New Hampshire city in ‘Jumanji' marks 30th anniversary with animal costume race
Madeline Murphy remembers the instructions she was given on the set of 'Jumanji' when she was an extra some 30 years ago: 'Pretend you're frightened and you're screaming because an elephant's coming after you.'
So, that's what she did in the Central Square of Keene, New Hampshire, running back and forth, over and over, on a long day in November 1994.
'I was pretty tired by the end of the day, and it was cold,' said Murphy, 61. She got a check for $60.47 — and several seconds of screen time.
Murphy was one of about 125 extras cast in the classic Robin Williams film, which is marking its 30th anniversary. It's spawned several sequels, including one planned for next year. The city of about 23,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state is celebrating its ties to 'Jumanji' this weekend.
A featured event is a 'Rhino Rumble Road Race' saluting the film's stampede scenes of elephants, rhinos and zebras on Saturday. Runners in inflatable animal costumes are sprinting about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) around the square.
There's also a cast party, a parade, and a scavenger hunt, among other events.
Keene gets picked thanks to coffee craving
Based on the 1981 children's book by Chris Van Allsburg about a mysterious jungle adventure board game, the movie version of 'Jumanji' is set in the fictional small town of Brantford, New Hampshire.
Veteran location manager Dow Griffith was crisscrossing New England in search of the right spot. A coffee lover who grew up in Seattle, he recalled feeling desperate one day for a good brew. He was a bit east of Keene at the time, and someone suggested a shop that was near the square.
'I took my cherished cup of double dry cappuccino out to the front porch, took a sip, looked to my left — and by God — there was the place I had been looking for!' he told The Associated Press. 'So really, we have coffee to thank for the whole thing.'
Scenes were filmed at the square that fall and the following spring. The fall scenes show a present-day town that had declined. Extras played homeless people and looters, in addition to panicked runners fleeing from the jungle animals.
Joanne Hof, now 78, had needed her son's help to spot herself behind the elephants, running with her hands up. Hof, a reading specialist, bought a videotape of 'Jumanji' and showed it to the kids she worked with.
'They were very impressed that I was in the movie,' she said.
The spring scenes, appearing early in the film, depict the town in 1969. Extras drove classic cars around the pristine-looking square and others walked around, dressed for that time period.
'I told the makeup person, 'Do you know how to do a French twist?'' recalled Kate Beetle, 74, of Alstead, who said she can be seen for 'a micro-second' crossing a street. 'They just found me the right lady's suit and right flat shoes, and then the hair is kind of what I suspect did it.'
The city helped transform itself
The 'Jumanji' crews worked well with the city in getting the permits to transform Central Square into a dilapidated, neglected piece of public property, recalled Patty Little, who recently retired as Keene's clerk.
'They brought in old, dead shrubbery and threw it around and made the paint peel on the gazebo,' she said. Items such as parking meters and lilac bushes were removed and a large Civil War-era statue was brought in to cover a fountain. Graffiti was on the walls and crumpled vehicles in the stampede scene were anchored in place.
Everything was restored, and fresh flowers were brought in the following spring, she said.
Crews spent a total of about a week in the city for both settings.
Little, whose classic 1961 Ambassador is caught on camera, could see everything happening from her office window.
'Did I get a lot of work done? I don't know during those days,' she said.
Locals watch and meet Robin Williams
A crowd turned out to watch a long-haired, bearded Williams run down the street in a leaf-adorned tunic. In the movie, he had just been freed from the game that had trapped him as a boy for years.
'He's shorter than I thought he was!' one viewer said, according to local chronicler Susan MacNeil's book, 'When Jumanji Came to Keene.' Others said, 'He has great legs — muscular, isn't he? But so hairy!' and 'Isn't he freezing dressed like that?'
The mayor honored him with a key to the city. Williams, noticing the mayor was a bit shorter, suddenly announced at the presentation, ''I am the mayor of Munchkinland,'' with a voice to match, City Councilor Randy Filiault recalled.
He stayed in character for 15 to 20 minutes, 'just bouncing off the walls,' approaching people in the audience and pulling their hats over their eyes. Eventually, he stopped, ending with a solemn 'Thank you,' Filiault said.
'I am really seeing something cool here,' Filiault remembered thinking. 'How fortunate we were.'
When Williams died by suicide in 2014, people left flowers and photos beneath a painted 'Parrish Shoes' wall sign advertising a fictional business left over from 'Jumanji.'
Former Keene police officer Joe Collins, who was assigned to watch over then-child actors Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce, also died by suicide, last year. Festival organizers planned a discussion about mental health and suicide prevention to pay tribute to Williams and Collins.
'I think Robin would have been impressed with that,' said Murphy, who met Williams and shook his hand.
