DVD Reviews
DVD Review: The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three - The Years of Change
By Jeff Swindoll
May 2, 2008, 14:23 GMT

The young Indiana Jones’ adventures continues and concludes with this final set that covers the years 1917 to 1920.  Indy has adventures and bumps into some famous faces along the way.  We even get to see Harrison Ford put on the fedora in this final round.  

By this time Indiana Jones was played exclusively by Sean Patrick Flannery and gone were the flashbacks to the much younger Indy.  This final volume concludes the adventures, but we do get to see the elder Jones (Harrison Ford) and that episode is the only one that is more akin to what aired on television when the series first aired. 

George Lucas has taken the hour-long episodes and stitched them together to form these feature-length adventures.  The hour-long episodes had a flashback structure with the elderly Indy (George Hall) reminiscing about some past adventure. 

With the making of a feature length adventure, Lucas jettisoned the old Indy segments.  The only time that Harrison Ford appeared on the show was with the episode “Mystery of the Blues” in which the fifty-year-old Indy is on the run from some villains and ends up in a cabin.  He spies a saxophone and thus begins the flashback to the jazz age and to Flannery’s Jones.  

Disc One: Tales of Innocence 

In Italy, Indy's espionage work takes him behind enemy lines where he embarks on an important propaganda assignment that he hopes will bring a swift end to the war. Along the way, he engages in a comic rivalry with Ernest Hemingway (Jay Underwood) over the affections of a beautiful Italian girl.

After being wounded in action, Indy is transferred to North Africa where he joins the French Foreign Legion. While trying to uncover the identity of a traitor in his own ranks, Indy battles hostile Berber tribesmen and engages in an innocent flirtation with author Edith Wharton (Clare Higgins). 

Special features include: Unhealed Wounds: The Life of Ernest Hemingway (34 minutes), The French Foreign Legion: The World's Most Legendary Fighting Force (28 minutes), The Secret Life of Edith Wharton (30 minutes), and Lowell Thomas: American Storyteller (29 minutes).  
 
Disc Two: Masks of Evil 

A top-secret mission for French Intelligence brings Indy to Istanbul during the First World War. Exploring the city's dark and dangerous streets, he is thrust into a web of betrayal and murder when he discovers a vile plot to assassinate French espionage agents.

Evil of a more enduring kind awaits him in Transylvania where he engages in mortal combat with bloodthirsty Vlad the Impaler and his horrific army of the living dead. With his very life at stake, Indy must garner all his strength and wits in order to defeat the fiend and save mankind. 

Special features include: For the People, Despite the People: The Ataturk Revolution (30 minutes), The Greedy Heart of Halide Edib (28 minutes), The Ottoman Empire: A World of Difference (33 minutes), and Dracula: Fact and Fiction (24 minutes).  
 
Disc Three: Treasure of the Peacock's Eye
 
The war in Europe ends but a new adventure begins for Indy when a mysterious man's dying words--"The eye of the peacock!"--sends him on a thrilling treasure hunt for one of Alexander the Great's most treasured possessions.

Pursued by a dangerous one-eyed man, Indy follows the trail of the diamond from London to Alexandria to the South Seas where he has a run-in with a murderous band of Chinese pirates. The shipboard battle that ensues is a spectacular display of swords, guns and flying fists.

Marooned by the pirates on a remote desert island, Indy is captured by savage headhunters, but before they can turn him into a shrunken head and cannibal stew, he is rescued by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (Tom Courtenay) and makes a life-altering decision. 

Special features include: Bronislaw Malinowski: God Professor (29 minutes), Anthropology: Looking at the Human Condition (23 minutes), and New Guinea: Paradise in Peril (25 minutes).  
 
Disc Four: The Winds of Change 

Working as a translator in Paris brings Indy in contact with T.E. Lawrence (Douglas Henshall), Prince Faisal of Arabia (Anthony Zaki) and Ho Chi Minh (Alec Mapa). The brutality of realpolitik devastates the idealistic young Indy, and he returns home only to discover the ugly face of bigotry as encountered by his boyhood friend, Paul Robeson (Kevin Jackson). 

