The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Spring Break Adventure (1999)

These two episodes are set in 1916. The first in Princeton and Oragne, NJ, including the factories of Thomas Edison. The second at Spring Break time, in New Mexico and Mexico during the revolution.Sean Patrick Flanery is really good as young Indiana Jones. The first episode (45 minutes) involves the school prom and his wanting to borrow his girlfriend's dad's Bugatti to impress the other kids. But the car develops a generator problem and Indy finds out that a scientist friend working for Thomas Edison can repair it easily, they just have to get it to the Labs. They do so by train and bicycle. But just as they arrive thugs kidnap the scientist friend and some plans for new batteries that would make the internal combustion engine obsolete. Robyn Lively is his girl Nancy, and the two of them have to do detective work to figure out who is sponsoring all this.The second episode (45 minutes) has Indy going on Spring Break with his family to New Mexico. He and his cousin decide they will try to get to the Mexican border to see a bordello, and tell the parents that they are going camping. But as soon as they get to the small Mexican town they encounter a band of thieves on horses, shooting up the town and blowing out the bank to steal money to finance their revolution. Indy gets involved in the cause and meets Pancho Villa, and Indy ends up helping out in a battle, but then decides that "this is not my revolution" and heads home.Interestingly this is the first time I saw Indy use a bull whip, which later became part of his signature.

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.

I enjoyed this Young Indiana Jones Chronicle. It has one of my favorite commentaries on revolutions. When Indy is taking chickens away from a Mexican man, he tells the man that this is for the good of Villa's army. Indy says that Villa will bring the people out of drudgery, slavery, etc. The Mexican man replies that he once was young and believed such things. He had joined a revolutionary movement when he was younger. The man still had his chickens taken. He said that revolutions come and go. All that changes is the name of the man who steals his chickens. I believe that this is a brilliant commentary on revolutions in general. I will always enjoy watching this Young Indiana Jones Chronicle just for that small speech.

...seems to start out a little slow, but then it gets going toward the end. Spring Break adventure combines Indy's first adventure at home in NJ and then it starts off an entirely new adventure in Mexico with Pancho Villa. Remy is introduced for the first time, and Indy first learns what war is all about. All in all, I think it was a good movie to start out the older young Indy with Flannery.