___
In the U.S., the national suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Paris' iconic cauldron from the Olympic Games returns to light up summer nights
PARIS (AP) — A year after it captivated crowds during the Paris Olympics, a centerpiece of the summer Games is making a comeback. The iconic helium-powered balloon that attracted myriads of tourists during the summer Games has shed its Olympic branding and is now just called the 'Paris Cauldron.' It is set to rise again into the air later Saturday, lifting off over the Tuileries Garden. Around 30,000 people are expected to attend the launch, which coincides with France's annual street music festival — the Fete de la Musique, the Paris police prefecture said. And it won't be a one-time event. After Saturday's flight, the balloon will lift off into the sky each summer evening from June 21 to Sept. 14, for the next three years. The cauldron's ascent may become a new rhythm of the Parisian summer, with special flights planned for Bastille Day on July 14 and the anniversary of the 2024 opening ceremony on July 26. Gone is the official 'Olympic' branding — forbidden under IOC reuse rules — but the spectacle remains. The 30-meter (98-foot) -tall floating ring, dreamed up by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur and powered by French energy company EDF, simulates flame without fire: LED lights, mist jets and high-pressure fans create a luminous halo that hovers above the city at dusk, visible from rooftops across the capital. Though it stole the show in 2024, the cauldron was only meant to be temporary, not engineered for multi-year outdoor exposure. To transform it into a summer staple, engineers reinforced it. The aluminum ring and tether points were rebuilt with tougher components to handle rain, sun and temperature changes over several seasons. Though it's a hot-air-balloon-style, the lift comes solely from helium — no flame, no burner, just gas and engineering. The structure first dazzled during the Olympics. Over just 40 days, it drew more than 200,000 visitors, according to officials. Now anchored in the center of the drained Tuileries pond, the cauldron's return is part of French President Emmanuel Macron's effort to preserve the Games' spirit in the city, as Paris looks ahead to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Winnipeg Free Press
3 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
A book with bite
In her first work to be translated into English (by Pablo Strauss), Québec City-based poet, short story writer and novelist Mireille Gagné explores ecological and biological horror in the novella Horsefly. This slim eco-thriller is split into three perspectives. The first follows entomologist Thomas in 1942, recruited by the Allied forces to test and develop biological weapons which could be spread by insects. He and other scientists are isolated on Grosse Île, a remote island in the St. Lawrence River. In the same region of Québec, in 2024, lives Theodore, a somewhat shiftless young factory worker raised by his strict and emotionally distant grandfather Émeril. Theodore lives near the care home where Émeril is mistreated by the staff. News reports hint at a heatwave all across Québec that seems to coincide with a sharp spike in violence and inexplicable flights of rage. Emilie Dumais photo Mireille Gagné's latest was initially published in French in 2024 as Frappabord. The third perspective is the first-person (or insect) point of view of a female horsefly who carefully stalks Theodore and knows how this young man, his grandfather and the heatwave are connected to Thomas and the experiments carried out in 1942. After being bitten by the horsefly, Theodore becomes more impulsive and less apathetic, breaking Émeril out of the care home and taking him to the remote island where he once worked as a caretaker at a secret army base. Émeril's worsening dementia means he is often unable to tell the difference between the current moment and memories, and he begins to share memories that were never supposed to surface. The sections narrated by the horsefly are short and sweet, mainly concerned with setting the atmosphere. The fly is a sensual creature; its sections are consumed with the sweaty, bloody and vaguely erotic focus on biting Theodore and consuming his blood. This brevity works well and sets an ominous tone for the longer, more narrative-focused sections. A tight focus is used again when the narrative follows Thomas in 1942. Isolated not only on the remote Grosse Île army base, he is also forbidden from discussing his research with the other scientists, as they are forbidden such discussions with him. Tasked with finding an appropriate vector to spread anthrax, Thomas becomes fixated on a particular species of horsefly which breeds in the St. Lawrence. The flies are particularly aggressive and abundant on the island, making them the perfect specimen for his experiments. But the flies' persistence and numbers make them effectively unmanageable, bringing great risk to everyone at the facility. Theodore's sections are similarly compartmentalized and narrow in their scope, focusing purely on him and his small apartment and his spot on factory floor, branching out slightly once he takes Émeril from the care home, but the focus is less effective in this instance. Theodore's narrative is peppered with radio and news snippets describing a growing outbreak of rage and violence across Québec. While this would normally raise the stakes, the novella maintains a narrative distance from the outbreak, which is the main threat of the plot. While post-apocalyptic narratives often tighten their focus to individual stories to show the individual consequences of the larger scale happening, in Horsefly the threat to the world remains too vague to feel threatening. While there is some revelation concerning the flies and Thomas's research which remains grounded in realism, the nebulous 'rage virus' idea has been used before — in, for example, Danny Boyle's film 28 Days Later or Paul Tremblay's novel Survivor Song. Horsefly is certainly not a zombie novel – it's doing something quite different – but the parallel remains. Horsefly There's a fascinating idea at the core of Horsefly, but the tight and limited focus of the narrative keeps the dread off in the distance. It's certainly thought-provoking — the sections of Second World War-era Québec are a highlight — but readers expecting more horror may find this novella light on tension. Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.
Winnipeg Free Press
3 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
On the night table
Guy Gavriel Kay Author, Written on the Dark I often give shout outs to authors I've loved, not so much authors I've just read — but I've just read Karen Russell's new novel The Antidote, which is being talked up as a potential Pulitzer Prize winner. And I enjoyed that. Ted Davis photo Guy Gavriel Kay Buy on Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. I love Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel Prize Laureate; I think he's a sorcerer as a writer. I love Penelope Fitzgerald, the English writer — A.S. Byatt said she's the greatest English writer since the Second World War, which is pretty hyperbolic, but anybody who gets that said about them has something going for them. I read primarily contemporary fiction, and re-read a lot. As I get older, every fourth or fifth book I read is going back to something I loved. It's nervous making, because you might go back to a book you loved when you were an undergrad or 30 years old, or 15 years old, and find that it's not so great. It's a relief, almost, to re-read something 30 or 40 years later and say, 'wow, this really is good' — you feel good about yourself. The Antidote
