The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones—the spin-off television series prequel to the films starring Harrison Ford—debuted in 1992. Critics raved: Shot on location! Learning that’s fun! But audiences were generally underwhelmed, and the series died after two years. Now it’s being resurrected on DVD along with loads of special features offering historical context as well as interactive games and timeline.

I’m a fan of the big-screen Indy but had never seen the TV series. So I sampled some of the 12 DVD set that’s Volume One. Here’s what you’ll get for your $130 list price.

The show itself. It’s got that Wonderful World of Disney feel, with plucky kids and pretty lame plots, as young hero Henry Jr. (later known as Indiana, a name borrowed from his dog) goes on adventures around the world. Guess who he meets? Anyone who was anyone, starting with T.E. Lawrence (yes, Lawrence of Arabia), who just happens to be riding his bicycle through the sands of Giza when Indiana and his tutor are stranded at the base of the pyramids. “Please call me Ned,” Lawrence says amiably. It’s ridiculous, yet kind of charming. And while you have to willingly suspend disbelief about the Big Names (Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, and Sigmund Freud are among those who drop in), you don’t need to pretend when it comes to location. This series was filmed around the world. Those are indeed the real pyramids of Egypt. Episodes were filmed in India, Kenya, Morocco, and more than 30 other countries.

Edutainment. The tales include clever details aimed at varying ages and levels of knowledge. Two examples: At the dinner table one evening, Indiana explains how mummies were made. First: remove the brain through the nose… The description is entirely correct. And rather gross. One by one the adults leave the room, hands to their mouths. Was it young Indiana’s embalming treatise? Or the disgusting tripe they were all eating? Later, in the Valley of the Kings, Indiana explores the tomb of a man named Ka. A critical prop here is a statue representing the spiritual essence of the deceased, known as a “ka statue”—or in this case, Ka’s ka statue. An inside joke for Egyptologists. Laugh amongst yourselves.

Special features. These are all together heavier fare, very much like PBS documentaries in tone and content and surely aimed at the late-teen/adult market. The section on archaeology, on the same disc as Indiana’s first two adventures in Egypt and Morocco, is a first-rate primer on the profession that includes interviews with some of the most successful modern archaeologists. The King Tut section, including newsreels and historical photos of Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon, the men who discovered King Tut, is great fun. And the T.E. Lawrence biography is brilliantly well done: surprisingly complete and insightful with cool news footage and T.E.’s voice as recorded by the BBC. A caveat: The bio is full of the complexities of personalities and alliances and treaties and betrayals that gripped the Middle East during and after World War I and Lawrence’s role in all of it—heavy-duty history, not a breezy docudrama. Unfortunately, some of the other documentaries include the kind of droning, talking-head lectures that made everyone’s eyes glaze over in eighth grade.

Game time. Based on the “Spring Break Adventure” on disc 8 (in which Indy rides with Mexico General Pancho Villa), a game called “Revolution” puts players in Indy’s shoes and allows them to make their own adventure-based decisions. Also, an interactive timeline allows viewers to click through the history and geography behind Indy’s adventures. Neither is the latest in video gaming, but the extras fit with the overall presentation of the DVD set.

Verdict. A strange mishmash of stuff. Judging by the time it took me to get through most of the first disc, I’d say the new DVD set will provide hours and hours (and hours) of viewing. But is it pleasure? Or torture? A bit of each if you ask me. The next set of CDs is due December 18, and the last is scheduled for the spring of 2008. Daunting prospects, both of them. I’d better stock up on munchies.

Pop Omnivore readers: What’s the coolest thing you learned in watching the DVD set? For me, it was finding out that Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso launched Cubism together, although Picasso got all the glory.

—A. R. Williams

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