This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

These two episodes are set in 1916. The first in Princeton and Oragne, NJ, including the factories of Thomas Edison. The second at Spring Break time, in New Mexico and Mexico during the revolution.Sean Patrick Flanery is really good as young Indiana Jones. The first episode (45 minutes) involves the school prom and his wanting to borrow his girlfriend's dad's Bugatti to impress the other kids. But the car develops a generator problem and Indy finds out that a scientist friend working for Thomas Edison can repair it easily, they just have to get it to the Labs. They do so by train and bicycle. But just as they arrive thugs kidnap the scientist friend and some plans for new batteries that would make the internal combustion engine obsolete. Robyn Lively is his girl Nancy, and the two of them have to do detective work to figure out who is sponsoring all this.The second episode (45 minutes) has Indy going on Spring Break with his family to New Mexico. He and his cousin decide they will try to get to the Mexican border to see a bordello, and tell the parents that they are going camping. But as soon as they get to the small Mexican town they encounter a band of thieves on horses, shooting up the town and blowing out the bank to steal money to finance their revolution. Indy gets involved in the cause and meets Pancho Villa, and Indy ends up helping out in a battle, but then decides that "this is not my revolution" and heads home.Interestingly this is the first time I saw Indy use a bull whip, which later became part of his signature.

Back when having a car was about as rare as three-legged ballet dancer Indy aims to impress everyone at school by turning up to the prom in a Bugatti race-car and put tormentor Butch to shame. His girlfriend's dad is Edward Stratemayer (the guy who created the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Tom Swift) and promises to loan him the Bugatti until the engine fails. Desperate to get it fixed in time Indy takes it to Edison Industries to have the guys in the science lab fit a new electric battery into it.But since the oil company's are such a fiendish bunch they steal the plans for the battery and trash the lab, leaving Indy to rescue them on his own if he wants to make an impression at the prom.In the second half Indy travels to Mexico with his cousin to have a good time in a whorehouse but he is kidnapped by a bunch of Mexican Revolutionaries and pressured into fighting for their cause. He gets to meet Pancho Villa, trash William Randolph Hearst's mansion south of the border and antagonize General Patton. In the end he just wants to go home but not before getting revenge on Demetrius, the baddie who eluded him six years earlier in Egypt.A solid adventure with a good cast, though it's weird seeing Lloyd Owen still play the Connery role since his is one year YOUNGER than Flannery who plays his son. It works though...somehow.

As the first of the Flanery-led Young Indy telefilms -- inadvisably patched together from two episodes of the early 90s series -- this feature is just mind-numbing in its choppiness.A bit of history is in order: the second half of this telefilm, taking place in Mexico, originally aired as the second half of Young Indy's two-hour premiere, featuring Corey Carrier in the first half and using an Egyptian artifact as a loose central piece to tie the episode together. Confused? You should be. In the late 90s George Lucas decided to take the one-hour, standalone episodes of the original series and edit them into a series of 2-hour films, creating new footage in the meantime to bridge the gaps between episodes that clearly didn't belong together. This volume is the ultimate example of this.While the second half deals with Indy joining up with revolutionaries in Mexico, the first half finds him thwarting spies in Indy's hometown of Princeton, New Jersey with assistance from -- wait for it, wait for it... -- Nancy Stratemeyer, the inspiration of Nancy Drew. Intriguing as it is to see Teen Indy's life before World War I, the entire Princeton episode is mostly dreadful, forcing awful cameos by historic figures into Indy's life in ways that just don't work. While the cameos in the series overall could be described as misguided at best, at least later volumes integrated them in a way that it didn't feel so, well, awkward.Still, the lowest point of this compilation video by far is the additional footage of Flanery that was filmed years later to bridge the gap between the two episodes. Flanery magically ages nearly a decade in this footage and just looks old, tired, and uncomfortable in a scene in which the then-34-year-old actor is supposed to be playing a 16-year-old schoolboy. It's simply embarrassing.Lucas' reimagining aside, the second half is by far the superior one, if for no other reason than it introduces Ronny Coutteure as Remy, Indy's Belgian friend who appears in a good portion of the series, and sets Indy on a course for enlisting in World War I, which is arguably the backdrop for the best of the Young Indy episodes. It's actually a very decent introduction to Indy's World War I adventures and is easy to see why Lucas & Company envisioned it as such in the first place, rather than the tedious Princeton affair that now precedes it.

I enjoyed this Young Indiana Jones Chronicle. It has one of my favorite commentaries on revolutions. When Indy is taking chickens away from a Mexican man, he tells the man that this is for the good of Villa's army. Indy says that Villa will bring the people out of drudgery, slavery, etc. The Mexican man replies that he once was young and believed such things. He had joined a revolutionary movement when he was younger. The man still had his chickens taken. He said that revolutions come and go. All that changes is the name of the man who steals his chickens. I believe that this is a brilliant commentary on revolutions in general. I will always enjoy watching this Young Indiana Jones Chronicle just for that small speech.