By Ned Jordan
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three - The Years of Change is a pretty long title for a DVD collection but then again it does come with 10 discs. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones was a cable television series in the 1990s that chronicled the travels of Indiana Jones as a boy and a young man. Volume One collects the episodes that featured Indy as a child traveling the world on archeological expeditions with his father. Volume Two features him as a young man who enlists in the Belgian army during World War I. Volume Three sees the close of the war and Indy's transition to a student of archeology at the University of Chicago.
It's hard to match the excitement of Volume Two, but Volume Three adds further depth with the intrigue of espionage as Indy closes out the war in the intelligence service. There is a bit of a glimpse at the Indiana Jones to come as well as a he partakes in a globetrotting adventure after the war in pursuit of a treasure known as the Peacock's Eye. However, overall things slow down quite a bit for the series in this volume which includes episodes of Indy's participation in the peace talks at Versailles and his time aboard an ocean cruiser as he makes his way back to America. These aren't necessarily bad episodes, but they are a lot slower paced than is typical for the series. Kids may squirm a bit during these types of episodes, but fans of the series will appreciate these looks at Indy in other circumstances and the way these situations helped to form the character that movie audiences fell in love with.
One of the endearing hallmarks of the series is the historical figures he encounters in each episode and that tradition is continued in this volume. Indy meets a diverse group of people including Ernest Hemingway, Ataturk, Ho Chi Minh, Lawrence of Arabia, and Al Capone. While his encounters with some of these people can be rather brief, for the most part he spends enough time with them to give viewers a glimpse into their personalities, beliefs, and causes. The DVD release tales this a step further by including some well-produced documentaries on each historical figure appearing in the episodes. At thirty minutes long they don't necessarily have the time to go into the same level of depth as a History Channel documentary, they are still very well done and educational and could easily be aired on History Channel or Discovery. This makes the collection a great purchase for kids - the entertainment is adventurous and mostly wholesome, and there's some stealthy education hidden within its stories. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones is truly an adventure the whole family can enjoy.
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