I remember someone once said indy fans don't like seeing indy as an old helpless guy who annoys the heck out of people.
But he wasn't helpless, and he annoyed people in a Good way. A really fun, sarcastic way. For me in the audience, anyway. After all he's been through and learned over the years, Old Indy's not afraid to call people on their pettiness and bull****. There are great morality lessons in his stories. I liked how he wound up shaming the dismissive guy at the hospital into being a hero for that little girl who was shot by donating his blood. "I hate needles," he mutters. [Looks at Indy] "You know, I wish I'd never met you." Indy [smirking]: "I have that effect on people." I like the notion that he'd grow to be this friendly curmudgeon in his old age, with his spirit and spunk undiminished.
Indy didn't make any impact on that "Pirate Of Wall Street" character on the airplane ride, but at least he got to chew him out in the teaser over his lack of regard for all the little people whose livelihoods he's destroying. (He was going to buy the airline Indy's been using for 50 years and break it apart and sell the pieces off.)
I remember liking a narrative device where he's at a museum on Russian history and sees a picture of himself (very tiny--only Indy and we know it's him) running towards the massacare in St. Petersburg Square in 1917.
Once I got used to seeing him, and hearing a new actor voicing an adult, very aged Indy, the Old Indy segments were keen. He added a lot of extra nuancing to the stories, I like how he filled us in on some of the backstory/futurestory and state of mind of Young Indy as well as some historical info. He set the stage and summed it all up with little pearls of wisdom each week in those bookend segments. Several episodes definitely Suffer without the bookends.
And I'd guess that the
Scandals Of 1920 film just proved too difficult to rework for release without including the elder Indy. I sure hope to see it on DVD, because it's one of the funniest of the bunch, with Indy scrambling around NYC maintaining romantic affairs with three women at the same time, while also working behind the scenes on a broadway musical. It's a great homage to Broadway and Gershwin music too.
I also really appreciated seeing that Old Indy still really got around. He was healthy and not bound to a wheelchair or bed. He still had his independence, taking care of himself, travelling all the time, giving lectures and so forth. I like the bits of info we got about his modern day life, like in the bookend for the London--May 1916 episode: Indy is in a restaraunt having dinner with his accountant and being lectured about his spending and how he's being threatened by the IRS and so forth. "What the IRS fails to understand is how, at your age, you can continue to accumulate the same level of expenses as you did when you were in your prime!" And then in the closing segment, of course, it turns out the woman whose voice he was hearing in the background is Vicky, (played by Jane Wyatt) his first love from the Young Indy story he just told!
I always thought they were cut when Lucas and Spielberg decided to do another movie, so that there still was a possibility that Indy could get killed in part IV. If the scenes would've been left in, the worst thing that could happen to Jones in the new film would be that somebody poked out his eye.
From the look of that scar, more like Ripped out with a vicious swipe from a jagged edge! I think that would be pretty intense, actually. That's certainly a bit of one-upmanship over prior films, for Indy to not only get the stuffing pounded out of him as usual, but to lose a damn Eyeball, and yet still keep his wits about him well enough to triumph over whatever nasty situation he's in and save the day and the girl and the artifact. Or just win the satisfaction of saving the world again even if no one else will ever know about it. (If it didn't happen in hand-to- hand combatting, or torture, maybe it was it was caused by shrapnel from an explosion.)
I think a high percentage of the moviegoers would still be quite shocked to witness something like that, even if a few fans already remember the Old Indy foreshadowing from 1992. And making it part of the fourth film would only make the DVD release of the Chronicles with the Old Indy segments restored all the more gripping, because we just came from seeing it happen to him in Indy IV.
I wonder how these Old Indy segments would have come off had George Lucas gone with his first thought--having Harrison Ford perform them. Hm...given Lucas's penchant for making bizarre changes to his films, I wonder if he'd pay for Harrison to play Old Indy after all and insert Him into the DVD releases?
Personally, I ultimately thought George Hall was the better choice. You didn't need a ton of old age makeup and latex because Hall had the authenticity of being an old man already. (Okay, only in his late 60s instead of his 90s, but that seems much easier to pull off than making up Harrison to look that old at that time. I suppose today they could create a much more Sophisticated version of an ancient Harrison makeover today with a little digital wizardry.)
[Edited by Whipper on 04-12-2003 at 04:16 am]