Indiana Jones in release order

About this order

What is on this list

All five Indiana Jones films: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Last Crusade, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny.

All twenty-eight episodes produced for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, the 1992 series with Corey Carrier as Indy at eight and Sean Patrick Flanery at sixteen. And all four television films made for The Family Channel between 1994 and 1996, which were built from episodes ABC had ordered and never made.

Four episodes America never saw

ABC showed twenty-four of the twenty-eight and then stopped. Every guide prints the other four as "unaired", which is true of the United States and not true of anywhere else.

Florence, May 1908 went out in Sweden on 17 October 1993. Palestine, October 1917 followed on 21 November and Prague, August 1917 on 5 December, so the series carried on for five months in Sweden after it had finished in America. Transylvania, January 1918 waited until 7 February 1995 and went out in Germany.

They are dated here by those broadcasts, because this site dates an entry by its first release wherever that happened. It puts three of them after the American finale and drops the fourth into the middle of the television films, which is a fair picture of how this series actually ended.

Treat those four dates as the earliest anybody has recorded rather than as certainly the first. They come from a fan compilation of international schedules that stopped being updated years ago and that says outright it has only some of the Swedish dates. The other thirty-three entries on this page are on much firmer ground.

The numbers run out of order, and that is the point

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was made to be shown out of Indy's own chronology. One week he is eight years old on his father's lecture tour, the next he is sixteen in the trenches. That was the design, not an accident.

Two consequences show up in this table. Palestine, October 1917 is numbered twenty-first in its season and sits above Prague, August 1917, which is numbered twentieth, because Sweden showed them in that order. And Peking, March 1910 aired the week before Benares, January 1910, which is the earlier half of the same story.

The Season and Episode columns keep the numbers everyone else uses. The dates put the rows where a viewer met them.

The one cross-over mark

One row on this page carries a cross-over icon, out of thirty-seven, and that is a finding rather than a gap.

Harrison Ford appears in Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues, in bookend scenes set in Wyoming in 1950 — the films' Indiana Jones, in the television series, and the only time he turns up in it. ABC used him to relaunch the show after a five-month absence. British viewers got a different version of the same episode with George Hall's elderly Indy instead.

Nothing else connects the two halves in that direction. No episode mentions the Ark, the Grail, the Sankara Stones or the crystal skull; Marion, Sallah, Belloq and Marcus Brody never appear. Henry Jones Senior is in a great many episodes, but he is one of the series' own leads rather than a guest from the films, so he is not marked — the same rule that keeps a spin-off's own regulars unflagged everywhere on this site. Films carry no cross-over marks at all, here or anywhere.

Two connections are worth knowing about and are still not marks. The Peacock's Eye, the diamond the 1995 television film is named after, was later established as the diamond Indy trades in the opening of Temple of Doom — but that was done in reference books afterwards, not in the film itself. And in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy explains that he learned Quechua riding with Pancho Villa, which is the second half of the 1992 pilot. That one points from the film back at the series, and films are not marked.

Where the dates come from

The twenty-four American broadcasts are agreed by three independent sources, and the pattern is its own proof: six consecutive Wednesdays in spring 1992, four Mondays that autumn as the lead-in to Monday Night Football, then Saturdays for the rest of the run.

IMDb is the exception and it is worth saying so, because it is the obvious place to check. Its dates for this series are not ABC's — it has London, May 1916 on Christmas Day 1993 and Verdun on a Sunday in May, which is some other country's schedule. Its numbering is fine and its episode pages are linked from every row here; its dates cannot order this series.

The films take their American release date. Two of them screened at Cannes first — Crystal Skull four days early, Dial of Destiny six weeks — but a festival gala for invited guests is not a release, which is the same line this site draws everywhere.

What is not here

The 1996 re-cut, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, which re-edited the whole series into twenty-two feature-length chapters in Indy's chronological order, cut George Hall's bookends out and shot new linking material. It is a different work rather than a different running order, and re-edits do not get rows here. If you have only ever seen that version, this page will look unfamiliar: it is the order the material was made and shown in, before anyone tidied it.

The making-of programmes and documentaries — Great Movie Stunts in 1981, The Making of Raiders the same year, Indiana Jones and the Ultimate Quest in 2008, Timeless Heroes in 2023. They are about the films rather than part of them.

LEGO Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Brick, a five-minute animated short shown on Cartoon Network on 10 May 2008, twelve days before Crystal Skull opened. It is licensed and it has a firm date; it is a parody rather than part of the story, and this list keeps to the story.

The video games, the theme-park attractions and the stunt show, none of which is a screen production. And no sixth film, because there is not one: nothing is announced and nothing has a date.