Some actors in Hollywood are lucky to have one character that permeates the culture and defines their career, but Harrison Ford has at least four, maybe even more. Han Solo is almost certainly the biggest across his filmography after his five appearances in the Star Wars franchise (not to mention the character’s other appearances voiced by other actors), plus Rick Deckard in the Blade Runner films, and his brief run as Jack Ryan. That’s not even mentioning one-appearance characters like John Book in Witness or Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.
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The top of the mountain, of course, for Ford’s career, is Henry Jones, Jr. aka, Indiana Jones. Ford’s creation with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas not only spawned a franchise but revived an entire genre for feature films, delivering something that quite literally no one else was really making at the time of its release. Indiana Jones has endured for decades, but today marks a distinct point in the character’s history, as it’s the day that Harrison Ford was actually replaced as the character, when the first episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles premiered on March 4, 1992.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles Replaced Harrison Ford
With 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg answered a big question about the character that had only been hinted at before: his childhood. River Phoenix took on the role of young Indy for the sequence in that movie, which was largely used to set the stage for Sean Connery’s debut as Henry Jones, Sr. That film set the stage for the series itself, which saw Harrison Ford replaced by not one actor in the role of Indiana Jones, but by three different actors.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles had two different actors playing the titular young Indy, with Corey Carrier playing a 9-year-old Henry Jones Jr. for a few episodes, and Sean Patrick Flanery as the 16-year-old version who would interact with countless historical characters and trot around the globe. The structure of each episode also saw bookends to the Young Indy adventures, with actor George Hall playing an older version of Indiana Jones, now wearing an eyepatch and still marching around at the ripe age of 92-years-old.
The first episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, “Curse of the Jackal,” actually includes all three actors playing the role and showing three different places of Indy’s history. Sure there are details like the introduction of the actual dog named Indiana, but other elements that have been in the feature films like a passing reference made to his fear of snakes, his knack for surprise meeting major historical figures (in the first episode, he meets Lawrence of Arabia, George S. Patton, and Poncho Villa), but also the line, “It belongs in a museum.”
What’s so distinct about the first episode is that, even though some of the larger charms found in the Indiana Jones films are not present (as Spielberg did not direct it), you can still find the DNA for the character in the stories. Not only do the bookends with Hall as “Old Indy” show his playful side is still intact well into his 90s, but both versions of Young Indy feel like a young man who would absolutely grow into Harrison Ford. They have a sense of curiosity, purpose, and humor that feels like it will one day evolve into the adventurer we already know. This had to work because, at the time of its debut, the series seemed like it might be the final road for the character and that Ford might never return.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles Is Still Mostly Canon to the Franchise
Given it seemed his time with the whip and fedora were over, it would have been easy for Harrison Ford to distance himself from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, especially since the series had already recast the role across various points of time. That said, Ford actually did return to the role, appearing in one episode in place of Hall, playing Indiana Jones in his 50s and over a decade after the events of The Last Crusade. This episode marked Ford’s final appearance as the character until 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a film that always seemed like a pipedream even during The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
In true George Lucas fashion, though, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles couldn’t remain fully intact. The original series ran from 1992 to 1993 for two seasons, with four TV movies released from 1994 through 1996, but in the late 1990s, the series was reedited, with The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles transitioning into The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. These new TV movies, composed of episodes of the TV show with new narrations and some new segments, did make one major change, though: they removed the segments of George Hall as Old Indy.
It’s never been fully revealed why George Lucas decided to remove these sequences, but it has been theorized that it was because he believed that Harrison Ford would return to the role eventually and didn’t want to be locked into that version of an Old Indy with the canon. As a result, there’s a bit of a question about the canon of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but there are two things that make it clear that the events seen in the series still count with the movies. The first is the previously mentioned appearance by Harrison Ford, but the second comes from 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, when Indy recalls his time riding with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, an event seen in the first episode 34 years ago today.
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