Thus far in my reviews of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, I’ve spoken about how individual episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles were smashed together to make movie-length features, even though the constituent parts were generally unrelated, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of a creation in just about every instance. Just to confuse things further, Travels with Father originally aired as a feature-length piece back in 1996 (titled Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father), almost four years after the audience first met the Corey Carrier version of Young Indy in Young Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Jackal. Confused? Not as confused as the scheduling of these episodes was, back in the day.
The movie almost serves as a prototype for the feature-length releases on VHS and DVD, being comprised of two distinct stories (albeit stories that had never aired as individual stories on TV); Russia, March 1909 and Athens, July 1910. As expected, the tales are unrelated and somewhat oddly only one of them involves Indy actually travelling with his father; the other has Indy running away – about as far away from his father as he can be – to travel around with the Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, instead.
It’s interesting that this movie didn’t appear on television for years after the series began, as it’s arguably the most enjoyable of the Carrier era of stories, having a strong comedic streak through both tales, which helps to paper over some of the – frankly bizarre – things that happen in them both.
Russia, March 1909 (again, never called that as a TV episode, but lets run with it here), sees Indy hit the road with Tolstoy as I mentioned earlier, creating all sorts of funny and really charming moments as the pair bicker, then become firm friends as time goes by. Michael Gough plays an excellent Tolstoy – a performance that you could imagine someone like Sir Ian McKellen delivering in much the same way. It’s that good. Unfortunately, to get to the point of Indy running away, the catalyst is him being extremely clumsy and frankly quite stupid on a variety of occasions (thus earning his father’s wrath and causing him to run away), which are character traits we haven’t really seen in Young Indy before. This is, after all, the kid who snuck into the royal palace in Vienna – like a mini James Bond – back in The Perils of Cupid.
Other aspects – like setting up Tolstoy as a very religious man (albeit one who doesn’t like organised religion), who then trades his incredibly old and valuable, handwritten family Bible for a bunch of Indy’s baseball cards, are just weird. On the surface it’s funny – even quite touching as we see Tolstoy reading off the stats of a player and appearing to be quite fascinated by this alien concept – but step back and think about it, and there’s no way on Earth that he would have traded his family Bible for the cards. I think something more appropriate for the trade – like a first edition of one of his novels – would have made much more sense, being a less sentimental item and tying into the fact he writes off his own career within the storyline itself, so would have no need of a first edition, or interest in keeping it.
Athens, July 1910 picks up the story with Miss Seymour still feeling ill (something that began in the first half, giving at least some connective tissue between the two stories), and Anna Jones wanting to go to a spa “that doesn’t allow children”, meaning Henry Jones Sr. is going to have to do some looking after of Young Indy for a change. This leads into a really great passage of scenes where Lloyd Owen and Carrier have some wild escapades while on their way to study at a monastery’s library. This culminates in them having their clothes eaten by goats while swimming and having to hit the road naked. Quite a wild scene for “children’s television” but extremely funny and a counterbalance to the disciplinarian father figure who normally comes across in the franchise. Here, Henry Jones Sr. is stripped down, quite literally.
The story starts to lose steam when they are at the monastery later on and Indy bumps into the Greek writer and philosopher, Nikos Kazantzakis. Although he gives Indy some philosophy to consider, he’s not well explained as a character and sort of drifts in and then out of the story without much fuss. A more egregious moment happens, however, when Indy and his father are leaving the monastery via the wooden cage that brings visitors up and down the cliff where the building is perched. The guys are lowered halfway down, then the cage just stops. Without explanation they are left dangling for a day and then, to compound the stupidity of the situation, they set a fire to keep warm… yes, a fire on the floor of a wooden cage, dangling hundreds of feet in the air. I get that the writers are trying to cause a moment of peril as the fire burns a hole in the floor of the cage, but it makes no sense that they would do something so moronic as starting a fire in the tiny wooden structure. Surely the threat at hand is already in front of us; that they’re stuck in the cage in the first place – albeit with no explanation as to why.
The resolution of Indy and his father working together to climb up the rope to the monastery is a nice moment, but is undercut when they get to the top and the monk responsible for lowering them had simply hit his head and been knocked out for the past day. Apparently none of the other monks missed him or went near the wooden elevator to notice that Indy and his father had been left hanging in mid-air. Granted, there’s an earlier line in the episode that the monks were about to be cloistered for a couple of days and I can only presume this was some sort of extreme cloistering and they simply didn’t miss their fellow prior to lockdown… maybe? What about the Kazantzakis character? He was allowed to stay during this lockdown and didn’t need the lift, too? Somewhat worryingly, three guys – including the author of The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont – were behind writing this. I imagine the three of them getting to this bit and being like, “Yeah, it’s fine…” No, guys, it’s really not!
Criticisms aside, I said earlier that Travels with Father is arguably the most enjoyable of the Carrier era of stories so far, so I’ll give it the equal highest rating I’ve given a Carrier movie – 7/10. That might seem a strange thing to do as, on the whole, it’s tonally quite different to Passion for Life (which I’ve also given the same score to), but I think quality-wise they’re in the same ballpark as adventures for Young Indy.