Even if Old Indy has retired at his age, he still could be called in to be a guest lecturer.
And so he was, though I forget which episode that happened in. It was played a bit for comic relief, of course -- I mean, yes, Indy was there as a guest lecturer, but, at the end, it turned out he was in the wrong lecture hall and someone had to come get him. In the meantime, he'd gone off on a tangent that led into that episode's main story.
Wait...I recall some more... He was a little bit nervous up there on the stage -- he dropped something and almost bumped over the podium. Pulling himself together, he looks out at the audience and says..."you know, this reminds me of the time..." and... Nnnh... Still can't remember what that faded into... Ah! Here we go -- maybe -- Barcelona, 1917? Yeah. The Terry Jones-directed episode. When he had to go undercover with Diaghilev's ballet as a Eunich, haha. All he had to do was stand "STILL."
And in some countries "Mystery of the Blues" was aired with George Hall segments if you want to count that.
Wow, really? I'd love to see those.
The Old Indy bookends made each episode a self-contained adventure. You could come in cold and watch them in somewhat random order -- which is how they aired originally. (And if you troubled to put them into chronological order via the episode titles, you could see the character progression from week to week.) That could've meant chaos, but The Old Indy segments put each week's story into a larger context.
Taking out the Old Indy segments makes a wreck of things, narratively, especially as Lucas envisioned the show being used as a teaching asset in schools. It makes a helluva lot more sense to me to provide them DVDs of the episodes in their original format. The originals were just the right length for classroom use, somewhere around 45 minutes.
