Young Indiana Jones Video Series Episode Guide
All the episodes from the original TV series and made for cable movies were edited into 22 two hour movies. Some addition footage was filmed to expand several episodes. This is a list of the new movie titles, the original episodes they were derived from, and a synopsis.
Episode guide revision date: December 10, 2000
This guide is based on info in the book George Lucas - The Creative Impulse and Brian Crewe's Young Indy video report.
1. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: My First Adventure
(Curse of the Jackal, Tangiers 1908 [new])
The adventures begin when nine-year-old Young Indy is along on his father's lecture tour around the world. At an archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, Young Indy finds an ancient mummy and a fresh corpse, and with help from Lawrence of Arabia he solves a mystery. For his pains, he is kidnapped by slave traders and hauled across the Sahara to the slave market at Marrakech, where he must use all his wits to escape.
2. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Passion for Life
(British East Africa 1909, Paris 1908)
Young Indy first goes on safari to the Masai Mara game preserve in Kenya with Teddy Roosevelt and becomes lost in the vast and dangerous wilderness. Later, in Paris, he runs into a young Norman Rockwell. Together they explore the fine-art scene and the rather wilder cafe scenes of Montmartre where they watch and listen as Degas and Picasso argue violently about what painting is.
3. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: The Perils of Cupid
Love - well, first infatuation - smites Young Indy in colorful Old Vienna where he falls for the daughter of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Needing emotional guidance in his own crisis, Young Indy sounds out Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on what love is all about. In Florence, love problems show up in another way as Young Indy's mother is smitten with Giacomo Puccini, composer of such Romantic operas as La Boheme and Tosca, and Young Indy himself must scheme to be an "unmatchmaker" and get Mama safely home to Daddy.
4. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Travels With Father
Young Indy, now a headstrong eleven, runs away from his parents in Russia. He meets the famous novelist Leo Tolstoy and they travel together, talking philosophy and warding off Gypsies and fierce Cossacks. Shaken and eager for the security of family, Young Indy rejoins his parents and they head for Athens. He and his father visit a monastery deliberately situated on a forbidding mountaintop. They make the white-knuckle trip up the thousand-foot face of the mountain in a tiny cage, an experience that leads to a heavy father-son bonding.
5. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Journey of Radiance
The elder Jones's lecture tour takes Young Indy and his parents to India, where Young Indy learns about having faith in oneself from the Theosophist philosopher Jiddu Krishnamuqi. Later on in China, where Young Indy falls desperately ill with typhoid fever, his mother learns more lessons in faith and trust from villagers whose ancient medicines must save the boy's life - if they can.
6. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Spring Break Adventure
(Princeton 1916, Curse of the Jackal)
Young Indy has a girlfriend - Nancy Stratemeyer, whose father, Edward L. Stratemeyer, was the creator of Nancy Drew. The couple visit Thomas Edison and are quickly entangled with German spies who are hot after one of Edison's inventions that has great strategic value. Later, visiting an aunt in New Mexico during spring break, Young Indy is kidnapped by Pancho Villa and swept up in the Mexican Revolution. There's a train robbery in true Wild West style and a barroom encounter with a dashing young cavalry officer named George Patton.
7. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Love's Sweet Song
Ireland's bloody Easter Rebellion, the suffragette movement in England, a Zeppelin raid (one of history's first air bombardments), and a meeting with a rising young British cabinet officer named Winston Churchill become vivid episodes in Young Indy's life. So do Young Indy's brief but impassioned romances, first with a colleen whose brother proves to be one of the clandestine Irish rebels and then with an Englishwoman who decides that the vote comes before love.
8. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Trenches Of Hell
Young Indy is a soldier in the Belgian Army at the Battle of the Somme, one of the war's bloodiest, with more than a million casualties on both sides. Young Indy endures artillery barrages and nerve gas attacks, then is captured by the Germans. In the prison camp he plans his escape with a young French officer named Charles de Gaulle.
9. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Demons of Deception
This film looks hard at the horrors of war and at the callous stupidity of army officers who sent thousands of men to their deaths at Verdun and Passchendaele for virtually no territorial gain. Young Indy must ponder the moral dilemmas of leadership, even as he falls deeply in love with the German spy Mata Hari, only to suffer the pains of disillusionment and deceit.
10. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Phantom Train Of Doom
In November 1916 Young Indy is sent to Africa, where he is to meet a small, daring band of sixty-five-plus-year-old soldiers who call themselves "The Old and the Bold." Crossing enemy-held land by wagon train and by hot-air balloon, their mission is to destroy a massive German artillery piece. Tracing the gun to the mountain cave where it is concealed, they risk their lives, as in The Guns of Navarone, to destroy it.
11. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Oganga, The Giver And Taker Of Life
(German East Africa 1916, Congo 1917)
Young Indy is on a vital mission through Africa for the Allies. In a village ravaged by an epidemic, Young Indy rescues a child from certain death. But as he fights his way cross-country, Young Indy's mission is endangered by the child, and he faces a moral quandary and a test of conscience. He then encounters the legendary doctor-musician-philosopher Albert Schweitzer and, working with Schweitzer at his hospital, he rediscovers his own humanity and reaffirms his personal values.
12. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Attack Of The Hawkmen
World War I was the first time the airplane was used as a military weapon, and in 1917 Young Indy is quickly and predictably airborne in the Allied cause. He learns to fly and, working with the French Secret Service, joins the famous Lafayette Escadrille, in which many Americans served. Scouting behind German lines, he is shot down by Manfred von Richthofen-the Red Baron of both historical and Snoopy fame. On foot in enemy territory Young Indy encounters the German aircraft designer Anthony Fokker and learns about a secret weapon that could lead to German victory, unless...
13. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Adventures In The Secret Service
(Austria 1917, Petrograd 1917)
Young Indy is a spy sent by the Allies on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines to the palace of Habsburg emperor Charles I, ruler of war-weary Austria. Young Indy moves on to an even more perilous assignment in revolutionary Russia, where he infiltrates a Bolshevik organization, endangering himself and his friends, and is forced to make hard choices between duty and friendship.
14. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Espionage Escapades
Posing as a dancer for the Ballets Russes, Young Indy meets his old friend Pablo Picasso, narrowly outwits some inept German spies, and whisks off to Prague, where his assignment is to get a telephone and wait for a call - a bureaucratic impossibility until Franz Kafka volunteers to help.
15. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Daredevils Of The Desert
(Palestine 1917, [new])
Young Indy is sent to assist the Australians as they attack the ancient town of Beersheba. He enlists the help of a belly dancer in a suspenseful mission to defuse the explosives with which the occupying Turks have booby-trapped the city's water supply.
16. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Tales of Innocence
(Northern Italy 1918, Morocco 1917 [new])
Young Indy's life is complicated by his incurable romanticism, as he competes with a young American journalist named Ernest Hemingway for the love of a gorgeous Italian girl. Now a spy for the Allies, Young Indy goes behind enemy lines hoping to bring off a propaganda coup that might shorten the war. Wounded in action, he makes his way to North Africa, where he is assigned to join the French Foreign Legion to root out a traitor.
17. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Masks Of Evil
(Transylvania 1918, Istanbul 1918)
On assignment for French Intelligence in an Istanbul thick with spies and danger, Young Indy fights a Turkish plot to assassinate French agents. Then Young Indy encounters the original vampire, Vlad the Impaler, centuries old but kept young and vigorous by his do-it-yourself transfusions. Vlad and his legions of the undead bent on world domination give Young Indy the toughest, weirdest battle of his life.
18. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Treasure Of The Peacock's Eye
(Treasure Of The Peacock's Eye)
In 1919 Young Indy takes off in search of a legendary diamond said to have belonged to Alexander the Great. The quest begins when a dying man gasps, "The eye of the Peacock!" Young Indy is stalked by a ruthless, one-eyed man as he races from London to Egypt to the South Seas, where he becomes embroiled in a vicious shipboard battle with Chinese pirates. Marooned on a remote island, Young Indy is captured by cannibalistic natives, and only the timely arrival of the famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski gives him a fighting chance to save his skin and his head.
19. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Winds of Change
(Paris 1919, Princeton 1919 [new])
World War I is over, and Young Indy, by now fluent in several languages, is working as a translator at the Paris Peace Conference, giving him - and the viewer - a ringside seat at a history-making and controversial event. The figures in view include Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Faisal of Arabia, and Ho Chi Minh, who was to loom large in American lives a few decades later. Back in Princeton, New Jersey, disillusioned by the hard and cynical realities of international politics, Young Indy discovers home-style bigotry cruelly touching his boyhood friend Paul Robeson.
20. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Mystery Of The Blues
Chicago in 1920 is at its most toddlin' - Prohibition, speakeasies, gangsters, and above all the joys of jazz - makes Young Indy's return to peacetime life and a belated crack at college as lively, and dangerous, as it ever was. He's working at a down-and-dirty speakeasy where the great Sidney Bechet teaches him to play jazz. Young Indy's college roommate Eliot Ness, not yet an Untouchable, helps him solve a nasty murder that gets him out of an ominous beef with Capone.
21. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Scandal of 1920
On a summer break from college Young Indy is stagemanaging a new work by George Gershwin. Young Indy gets to trade quips with the famed and razor-witted Algonquin Round Table when he is not soothing temperamental stars, romancing three different women at once, and worrying about suspicious backstage malfunctionings.
22. The Adventures Of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies
Trying to earn money for his college tuition, Young Indy has a summer job as a junior executive at a studio and fights a losing battle with the imperious Erich von Stroheim over the skyrocketing costs of Foolish Wives (1922). Stifled by the system, Young Indy goes on location with John Ford, and even gets to shine before the cameras.