Larry David | Curb Your Enthusiasm | Los Angeles | Toyota

A Tale Of Two Larrys

by American Way Staff

Four Things You Don't Know about the Young Indiana Jones

1 Given that he was traveling the world in the early 1900s, the teenage Indiana Jones would have traveled slowly to many of his adventures by steamship. Fittingly, the 1990s George Lucas television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, has taken more than a decade to reach DVD. In part, that's because Lucas wanted to upgrade the series by remastering the soundtracks and the 16 mm film. Those tasks continue, and the 44-episode series is being released in three volumes, the first of which is out this month.
2 Many states adopted compulsory school-attendance laws before the turn of the last century. So we have no idea how a young Indy could have been traveling the world instead of doing his book learning. Lucas is making up for that, though. His intention is to have the DVD series used as an educational and entertainment tool. David Schneider, a former 60 Minutes producer who now works for Lucasfilm, has spent the past several years creating documentaries on the historical figures and places featured in the series. Those documentaries will accompany each volume of the DVD releases.
3 Before he was Bond, Daniel Craig connected with Sean Connery by appearing in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Unlike Connery's character, Indiana Jones's older father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Craig's character was not related to Indy. But like Connery, Craig - 25 at the time of his 1993 appearance - had a mustache. Ick.
4 While not an instance of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, this connection is worth mentioning: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Connery's costar from 1999's Entrapment, also appeared in the Young Indiana Jones episode with Craig. It's very interesting that the episode with Zeta-Jones and Craig was, like much of the series, partly shot in an exotic location. (Producers visited some 35 different countries, even though the series didn't even last two full seasons.) But what's more interesting is that during her appearance, Zeta-Jones does a belly dance.

If that sounds like it would be a perfectly prickly dilemma for the character David plays on his show, good - it should. Now that Curb is in its sixth season, it has become even harder to figure out where TV Larry David ends and real Larry David begins.

From the start, Curb Your Enthusiasm was set up to be a slightly fictionalized version of David's real life in Los Angeles. While real David is the misanthropic rich genius who was behind Seinfeld and who now makes his HBO show because he feels like it, TV David is a semiretired sitcom legend zipping around town in his Toyota Prius, trying to find something useful to do.

The big difference between the two, of course, is that real David can be cordial if he wants to - or has to - whereas TV David manages to annoy or infuriate everyone he comes in contact with. Whether inviting a sex offender to a seder or adopting a racist dog, David's always doing something - something that only gets worse the more he talks. "I love the guy who's on the show," says David about his TV character. "He says things I'm thinking and feeling, and he doesn't have to behave in a way that society really wants everybody to behave. I wish I could be that way in my life."