"Bookends" is the terminology used for the framing segments used in most episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show.
Taking place in the-then contemporary early 1990s, the bookends usually depicted the elderly Indiana Jones encountering several individuals and telling them stories of his youth.
Author Rob MacGregor intended to open and close his 1991 novel Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi (and the series which followed) with the appearance of a ninety year old Indiana Jones framing the story. He was told that no one would be interested in seeing Indy as an old man, so the idea was dropped. As the concept resurfaced in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show a year later, MacGregor believes that George Lucas was responsible for nixing his idea for the book.[1]
The bookends were included in most episodes of the television series, which ran from 1992 to 1993 and are generally assumed to take place in the same year in which their respective episodes aired. During the bookend segments, Indy told stories to other people, sometimes even members of his family, while Sean Patrick Flanery and Corey Carrier played the young Indiana in his stories. Though Indy was known for being the only character to appear both in the bookends and main stories of the episodes, an exception was made with Vicky Prentiss, played by Jane Wyatt. The actor selected to play the older Jones was the late Broadway veteran George Hall, who was in reality in his late 70s when he played the role.
Though Hall filmed most of bookend segments of the series, original Indiana Jones actor Harrison Ford was brought in in a guest role for Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues, an attempt to boost ratings and re-launch the series, leading to Hall's bookends as originally filmed for the two episodes that made up the full Mystery of the Blues story being replaced. However, Hall's bookends were broadcast to the overseas market as individual episodes.[2]
After the cancellation of the series, four television movies built out of unbroadcast episodes were made in the mid-1990s without Hall providing framing material. Instead, most of the movies went without bookend segments. The exception was Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father in which Flanery's Indiana Jones and Lloyd Owen's Henry Jones, Sr. framed two unaired Carrier stories and ultimately depicted the final falling out between Jones and his father that would not be resolved until the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
In 1996, George Lucas and editor T.M. Christopher re-edited the series into 22 feature-length episodes, known as "chapters", which make up The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones during which all of Hall's bookends were removed leaving just those scenes featuring Ford. Flanery's bookends, meanwhile, would be be expanded and reworked to create the latter half of Winds of Change. As a consequence of the bookends' removal, various actors, while still credited for their roles, did not actually feature in the re-edited episodes. Nevertheless, the hands of the older Indiana Jones can still be seen closing his journal at the end of the closing title sequence.
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The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles | |
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