Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock’s Eye is one of 4 television films aired on The Family Channel from 1994 to 1996, so never had to be cobbled together out of standalone TV episodes previously aired on the ABC network to make movie length. We’ve already looked at 2 of the other films: Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen and Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father.
When we last saw Indy, he was giving a mouthful to his superiors in French intelligence and this has apparently resulted in him being returned to the front lines – despite being their best and brightest intelligence operative over the past year or two – with Remy. How on earth Remy got roped into this is unknown. Last we saw him, he was being set up to do intelligence as a cafe owner and, given Ronny Coutteure’s girth and his character’s love for the ladies, I’ve always thought of this as some sort of prototype ‘Allo ‘Allo, one world war too early. Alas, we never saw any stories during his cafe phase.
Putting aside how Indy and Remy have got back together, the trench scenes immediately put us in mind of past great adventures such as, Trenches of Hell and although peace breaks out almost immediately, the episode is only getting started. The plan for our hero and his mate to go looking for a diamond called the Peacock’s Eye begins what feels closest to an Indiana Jones movie starring Harrison Ford. That doesn’t mean this is Raiders of the Lost Ark by a longshot, but the artifact is ancient, we travel to exotic locations (complete with a line being drawn across an on-screen map), and without a war to fight or superiors to report to, we suddenly get a lot more freedom for the story to spread its wings and do what it likes.
This includes killing off Miss Seymour (off-screen no less!), although Indy reads a letter from her and it’s narrated by the character’s actor, Margaret Tyzack. I’m not entirely sure why Miss Seymour had to die, outside of illustrating the ‘Spanish Flu’ towards the end of WW1. The character was great but if pressed, I suppose with Indy growing up and not doing as much in the UK versus the rest of the world, she probably wasn’t going to get much air time even if the series had continued for any length of time.
Indeed, even the need to shoehorn famous people into the story seems to take a back seat for the first half of the film, in favour of just telling an adventure story. Only the archaeologist Howard Carter pops up for a reunion scene with Indy (with the two having met in My First Adventure). He’s staying at the same hotel as the author, E. M. Forster (who wrote A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India among other novels), but this amounts to just one scene with Indy, Remy, Howard, and Edward.
Bottom and Young Ones alum, Ade Edmondson, shows up early in the story as a German officer and post-war treasure hunter and, especially given his penchant for playing slightly over the top Germans (see his turn as Baron von Richthofen in the Blackadder Goes Forth episode Private Plane), he is surprisingly restrained here, playing it absolutely straight. It’s good to see, albeit it a touch discombobulating!
The search for the diamond and the ensuing chase for it once it’s found – as multiple parties want to get their hands on it – is quite exciting. A pirate attack on the passenger liner Indy and Remy are travelling on comes out of nowhere (literally and figuratively), and the guys finding themselves stranded on islands ‘near Australia’ gives a new dimension to Indy’s travels after so much time spent in Europe.
The Austro-Hungarian anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski is shoehorned into this second half of the film for the history lesson component of the story. Working in the islands for research purposes (so we must presume Indy and Remy have landed in Papua New Guinea/Melanesia which was where Malinowski was operating at this point in time), he takes on a similar-ish role to the storyline of the German doctor, Albert Schweitzer, in Oganga, The Giver and Taker of Life. That is, he spends a decent amount of time discussing ‘life’ with Indy and giving him a new way of looking at things. To the degree that Indy decides that chasing the Peacock’s Eye is a waste of time and energy versus things he’d rather be doing (such as studying to be an archaeologist), and he decides to part ways with Remy and go home.
This decision, late in the episode, is both good and bad. On the good side of the ledger, Indy is shown to have taken another step in growing up and when Sean Patrick Flanery says, “I’m going home…” to himself, there’s almost a sense of disbelief in his voice. He’s survived a world war, had crazy adventures, and has to face his father, Henry Jones Sr., and explain his running away when he arrives home.
On the bad side of the ledger, however, it’s a bit cheap to have Indy pursuing this artifact and a really good adventure unfolding, but then it just… ends. And let’s not forget, Remy’s wife sold a priceless family heirloom to fund searching for the Peacock’s Eye, in the belief that the pain of selling that heirloom would be worth setting the family up for life through gaining the treasure. Indy’s basically turned his back on that sacrifice, and his war years pal, just because of a pep-talk from Malinowski. Good work, Malinowski. All of this is just quickly glossed over at the end of the episode, however.
A tricky film to score on many levels. It does what it sets out to do, and it does it well. The sense that we’re away from army life and are having an unrestrained adventure is thrilling. The guest cast is good. There’s action aplenty. The island scenes are gorgeous. So many neat aspects. But it still doesn’t quite ‘get there’ for me in the end. The resolution is really lacking for my taste. 8/10 is my limit on this one.