Forget Crystal SKull (or, you know, try to). Let's talk about a much more satisfying, if sometimes frustrating, version of Indiana Jones.

I'm talking about The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

I watched - and loved - this series when it was originally on. And I've been waiting, ever since my kids first watched Raider of the Lost Ark, for Young INdy to turn up on DVD so I could watch it with them.

For those who never saw this show, it was imagined as, for want of a better word, a sort of "edutainment". Aimed at kids, it fused age-appropriate action-adventure with educational content. Each episode featured Indy, at different ages, meeting historical figures in various sorts of adventures.

It didn't always work. The ten-year-old Indy (Corey Carrier) was cute in a pudgy-and-precocious way, but the episodes featuring him appealed more to younger kids. The older, teen indy (Sean Patrick Flanery) had almost a teen heartthrob look to him. While both versions of Indy made sense, they appealed to different audiences, and the show, being built around the lead character's age, wound up very different.

The network, or the producers, or whomever, eventually dropped the younger Indy; presumably because of it's greater audience interest (Shows featuring a ten-year-old protagonist may be very successful today, but in 1993, they didn't play to enough audience for it to work). IT made sense; the teen-indy episodes featuring Flanery worked incredibly well; the weakest ones were pretty good, and the best of them (like Congo, January 1917, featuring Dr Albert Schweitzer) were truly great teevee, with both adventure, and a convincing sense of the real human story behind history.

Because that's what Young Indy was all about; putting a face and a personality to history. And they nailed it.

Sometime late last year, the DVD release finally happened. And I Couldn't have been happier when I noticed it on netflix a couple of months ago. I've been watching it with my kids for teh last several weekends, and was pleased to see that the show I remembered was just as good as I thought it was.

More importantly, though, I found that it worked just as designed.

A week after we'd watchedRussia, 1910 (where Indy meets Leo Tolstoy), my older child told me with big, sad eyes that she'd just read about Tolstoy dying in a railway station; she now had an imagine of who Tolstoy was, and cared about him. A few nights ago, my younger mentioned how much she liked Picasso's work, and how she's like to meet him; a week before we'd watched "September 1908', in which Indy had met a young and flamboyant Pablo Picasso. In both cases, they dry historical figures were suddeny people.

The thing about this that makes it magical is that my children were not fooled; they understood they were being slipped education in the guise of entertainment. BUt they didn't care; they loved it. Which is an almost sorcerous feat.

There's a down-side, of course.

We know how some directors can't fucking leave it alone. Look how many 'Director's cut, versions there are of Bladerunner. Look at the the butcher job Adrian Maben did when he re-released Pink Floyd at Pompeii. And look at - *choke* - the director's cut Star Wars.

They've done it to Young Indy as well.

Now, they haven't in any way ruined it. The episodes are mostly intact, and just as cleverly done, just as well written, just as entertaining as ever. But they made a classic bad choice about order.

I'm a staunch beliver in creation order over chonology order. I'd happily slow-roast whomever decided the Cronicals of Narnia should be released out-of-order; some of the series key moments are sucked dry of resonance by being played out of original sequence. BUt it isn't just chronology that makes the re-packages Young Indy problematic.

What they've done is taken the episodes, and re-packed them as two-hour movies, linked together by transition scenes shot in the mid ninties. This is problematic because some of these edipsodes were fimes a year or more apart (hence Indy suddenly looking three years older and 10 lbs lighter in teh middle of the first disk). Worse is that the bridge sequences are obvioulsy shot later, with every character looking different for four minutes mid-film.

The other thing that makes this work poorly is that certain themes were intended to play together. The episodes originally alternated week to week between little indy and teen indy. The first two introduced a story in egypt, then completed it with teen indy in mexico, closing a story arc and creating a continuty. That continutity breaks when we have ten hours of film in between these two episodes. Worse is that the Mexico episode tells us about INdy's monther dying, so we know, at the close of the little-indy shows, what it means when Mom collapses. As played on the DVD, the collapse seems oddly out of place, and then two epsisodes later, we hear a sudden mention of her dying, far in the past. The resonance of her collapse is lost, and the mention of her death later seems all too causal.