episodes. It's actually a very decent introduction to Indy's World War I adventures and is easy to see why Lucas & Company envisioned it as such in the first place, rather than the tedious Princeton affair that now precedes it.