The Jumanji franchise films of 1995, 2017, and 2019 originally featuring Robin Williams and later Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are excellent adventure stories liked and remembered by the parents of trick-or-treaters of all ages. Children under 15 have no clue. This will be our Halloween theme.

Jumanji is an idea we have been batting around for years. There’s a lot of material to take from, but streamlining the story down into a small number of visual elements is a challenge. Visually, the movies are generically jungle-ly which makes it difficult to identify at a glance. The first movie has the iconic board game. This is changed into a video game in the later films for no plot-driven reason. There’s the statement about social and racial inequity from the first film, but that will be hard to squeeze in. The rest of the scenes are just people being chased around by plants and animals. That is with exception of one line: “Albino rhinos! They’re indigenous to Jumanji.”

We must build a rhinoceros.

The rhino was one of the more achievable gags that we tried to build. Granted, it was scaled back from making the full animal to just the head, but we’ve gotten pretty good at building large sculptures and mechanisms to move them. In this case it was papier-mâché on a cardboard form.

We figured that projecting the game board and the mysterious riddles that appear in the game on the front of the house was both achievable and would provide enough context for people to get the theme. That and the drum sound that is heard whenever player takes a turn in the game.

About half the people figured it out. There were a lot of good guesses: Jurassic Park, Tarzan, Jungle Cruise. Only people who had seen Jumanji had any real hope of getting it. And this refers only to the adults. None of the kids got it, save maybe two. That was part of the fun… for us.

There’s noting quite like opening the door and exclaiming “Welcome to Jumanji!” only to see utterly dumbfounded children respond “Trick or treat..?” Then, down the stairs, out in the darkness we hear a parent say “I told you it was Jumanji!” That is our definition of success.

As always, there were a bunch of gags that we tried to do, but couldn’t quite make work the way we wanted. There was a visual effect that was intended to emulate the magic green light that sucks you into the game as seen in the movies. This, we knew, would work only if we combined the lighting with fog. There were technical problems with hanging the fog machine close enough to the lighting to make the effect effective, but no matter. The fog blast itself ended up being the jump-scare of the night. C’est la vie.

With such great weather we surprised to receive only 204 kids. Maybe as many adults. These things ebb and flow as the neighborhood changes. It probably means that next year will be huge. We will have to prepare something special and well known. Perhaps our take on Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes? Kidding.

Spoiler: No, we did not roll a 30-ton ball down the stairs. But we thought about it.

One of the first hints we had on achieving this was in finding a still-frame of the idol room which we edited the pedestal out of. This we projected on the house so that we didn’t need to build the whole room. Falling rocks were animated over the image to simulate the destruction of the temple, triggered on a Sprite video player.

The pedestal was fabricated out of wood and carved foam with foam hardener. In the center was a pneumatic-driven lift mechanism with a Chachapoyan Fertility Idol that we bought on Etsy. Turns out you can buy anything on Etsy.

As an almost last minute addition, we introduced an ankle blaster on the stairs to simulate the blow dart scene. The compressed air blast worked really good as a scare because it was combined with a stereo blowgun sound effect that panned across the stairs. As in past years, the whole show was run on VenueMagic software.

In all, we had just over 200 kids. We’ll call it a “rebuilding” year. It was definitely the best prepared we have ever been with the setup mostly done at 3pm. Having friends Suchi and Sarath over to hand out candy also made the evening the easiest and most enjoyable we have ever had.