Indiana Jones Meets Tomb Raider In The Forgotten '90s Classic With 66 Episodes

One ‘90s cult classic blended the adventure plotting of the Indiana Jones movies with the addictive action of the Lara Croft franchise better than any of the character’s official adaptations, and this series deserves to be rediscovered by viewers in 2026. Even though the Indiana Jones series is one of the most instantly recognizable franchises ever made, it is surprisingly tough to find later blockbusters that directly copied from the series.

Although Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy movies were unapologetically indebted to the Indiana Jones franchise, 2026’s R-rated reboot Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and 2017’s disastrous Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy prove the rest of the Universal monster movie franchise’s outings are more horror-centric. Meanwhile, although the National Treasure movies owe some creative debt to the adventures of Dr. Jones, their comparatively grounded storylines and focus on espionage over supernatural villains prove the series was as inspired by the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as the Indiana Jones movies.

One of the few franchises that truly recaptures the fun of the Indiana Jones movies is the Lara Croft games. Beginning in 1996 with the hit video game of the same name, the franchise continued with another trio of games before 2000, followed by two live-action movies starring Angelina Jolie in the early 2000s. While the Lara Croft movies were passable blockbuster entertainment, it was Relic Hunter, a Canadian TV show that also borrowed from the video game franchise, that truly offered viewers a perfect Indiana Jones replacement.

Relic Hunter Is Worth Digging Out 27 Years Later

Starring Wayne’s World heroine Tia Carrere, Relic Hunter told the story of the archaeologist and martial artist Sydney Fox. While Fox was a Professor of Ancient Studies in her day job, this title was mostly an excuse to send her and her dorky British sidekick Nigel jet-setting around the world in search of lost artifacts. Every episode of Relic Hunter opened with a prologue that explained how an artifact went missing, then cut to the present day as Sydney used her unique expertise to hunt them down.

Although the show’s creative debt to the Lara Croft games is self-evident, this didn’t stop Relic Hunter from becoming a surprisingly solid procedural in its own right. Lasting 66 episodes, the series never took itself too seriously and balanced Carrere’s impressive displays of martial arts with globe-trotting adventures that owed as much to the knockabout comic relief of the Indiana Jones movies as the Lara Croft games.

The prologue format meant that each episode felt like a version of Columbo for adventure fans, as Sydney had to solve each artifact’s providence while viewers already knew how they ended up stolen or lost. The dramatic irony of this setup meant that, whether the relic was as new as Elvis’s guitar or as old as a Mesopotamian statute, the thrills were always equally unpredictable.

What Tia Carrere Did After Relic Hunter

Tia Carrere as Mrs. Kekoa smiles in Lilo and Stitch 2025

Appearing in classic comedy movies like Wayne’s World and High School High as well as thrillers like True Lies and Rising Sun, Carrere had an impressive screen career before Relic Hunter even began. However, her most famous role came directly after the series ended in 2002, when Carrere provided the voice of Nani in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. Carrere later returned for a cameo in 2025’s live-action Lilo and Stitch remake.

The star is soon set to appear alongside Daisy Ridley and Alden Ehrenreich in the upcoming romcom The Last Resort, which is also one of the late, great Sam Neill’s final movie roles. However, despite plenty of other TV roles in the intervening years, for many viewers, Carrere will always be best known as the small screen mashup of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, Relic Hunter’s inimitable Sydney Fox.