I was in college overseas when The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles aired on CBS, so until only a few short months ago I was completely unaware that this program even existed. I stumbled onto it in rebroadcast on the History International cable channel. Admittedly, I didn't really dig the first few where Indy is only 10 because the historical hurdles they had to plot became increasingly unbelievable, and was ready to write the show off.

But, and again, I'd never heard of this show before, the tone changed when Indy was suddenly 16 years old (played by Sean Patrick Flannery) and the Great War became the backdrop.

That series of shows, sold as the set Volume 2: The War Years was a fantastic and fascinating collection of two-hours films following Indiana Jones from the trenches of the Somme, to the hangar of the Lafayette Escadrille, to Verdun, to Arabia, Congo, and all points in between.

Volume 3 completes Indy's war saga first in Northern Italy where he pals around with Earnest Hemmingway and to North Africa to accompany Edith Wharton, to the Paris Peace Accords, Chicago during prohibition, New York to the Algonquin Round Table, and finally to a nascent Hollywood and the birth of the movies.

To call this is a show is sort of a misnomer, what you actually have in these sets are five two-hour films and each film has multiple plots that intertwine from one hour to the next. For those of you who might have watched this during its initial run in the early 1990's, the films as I mention them are in actuality two episodes seamlessly grafted together. Lucas shot some new content to blend the episodes for the much older VHS release. Finally, the broadcast bookends, of a much older Indiana Jones, setting up each story has been removed.

I've never seen the bookends, so I have no idea what the hell wikipedia is talking about…

Anyway, if like I was, you are scratching your head and asking "Young Indiana Whatnow?" Lucasfilm and Amblin Entertainment created this show for the early teen demographic as an "edutainment" title. Edutainment, you know, educational and entertaining. 99% of the time this fails so miserably as to almost be tragic. But Ambin/Lucasfilm have managed to short circuit the usual problems with "edutainment" by using an established ass-kicking fearless, reckless, nutcase archeologist of whom we are all very familiar. He's different here though, he hasn't been all the way through the crucible that makes Sean Patrick Flannery's Indiana Jones, an idealist, into the Harrison Ford Indiana Jones, a lunatic.

This young Indiana Jones is thrust into real events, and met real people under real circumstances so that the audience could get a little fictional perspective to all the names and dates and stuff they'll be starting to learn about in school. And in the hands of anyone else this would have failed miserably, but Spielberg and Lucas somehow managed to pull it off here.

Now, if you are a history nerd like I am then the show offers a whole new dimension. I already know stuff about many of the people Indy is thrown together with, like Edith Wharton (I read most of her books), or Hemmingway (I real ALL his), or President Wilson, or T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), or David Lloyd George, or Ho Chi Mihn, etc, so seeing events I'd read about such as the Paris Peace Accords played out is like being in a living history class. And they don't skimp on the historical stuff either, there are no noticeable anachronisms, i.e. someone hired some historians to help with the scripts. Even better, real documents and speeches from these events are acted out as originally written which really gives these pieces power. To hear the French declaration of peace at the Paris Peace accords really shows just how viscous "peace" would be for the Germans. You can almost see Clemenceau physically planting the seeds of the next war.

Each film has a couple of standard scenes that help give the films a sense of non-historical continuity. Indy will always be involved with a girl, usually without much success beyond chaste kisses, before the relationship falls apart.

Action sequences are virtually non-existent in this set of films too, so don't look for Indiana Jones to be thumping Nazi's out of a speeding Volkswagen while dodging snipers and strafing airplanes. No, you'll get most of your action from the conversations that Indy has with historical figures to flesh out the events to which he's privy. And what a cast of historical figures he meets. Indy bumps into Earnest Hemmingway, Edith Wharton, T.E. Lawrence, President Woodrow Wilson (he hands him a pencil), to Gertude Bell, John Ford, Erich von Stroheim, Al Capone, Eliot Ness, Irving Thalberg, Louis Armstrong, Ghengis Khan, Moses, Oog of The Rock Tribe, Kermit the Frog, and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot.

Okay, I made the last couple of them up but only because I didn't want to schlep out the DVDs and look at the documentary listings.

Action purists and die hard fans of the Indiana Jones movies (with Harrison Ford) will be disappointed that so much of the slam-bangness is gone. But these quieter stories help to flesh out the Indiana Jones character and introduce you to the events and relationships that made him able to stare down a nest of cobras, have his heart ripped out and then put back, or survive the test of the Holy Grail.

Accompanying the movies are 15 hours of documentaries about the personalities and events depicted in the films. Admittedly, these are in no way exhaustive, but about as good as you'd get in a decent middle school history book, and in some cases maybe a little better.

There are some minor quibbles about the films, the music can get overpowering, the scripts can get melodramatic, the acting can be stiff, everytime Indy punches someone we are treated to the trademarked KATHWAP sound effect from the films, and yet there is no trademark Indiana Jones theme to be found in any of the films that I've seen. All that said, the pros definitely outweigh the cons with these series.

Sean Patrick Flannery is good as Indy and really seems to show the stirrings of what we'd come to expect in the later adventures featuring Harrison Ford. He's not the greatest actor, but he isn't meant to chew up the scenery either. So I guess it balances out. I dunno.

I liked him as Indiana Jones. Sue me. One thing did kinda bug me though, see, Indy was in all the worst drawn out badass slaughterhouses of WW1, he's seen thousands ground into muddy hamburger, yet, when he returns home after the Paris Peace Accords, he still can't really make conversation with his father. And, he almost immediately falls back into the exact same mid-teen life he had before. This is patently unbelievable.

However, the rest is so good I was able to let this slide.

Each episode was originally budgeted at a million bucks or so, and you can see every dollar of it on the screen. Shot on location all over the world, with real world stuff from the time period (clothes, cars, planes, boats), and some in soundstages, it looks great; a testament to the cinematography and direction.

Multiple directors worked on the show including Nick Roeg and other Hollywood veterans.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles gives me a whole new appreciation for the Harrison Ford films, and stokes my history nerd gland better than an all WW1 day on The History Channel.

The films and documentaries are presented in TV aspect ratio. I have one minor quibble about the films, but why aren't there any chapter stops? It's kind of hard for me to sit still and watch a two hour film because I have two kids, so being able to quickly get back to where I might have left off is much easier if I don't have to fast forward through 90 minutes of stuff I've already seen.

Still, minor nits aside, this is would make a great gift for virtually any middle school kid or middle aged history nerd.