Where to watch Jumanji (1995)

Trivia & production notes

• Chris Van Allsburg wrote a draft of the screenplay and contributed a film treatment that added story material not present in his original book, which helped convince the studio to continue the project when it was close to being abandoned.
• Robin Williams initially declined the role but agreed to star after director Joe Johnston and the writing team completed extensive rewrites of the script.
• Director Joe Johnston was concerned that Robin Williams would improvise extensively and deviate from the script, but Williams committed to filming scenes as written, occasionally doing duplicate takes where he was permitted to ad-lib with co-star Bonnie Hunt.
• Industrial Light Magic developed two new software programs specifically for Jumanji: iSculpt for creating realistic facial expressions on computer-generated animals, and the first program ever to generate realistic digital hair.
• Bradley Pierce spent three and a half hours daily getting prosthetic makeup applied for two and a half months to film scenes of his character's transformation into a monkey.
• The film was dedicated to visual effects supervisor Stephen L. Price, who died before Jumanji's release.
• Filming took place across multiple locations including Keene, New Hampshire, North Berwick, Maine, and Vancouver, British Columbia, where a mock-up of the Parrish house and the Sir Save-A-Lot store sequence were constructed.
• The VHS release of Jumanji became the 7th best-selling video in the United States for 1996.
• In the United Kingdom, Jumanji was released on DVD as a special edition bundled together with the Jumanji board game.
• Roger Ebert criticized the film's PG rating, arguing it should have been PG-13, and compared Peter's monkey transformation to something from The Wolf Man that could traumatize young children.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Jumanji (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.