New Hampshire city in 'Jumanji' marks 30th anniversary with animal costume race

KEENE, N.H. (AP) — 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 has 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.

The festivities include a parade, scavenger hunt and a “Rhino Rumble Road Race” saluting the film’s stampede scenes of elephants, rhinos and zebras. Runners in inflatable animal costumes sprinted about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) around the square Saturday.

Juniper Thurston and her daughters Elska and Madison Christgau wore rhino costumes, which they said were difficult to run in but better ventilated than expected. Thurston, who lives in nearby Hancock, was 13 when “Jumanji” was filmed, and she remembers visiting Keene to watch her friends perform as extras.

“It was literally right here -- it was amazing,” Thurston said. “It was just wild, and to be here today and be able to have a small part our own stampede is kind of awesome.”

Elska Christgau, 9, said everyone in her family loves the film, and that her favorite part is “the mystery and the Jumanji game” itself.

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 microsecond" 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 “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.

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

Associated Press writer Leah Willingham in Keene contributed to this report.

Children in inflatable costumes participate in the 'Rhino Rumble Road Race' to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film 'Jumanji' in downtown Keene, N.H. on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

Crowds dressed in inflatable costumes participate in the 'Rhino Rumble Road Race' to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film 'Jumanji' in downtown Keene, N.H. on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

Juniper Thurston, right, and 9-year-old daughter Madison Christgau celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film 'Jumanji' by wearing inflatable rhino costumes in downtown Keene, N.H. on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

Crowds dressed in inflatable costumes participate in the 'Rhino Rumble Road Race' to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film 'Jumanji' in downtown Keene, N.H. on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

Crowds dressed in inflatable costumes participate in the 'Rhino Rumble Road Race' to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film 'Jumanji' in downtown Keene, N.H. on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.

To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.

“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”

Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.

Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.

The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.

Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.

Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.

But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.

As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.

The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”

Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”

The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.

The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.

But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.

In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.

The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.

Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.

“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.

Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.

That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)