young indiana jones

It's a lot of video but my family enjoyed the Young Indiana Jones series from Lucas studios. Lucas has always been a pioneer. And this unique series (Wikipedia entry) is a great resource for homeschooling families. 

Series Format (DVD set)
For each full-length feature, all with good directors, excellent production values and worldwide location filming, there are six or more companion documentaries to each film. The features have some of famous people of the 20th century in each episode and the companion documentaries then examine that person or issue at a deeper level. For example, a movie about the young Indiana in Vienna may have him run into Fred, talks with Jung and Adler, and somehow sees Archduke Ferdinand. Accompanying documentaries highlight each figure or events. More stuff: a few themes video games for younger kids, something like Oregon Trail, and even a professor giving background for teachers.

An approximate listing of all this is here.

The features are good: a bit upbeat but usually entertaining and often fun. Easy on families of wide ages. The documentaries are uniformly excellent. These are not over-edited, formulaic documentaries (re History channel). These are concise, elegant and they also tackle many lesser-known figures (Sassoon or Edib) along with the standard ones (like Churchill).

NOTE: There is graphic war violence and one erotic depiction of a sexual encounter with Mata Hari.

• The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One - The Early Years
• The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Two - The War Years
• The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Three - The Years of Change

All told there are 93 thirty-minute documentaries accompanying 18-22 feature films.

The figures profiled include: Freud, Jung, Picasso, Rockwell, Braque, Baron von Richtofen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Marx, Stalin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Schweitzer, Mata Hari, De Gaulle, the French Foreign Legion, Hemingway, T.E. Lawrence, Howard Carter, Puccini, Degas, Rousseau, Adler, Archduke Ferdinand, Theodore Roosevelt, Krishnamurti, Yen Fu, Stratemeyer, Edison, Pancho Villa, Pershing, Patton, Yeats, O’Casey, Churchill, Sylvia Pankhurst, Petain, Mata Hari, Smuts, B.Boganda, Diaghilev, Lenin, Kafka, Prince Vlad IV the Impaler, Hemingway, Ataturk, Edib, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Gertrude Bell, Toynbee, Ho Chi Minh, Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Eliot Ness, Capone, Ben Hecht, MacArthur, Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wolcott, and others.