VGFlicks: Jumanji: The Next Level (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

I realized I had accumulated far too many video game movies to review, and therefore I decided to knock three this year. Even better, they'll share a common theme: “Trapped in a virtual world”. I would have said “game world”, but that’s not entirely accurate for all three; Heck, I don’t know whether “virtual world” really counts for today’s movie, either. Depends how you see it.

Truly an all-star cast. Pictured: Five teenagers, actually.

Of all the franchises to make a resurgence, I think nobody expected Jumanji to return after the 1990s with a new movie, Welcome to the Jungle, in 2017. Before then, all the franchise had was one movie, one TV show, and an unconnected movie with a similar concept. Then, suddenly, we’ve got a new Jumanji game, in which the board game has morphed into a cartridge to entice modern-age kids. Thus, we followed five new characters: Spencer Gilpin, Anthony “Fridge” Johnson, Bethany Walker and Martha Kaply, who got sucked into the video game the first time and became their characters. They even rescued another player, Alex Vreeke, who had been trapped in the game for 21 years. They overcame the game’s challenges and returned to their world, and Alex went back to 1996.

I covered Welcome to the Jungle in January 2019; that same year, on December 13th, the sequel, The Next Level, came out in theaters. Surely, the only way to make a sequel to this would be to either introduce new characters, or teach the previous characters new lessons they haven’t learned yet. Both? Both is good. Also, the next sequel is coming out this December, so I figured I’d do this one on time before I forget again!

The Longing

Beautiful locales, and she's still on her phone? Well, at least
it's to talk plans with her friends...

The movie opens two years after Welcome to the Jungle, to scenes of our main four characters, and how their previous adventures in Jumanji changed them. Former alpha girl Bethany (Madison Iseman) lives for the great outdoors, doing volunteer work in gorgeous areas of the world. Martha (Morgan Turner) and Spencer (Alex Wolff) graduated and are now attending different universities. Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) is as athletic as ever, as we see him training before replying to the others' offer for a meetup.

Needlejuice Records: Other Album Recommendations

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

I figured I’d do this one real quick, because I mostly talked about one band last Friday, and figured I’d expand a bit. One thing I noticed that was missing from my previous Needlejuice articles was a quick mention of other albums I recommend for each band and/or artist I discuss. There’s a lot of artists signed onto the label, and though many of them have multiple albums on it, they also frequently have albums that aren’t on there.

I figured I’d give many of them a little bit of extra visibility by listing the albums I, personally, enjoyed the most and felt like adding to my own collection. Not every band discussed across these past articles is listed here; I already covered everything I’ve got from Nuclear Bubble Wrap, and some bands haven’t wowed me to the point of getting more. I might also discuss in a later article some albums listed below that are indeed available on the label, so this list is bound to be modified over time. The albums for each band/artist are listed chronologically.

So, to make this quick, and in the order that I’ve talked about them: The list!

Eldren: Welcome to Deathville

Blinker the Star: Still in Rome, Songs from Laniakea Beach, Love Oblast, Animal Math, Occult Classic

Ookla the Mok: oh okay LA, vs. Evil

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: *takes a deep breath* Float Along – Fill Your Lungs, I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, Nonagon Infinity, Polygondwanaland, Gumboot Soup, Infest the Rats’ Nest, Live in San Francisco '16, K.G., L.W., Omnium Gatherum, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, The Silver Cord, Flight b741 *phew!*

Nick Lutsko: Ends

Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears: The Shredding Tears, Mad Valentines, Daffy’s Elixir, (and a side-project) Evil Arrows EP 1 & EP 3

Marc with a C: Popular Music, Flowers for Analog, (and a side-project) Have an Okay Time with Claire and the Potatoes!

Not necessarily a big list, but one I felt was worth sharing anyway.

Needlejuice Records: A Nuclear Bubble Wrap Special

NEEDLEJUICE RECORDS

Mystery Boxes: 2022 – 2023 (Part 1) – 2023 (Part 2)

NBW Special

Other album recommendations

I’m hard at work on the next articles, since I have huge plans for VGFlicks this time around. Plus, I didn’t get a mystery box of music last year, so I figured I’d just go through fewer albums this year.