Special features are located on disc five and include: The Best Intentions: The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles (33 minutes), Woodrow Wilson: American Idealist (28 minutes), Gertrude Bell: Iraq's Uncrowned Queen (33 minutes), Ho Chi Minh: The Price of Freedom (31 minutes), Paul Robeson: Scandalize My Name (32 minutes), and Robert Goddard: Mr. Rocket Science (31 minutes).  
 
Disc Six: Mystery of the Blues 

Going to college and working in a seedy speakeasy brings Indy into contact with jazz great Sidney Bechet (Jeffrey Wright), who teaches him how to play the blues.

Unfortunately, he also crosses paths with up-and-coming thug Al Capone (Nicholas Turturro) and it's only with the assistance of his dorm roommate, future Untouchable Eliot Ness (Frederick Weller), that Indy is able to solve a vicious murder and prevent himself from ending up in a pair of cement overshoes.

Special features are located on disc seven and include: Jazz: Rhythms of Freedom (31 minutes), Al "Scarface" Capone: The Original Gangster (27 minutes), Prohibition: America on the Rocks (32 minutes), On the Trail of Eliot Ness (29 minutes), Louis Armstrong: Ambassador of Jazz (31 minutes), Ben Hecht: The Shakespeare of Hollywood (31 minutes), and Hellfighters: Harlem's Heroes of World War I (29 minutes). 
 
Disc Eight: Scandal of 1920 

In New York City, Indy covers a lot of ground as he stage-manages a Broadway musical, parties with 5th Avenue high society, reads poetry with Greenwich Village bohemians and trades barbs with the literary wits of the Algonquin Roundtable. Composer George Gershwin (Tom Beckett) accompanies Indy in his adventures as he attempts to ensure that the show goes on despite temperamental stars, malfunctioning props and the fact that he's dating three very different women at the same time.

Special features include: Tin Pan Alley: Soundtrack of America (31 minutes), Wonderful Nonsense: The Algonquin Round Table (26 minutes), Broadway: America Center Stage (30 minutes).  
 
Disc Nine: Hollywood Follies 

While working for a Hollywood movie studio, Indy finds that he is no match for wily, megalomaniacal director Erich von Stroheim (Dana Gladstone) when the two lock horns over the ever-increasing budget of Stroheim's film Foolish Wives. Though battered by the film industry, Indy decides to give it one more chance and goes on a location shoot with legendary director John Ford (Stephen Caffrey).

Ford and his cronies, including aging gunman Wyatt Earp (Leo Gordon), help him to see the magic of movies and moviemaking, and when an actor is accidentally killed, Indy pitches in to save the film.

Special features include: Erich von Stroheim: The Profligate Genius (32 minutes), The Rise of the Moguls: The Men Who Built Hollywood (25 minutes), Irving Thalberg: Hollywood's Boy Wonder (32 minutes), and The World of John Ford (33 minutes).  

Disc ten is an interactive disc that features a 64-minute historical lecture entitled New Gods for Old by Professor H.W. Brands (of the University of Texas at Austin).  DVD-ROM features include an interactive timeline and a “hunting for treasure” game.  The episodes are presented in fullscreen as they aired on television. 

Volume three only continues the fine standard set by volumes one and two.  The special features are excellent and offer some nice historical capsules.  It’s too bad that some attention wasn’t paid to George Hall, but I suspect that Lucas again wanted to change direction of the series and didn’t see the old Indy fitting in with his plans for the character. 

The show does let the kiddies get a glance at some intriguing historical figures, though it does seem somewhat contrived that Indy runs into so many of them.  It’s still a fun series and the historical documentaries on the discs will still please the detractors of the show since they offer some fact to the show’s fiction.  

Just in time for the return of Indy to the big screen, we conclude the adventures of his youth in this final volume.  The show is a fun time capsule and this set has a grand amount of historical documentaries that educate as well as entertain.  

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three - The Years of Change is now available at Amazon. As of yet, there is not a release date for the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.