JumpStart

Edutainment Game series created by Knowledge Adventure for kids up to sixth grade. The series consists of several games, each one dedicated either to a specific grade level (apparently "baby" and "toddler" are grades now) or to a specific subject. There was also a JumpStart Typing that featured the return of the Jump Start 3rd Grade cast.

The series is still going strong now, but this article will nonetheless basically devote itself to the JumpStart games released in The Nineties since that's when we played on them.

Not to be confused with the newspaper comic strip of the same title.

"Maggie: Do you work for the Park Service?
 * Alphabet Soup Cans
 * Badly-Battered Babysitter: Botley's purpose until the writers forgot/didn't care anymore.
 * Barefoot Cartoon Animal: C.J. Frog.
 * Blank White Eyes: Jo Hammet has these, along the same lines as Little Orphan Annie
 * Catapult Nightmare: Jo Hammet, in the opening Cutscene of the fifth grade game.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Jo Hammet, the Kid Detective heroine of the fifth grade game, in varying degrees depending which lines you pick for her in the Dialogue Trees. Most of this is directed at Maggie Mead, the lady who runs the town mine shaft and whom Jo is convinced is the most boring person who ever lived. A sample of their relationship:

Jo: Why yes! Actually, I'm the director of the Park Service down from Yosemite! How did you know?

Maggie: Lying will get you nowhere."


 * The snarkier lines do get you nowhere, so they're clearly trying to teach An Aesop about not being a smartass. Which doesn't make selecting them any less fun.
 * Dialogue Tree
 * Difficulty Levels
 * Direct to Video: Two animated videotapes were included with early 2000s re-releases of JumpStart Preschool and JumpStart Kindergarten.
 * The End of the World As We Know It: You have to prevent this in Jump Start 3rd Grade and JumpStart 6th Grade.
 * Fetch Quest: Most games in the series, especially those for third grade and over, are basically a series of these.
 * Four-Fingered Hands: Jo Hammet and all the other characters in JumpStart 5th Grade.
 * Free-Range Children: Seriously, what were Jo Hammet's parents thinking? Would you let your ten-year-old daughter skateboard around the city at night, dodging a madman's goons and breaking into sabotaged industrial plants? And there's no way they couldn't have known about it because it's implied that she became the town hero. Of course, the game solves this issue by just never showing or mentioning her parents.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: In JumpStart 5th Grade, they managed to get away with making an educational game for kids as young as nine in which the main plot involved disarming bombs. Not to mention the fact that the heroine rides around on a skateboard without a helmet...
 * Hey It's That Voice: Jo Hammet is voiced by Kath Soucie.
 * And Botley is voiced by Carl Foutley and Pau.
 * Grey Delisle voiced Keisha the koala in "Artist".
 * Idle Animation
 * Keep Circulating the Torrents: The original JumpStart Adventures 4th Grade has had no rerelease. But given the fact that the game is almost like a Survival Horror...maybe it's best to save that until they're more mature!
 * Lock and Key Puzzle
 * Mad Libs Dialogue (used very jarringly in the earliest games: "The ball is on the... forty-nine... yard line.")
 * Justified in the 4th Grade Adventure games where you are playing Mad Libs.
 * Plot Coupon
 * Pop Up Video Games
 * Think of the Censors: Combined with Nonstandard Game Over in 5th Grade. If you fail to disarm one of Dr. X's bombs, Jo breaks the fourth wall to inform you that you have to try again because bombs can't go off in an educational game.
 * Tomboy: Jo Hammet, the protagonist on the fifth grade game. In some subsequent products, she is given a Girliness Upgrade and drawn in a much less stylized art style, becoming completely unrecognizable.
 * Warp Whistle: While in the report card's screen, clicking on any of the subject names will bring the user to the game designed to build that skill.