Parents' Guide to Legends of the Hidden Temple: The Movie

With plenty of touchstones for the series' original fans -- and rollicking kid adventure for the uninitiated -- this special is solid whole-family watching. Thirty-something viewers of the original game show may find themselves pointing and pausing to explain the significance of silver snakes, Temple guards, or a great big stone head that sets the siblings off on their quest by narrating the temple's backstory. Don't expect anything great on that front -- Olmec's (Dee Bradley Baker) reason for purposely turning his entire kingdom into stone turns out to be a conflict between his good son Zuma and his bad son Thak, even though we're never told exactly why Zuma's so good and Thak's so bad. Never mind, and never mind that Thak's a cardboard villain and he and his group of henchmen are primarily distinguished by face makeup and ragged costumes; this is a show about adventure, not emotion or realism.

There's adventure aplenty, too, with a new challenge awaiting in each room of the Temple: quicksand, snakes that have to be placed into empty spots in Medusa's hissing stone crown, a giant chasm that stands between the adventurers and the next quest -- not the mention the fact that Noah, Dudley, and Sadie have parents who are worried their kids are lost inside a crummy old theme park set. Bypassing each challenge is generally a matter of pushing a button or bravely attempting a jump rather than them using their wits, and everything works out predictably. But for nostalgia and Goonies-lite thrills, this production scores.