I’ve done this intro each year since 2024 now: Needlejuice Records is an indie label from Nashville, Tennessee, that I greatly enjoy. I started off knowing just one band from their lineup, then expanded thanks to mystery boxes, and now I’m going as far as to try and at least hear everything their artists have put out. Some bands I’ve discovered this way are now big favorites of mine. Are you into indie rock? Maybe metal? Prog? Techno? Punk? Vaporwave/slushwave? Comedy music? Damn near every genre’s covered in some fashion. The label is very LGBTQ+-friendly, and has both a Bandcamp page and a website. (And a Discord server, too, accessible from Bandcamp.)

This time, I’ll do things differently by focusing on a specific band. This journey of mine began with one musical act: Nuclear Bubble Wrap (shortened NBW), whom I discovered around 2010. Crazy to think that’s been 15 years. Songs from the band were posted to a forum dedicated to “Weird Al” Yankovic by the band’s frontperson (and one of its singers), Jace McLain, which is how I first discovered them. McLain, one of the founders of Needlejuice Records, still puts out music both with this band and as a part of a few side-projects.

I did buy some physical albums from the label in 2024, including an anniversary box set of NBW’s fourth album, Exploding Head Syndrome (shortened EHS), packed with three additional CDs – so instead of bogging down a whole list of 10 albums with constant repetition, I figured I’d just dedicate an article to covering all four discs. Along with the other album of theirs I’ve got that I haven’t covered yet. And maybe throw in another album that felt like foreshadowing towards the existence of the label.

Once again, I rank from my favorite to the least favorite, starting with…

Psycho Delicacy

This was the first NBW, non-EP album to be made up entirely of original songs (zero parodies) that all have either a comedic or psychedelic edge. Sometimes both. At a sprawling 72 minutes and 21 songs, Psycho Delicacy, released on May 13th, 2014, is NBW’s longest official album, funded through Kickstarter. I backed it; along with the physical CD, my reward included a bonus disc containing demos from their next album, Multiverses, and other random songs.

Retrospective 2025

Ughhhhhhhhhh…

For your sake and mine, I’ll spare you ten paragraphs of intense screaming at everything that was wrong this year. This fucking year. 2026 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better, either. But god damn, 2025 was probably the worst year I’ve ever lived through. And look – for me, personally, years never go THAT badly. I keep my job, I am financially stable, I have decent relationships, the blog is doing well (in fact, it’s doing better than it’s ever been). But as someone with some empathy and who feels the need to keep track of news, these past twelve months were some of the most mentally and emotionally exhausting shit I’ve had to deal with.

I knew we were in for a bad time all the way back in January when-

CRAP! I said I wasn’t gonna do that! Okay, you know what? I’m going to focus on the blog. ‘Cause I really, REALLY don’t want to start on another tangent with all this. (And I’m holding back, ‘cause gaming, in general, has been a huge bearer of shitty news all year, from Nintendo’s attempt at patenting creature-battling to all the game development studios going mask-off with A.I. at the end of the year and – Dammit! Moving on!)

But it’s like I said. My year? On a purely personal standpoint? It was alright. Speaking strictly of employment and hobbies, that is. I think I mostly stayed true to my desire to keep this blog as a pure hobby, so that’s at least a net positive. I’ve written articles I had wanted to do for a while (the Sonic movies, Pokémon Sun/Moon and their rereleases), and I once again covered a decent number of games across the year. (If we count all the ones I covered in my itch.io and Nintendo Classics articles, then I technically covered more games this year than ever before, but… should those really count, with how short most of them were?) I'm just glad I started both of these, too, as they're two concepts I quite enjoy writing for.

I didn’t overshoot too badly with my Year Plans, but I think I could have done even more if I hadn’t landed myself a Balatro addiction. (Seriously. I’m 250+ hours in.) Perhaps the best blog-related achievement this year was the sheer number of views. It took me from 2013 to 2024 to reach a million views on the blog, then 2025 casually comes around and boosts those numbers by 450,000! For a short time around the last week of October and the first of November, I got over 9,000 views per day. Several days in a row. Ever since October, I’ve been getting over 55k views per month, blowing my previous record of views in a month (40k, back in May 2017) right out of the water. I still have no idea where this sudden spike came from, but hey, I’m not gonna complain!

Slowly but surely, I’m going through my collection – now, if only I wasn’t buying damn near as many games as I finish… Okay, enough chitchat, time for the yearly lists.