The best thing on TV in its day
In fact one of the best things on television ever. The production values! The world locations! The casts! The action sequences! The star directors involved! Did George Lucas personally spend half his vast fortune providing the budgets?
Indiana Jones, as a young man or child, has a series of adventures, highly entertaining ones as he gets older and takes part in various revolutions and the First World War, and on the way encounters many of the great or notorious figures (and important ideas) of the early twentieth century. He has romances with Mata Hari and a suffragette played by Elizabeth Hurley. His mum is chatted up by Puccini, his dad teaches him about democracy in Athens. He befriends Tolstoy, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Kafka, Erich von Stroheim and Lawrence of Arabia to name but some. Even as a reasonably educated grown-up I learned a lot, in particular about lesser-known fronts of WWI; but all in the form of thrilling Boy's Own adventures - some of the war episodes especially are as good as any film.
Amid uniformly excellent casts Sean Patrick Flanery as the university-aged Indiana and Lloyd Owen as his father must be singled out. But almost every role is filled by someone great, usually a stalwart British character actor. (To give some idea of the expense and trouble that must have been gone to, Harry Enfield, then already a huge star here, appears in one episode as a chauffeur who if I remember rightly doesn't even talk.)
Really this is the best thing George Lucas has ever done. (I hope at some point he does something similar for other periods of history - I would love him to get the rights to the Flashman books, for example.) Tremendously entertaining, and a good thing to get hold of for a youngster you'd like to learn a bit of history.
Indiana Jones, as a young man or child, has a series of adventures, highly entertaining ones as he gets older and takes part in various revolutions and the First World War, and on the way encounters many of the great or notorious figures (and important ideas) of the early twentieth century. He has romances with Mata Hari and a suffragette played by Elizabeth Hurley. His mum is chatted up by Puccini, his dad teaches him about democracy in Athens. He befriends Tolstoy, Schweitzer, Hemingway, Kafka, Erich von Stroheim and Lawrence of Arabia to name but some. Even as a reasonably educated grown-up I learned a lot, in particular about lesser-known fronts of WWI; but all in the form of thrilling Boy's Own adventures - some of the war episodes especially are as good as any film.
Amid uniformly excellent casts Sean Patrick Flanery as the university-aged Indiana and Lloyd Owen as his father must be singled out. But almost every role is filled by someone great, usually a stalwart British character actor. (To give some idea of the expense and trouble that must have been gone to, Harry Enfield, then already a huge star here, appears in one episode as a chauffeur who if I remember rightly doesn't even talk.)
Really this is the best thing George Lucas has ever done. (I hope at some point he does something similar for other periods of history - I would love him to get the rights to the Flashman books, for example.) Tremendously entertaining, and a good thing to get hold of for a youngster you'd like to learn a bit of history.
- Adrian Sweeney
- 16 mag 2009