Ok so I'm pretty sure that if there was one thing that caused some people to take an immediate dislike to this show it would have to be the visual style and character designs, everything is so jagged and overly-exaggerated and the shape of the characters is so bendy and weird. Even as I kid I was annoyed at first by how ugly and radically different the characters were to their live-action counterparts, but once you get used to the funny look of everything it does give the show a distinctive quirky charm and tone. One little visual touch I think they made a mistake with though was in giving just about every animal sharp monster teeth, even the birds! I know it was probably just to make the perilous wildlife of Jumanji more frightening and fantastical, but the fangs were dumb guys, sorry! And the writing wasn't the wittiest ever but I thought the ideas of a lot of the episodes were fairly clever in how the challenge that they had to overcome was always built around the most wonderful rhyming clues, I wonder if the show's writers wrote down a lot of those profound limericks and then picked them out of a hat and decided how'd they'd construct a specific around the chosen clue. One of the best episodes is when they journey through the desert and find the fortress of one who declares himself the master of Jumanji, only for him to turn out to be just another lost player who never figured out his clue, and who with our heroes help eventually solves it by giving up on ever solving it, his clue being "Try as you might to escape your fate, you'll never pass through the gateless gate." Again the characters aren't the most super-interesting ever but they do grow on you, and by the end you really do care about them and want Alan to be freed from the game, which he finally is in the last episode, which I find to be a more satisfying ending than the one in the movie. I find that this series does a greater job of building on the world of Jumanji and really brings it to life, for me it took what I loved best about the movie and expanded on it, we get to see those "things you'll only see in your nightmares" and a lot more, it was awesome how it explored the lore without ever directly spelling out what it's really meant to mean, with Van Pelt's "hunt or be hunted" outlook seeming to sum it up. I loved the new villains and characters that they introduced, especially Tim Curry as the hilariously avaricious and tricky to deal with Trader Slick, who wasn't a villain exactly, although his items often proved to do the gang more harm than good! Another really cool new character was the seldom-seen Grim Reaper like Stalker who emerges from the fiery mechanical underworld of Jumanji whenever the game itself is threatened, now for an animated series he was just plain scary! So it's not a perfect show or quite as great as I once remembered, but it is still fun and inventive adventure to watch and definitely worth rediscovering as an unsung gem of a series from back in the day. Very cool beans! X
