Or he could produce a television series about the early years of Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling archaeologist he created with Steven Spielberg. Unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles were intended to be history lessons. In one episode, Young Indiana would befriend Sidney Bechet, the seminal New Orleans saxophonist, and learn to play jazz.
In the early 1990s, Lucas pitched the show to Iger, who’d risen from TV weatherman in upstate New York to chairman of ABC. They met at Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s 6,100-acre property in Marin County, Calif. Iger had misgivings, but Indiana Jones was one of the most popular movie characters of all time. “I wanted it to work very badly,” Iger says. “It was George Lucas, come on.” Iger green-lighted the series and kept it on ABC for two seasons even as it failed to find an audience and solidify creatively. “It struggled,” Lucas says of Chronicles. “But he was very supportive of the whole thing.”
