howdy my name's danny - he/him - 27 years old - goth/punk - autistic - disabled - cane user- cishet- white - leaning so far left i can't even see the democrats
the thing is i wouldn’t say pizza bites taste like pizza per say but they definitely feel like little pockets of flesh filled with gore which is a different but equally fun experience
I have a whole article about it on my website but please ask me to over share the lore of the 1996 Jumanji cartoon series
Oh did something else go around about it at some point???
The Jumanji animated series was largely the product of the late Everett Peck, also known as the creator of Duckman and a creature/character design for The Real Ghostbusters. I haven’t seen the 2017 and 2019 Jumanji movies, but I’ve heard that they borrow a few broad concepts from this series and even feature some direct subtle references to it, however they are nowhere near as surreal or as dark.
According to this series, “Jumanji” is a malevolent entity of unknown origin that manifests for equally unknown reasons as an immersive jungle-themed game world. Here are some facts about this world:
The sun is a satellite and the sky is an animated tarp. On the other side of the sky is possibly an endless, empty white void.
There are various “NPC villains” like the big game hunter, a religious fanatic ape, a guy who’s clearly coded as a misplaced nazi general and others but it is eventually revealed they may have all been normal people “taken” by the game. If one of them is killed the game will seek to transform anyone it can into a replacement for that character.
The show avoids depicting “jungle people” by instead having strange creatures who are themselves wooden masks, but an episode implies that these are another former human “NPC,” and in this case, they’re what happens to children who could never return home.
One of the villains is a mad inventor who can create fully sentient mechanical creatures, so there’s also robots, but we also find out that a great deal of the actual animals in the game world are just robots as well. They still eat and live like animals, but they’re hyper-advanced and ambiguously magical “animatronics.”
Within the Jumanji world is an artifact similar to the Hellraiser puzzle cube that will take you deeper down into a game-within-a-game, a horrifying biomechanical netherworld, and it’s possible somewhere in this reality there’s another supernatural game to get sucked into, and so on and so forth.
We never find out what the entity is or its true motivations - Allen (the Robin Williams character) says it’s just an evil thing that “eats children” - but if you manage to “cheat” or break its rules it will chase you down in its personal avatar, a reaper that kills everything it touches. This is also when we see that there’s giant clockwork gears under the ground.
Also just really like these sirens from the nautical episode
Also the mad inventor is named Ibsen after the playwright Henrik Ibsen as a reference to his play The Master Builder. Jumanji’s Ibsen is also voiced by William Sanderson, who played JF Sebastian the toymaker in Blade Runner, and Jumanji’s Ibsen is pretty much an evil version of the Blade Runner character.
Surprisingly sophisticated references considering this is a movie tie-in cartoon.
Also it’s been pointed out in conversations about the movie that Van Pelt works as the main villain as he’s a big villain for the jungle and nature; a rich, white man who ruins the environment and slaughters endangered animals for sport. Taking this into consideration, perhaps in-universe Ibsen’s persona is a reference to Blade Runner (since the original book has almost all animals be extinct) and whatever force is behind Jumanji has a decent knowledge of popular culture? Ibsen does have a big factory that generates a lot of smoke and ploughs down trees in his vehicles so he is just as much an enemy of nature as Van Pelt is.
I mean, in the episode where they entered a cross between their hometown Brantford and Jumanji, it was the cop who became the Van Pelt equivalent.
Yeah that’s another thing, the three main NPC villains are almost all caricatures of people who traditionally exploit a jungle or its inhabitants; there’s a hunter, an industrialist, and a shifty salesman (played by Tim Curry!)
A lot of the one-off villains are also characters who would have been “outsiders” to a jungle setting and it makes you wonder if Jumanji used to be possibly some sort of rainforest spirit or god twisted by bitterness for humanity.
The little mask children actually “worship” it but also fear it; they try to appease it for their freedom and only act on its behalf when they know the alternative is that it’ll kill everyone.
The more plot points or details anyone reminds me of this show the more it sounds just absolutely sick and I wish it had just gotten a better finale. The last episode is so rushed, it’s mostly a clip show ☹️
You might have thought card sharks and loan sharks were named after the predatory fish, but apparently there’s a decent chance it’s the other way around from an old Dutch word meaning “person that takes unfair advantage of other people”. Before that they were known in English as a haye or dogfish, which means sometime in the ~1400s enough English sailors started saying “don’t get in the water, it’s infested with those jerks”
