This Is the Harrison Ford Indiana Jones Performance You Forgot About

This brief appearance marks Ford's only portrayal of Jones on the small screen.

Harrison Ford has now played Indiana Jones in five feature films— the original trilogy from the 1980s, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008, and Dial of Destiny, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month. However, Ford actually made one more appearance as Jones in the early 1990s. The part was brief, and even the most fervent fans of the franchise might have forgotten it by now, but it was nevertheless Ford reprising his most recognizable character one more time.

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After George Lucas wrapped on producing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, he shifted his focus towards a television project involving the character. Inspired by the opening sequence in Last Crusade, where River Phoenix plays a teenage Jones, Lucas decided to make the TV series about the character growing up at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was born.

The series, which aired on ABC for two seasons between 1992 and 1993, was a few notches off from the feature films. Pitched as an educational show, Young Indiana Jones shaped each episode around Indy encountering historical figures and events firsthand. Over the course of the series, the young protagonist serendipitously collided with Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, and other notable people. Meanwhile, River Phoenix did not reprise the young Indy role, handing the mantel off to Corey Carrier to play kid Jones in the first five episodes, and then Sean Patrick Flanery to play teenage and young-adult Indy for the remainder of the series.

Every episode was also a framed narrative, beginning and ending in the modern era, where "old" Indiana Jones would be the one telling the story. By "old", we do not mean Harrison Ford circa 1992. This Indiana Jones was meant to be ninety-three years old, and he was portrayed by character actor George Hall. Sporting an eye patch, horn-rimmed glasses, and a leathery face, Hall looked more like John Ford than Harrison Ford. His elderly take on the character was whimsical, slightly quirky, and quite long-winded— hence the copious stories. He was grandfatherly. In fact, the series even revealed him to be a great-grandfather through his daughter's lineage. Evidently, Mutt Williams was not yet a twinkle in George Lucas' eye.

George Hall's elderly Jones book ended nearly every episode, with just four exceptions. One of those exceptions was Season 2, Episode 5. Titled "Mystery of the Blues," this episode still opened and closed with an older Jones recounting the story from the future. However, Jones was not quite as old as George Hall this time, and the future was not quite as distant from the character's youth. Instead, the episode begins in the 1950s, with a middle-aged Jones portrayed by none other than Harrison Ford himself.

In the opening sequence, Ford's Jones drives through a snowy Wyoming landscape with his Native American friend, Greycloud (Saginaw Grant). They drive with reckless haste, as gun-slinging pursuers chase after them. Once they lose them, Indy crashes the car into a snowbank, and the two continue on foot into the forest and find shelter in an abandoned cabin. There, Greycloud reveals that the faceless bad guys are chasing them to steal his peace pipe: a sacred relic of his people that he presently holds in his possession.

All in all, the beginning is pretty familiar fare for Ford's Jones. It's a high-speed chase through a rugged landscape, where the antagonists are after a treasured, ancient MacGuffin. Ford brings the same cool confidence to the character that he always offers, except this time he sports a beard, as the actor was also working on The Fugitive at the time of the shoot. Still, the ever-so-slightly graying facial hair suits a marginally older, 1950s Jones on a Western adventure.

However, the feel of the cinematic Jones lasts less than five minutes, as when Indy and Greycloud arrive in the cabin, they find an old soprano saxophone, which Jones picks up and starts to play with surprising, jazzy talent. From there, he waxes nostalgia about his time working as a nightclub waiter while studying at the University of Chicago, kicking off the main story set in the 1920s. It then becomes less like Indiana Jones and more like Young Indiana Jones, with camp, didacticism, and zany historical cameos aplenty.

The first half of "Mystery of the Blues" centers around young Indy learning how to play the saxophone after hearing the band playing at the restaurant where he works. Because it is the 1920s, and the band is made up of Black people, this musical endeavor forces Indy to cross the boundaries of color, where he learns not just about jazz and the blues, but also about the plight of Black Americans. This was probably made with the noble intention of educating young viewers about diversity and inclusion, but it has aged rather questionably.

Then, the second half of the episode goes in a wildly different direction. The manager of the restaurant Indy works at gets unexpectedly assassinated, and the police refuse to do a thorough investigation. Indy teams up with his school friends (who happen to be a young Eliot Ness and Earnest Hemingway) to solve the crime through investigative journalism. They eventually reveal the main culprit to be Al Capone, whose bootlegging operation had a vendetta against the restaurant owner. When all is said and done, the web of corruption is too thick for the boys to penetrate, and the criminals get away. What started as a straightforward lesson about overcoming racial divisions ended with that theme taking an extreme backseat to a noir-style detective narrative, starring a couple of the 1920s most notorious figures. It's rather bizarre, yet that idiosyncratic writing was somewhat indicative of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Still, before the episode ends, it returns to the 1950s, where Indy and Greycloud's pursuers eventually catch up to them and break into the cabin. They get the peace pipe and are about to walk away with it, and Indy seems apathetically submissive to their defeat. Echoing the main story's message that some battles simply can't be won, he says, "Things can't always be the way you want them to be." He then takes a seat and resumes playing the saxophone, but ends his tune on an ear-splitting note that causes an avalanche from the trees and roof to bury the bad guys in snow. With a knowing smile, Indy then concludes, "But sometimes they are." Triumphant, they go out to take the pipe and continue on their way as the iconic John Williams theme plays.

Yes, it is a corny resolution, but the entire episode is a whirlwind of mismatched lessons, genres, and plot points. One might question what compelled Harrison Ford to make this single, cheesy appearance on the series. Well, he allegedly did it as a favor to the producers, as George Lucas had buoyed much of the actor's success from American Graffiti, to Star Wars, and, of course, Indiana Jones. Lucas wanted Ford to make the cameo to help boost ratings and hopefully solidify the show's longevity. Ultimately, it didn't quite do the trick, as ABC canceled The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles at the end of the season. In 1994-1996 Lucas tried to revive it with four made-for-TV movies, but despite reedits and a title change to The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, the series never bounced back.

If nothing else, however, the show was ambitious, with large sets and a vast canvas spanning Indiana Jones entire upbringing, including his boyhood, his service in World War I, and beyond. Whether The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is canon is a debated question, and therefore, "Mystery of the Blues" cannot really be called essential viewing. Still, the episode offers a few extra minutes of Ford playing his most famous character, and it marks the only time that the true Indiana Jones has graced the small screen... and we're not counting those Last Crusade Diet Pepsi commercials.