Jackie Chan is a natural for children's entertainment. Even though his movies involve lots of fighting and dangerous stuntwork, Chan is a showman at heart, a crowd-pleasing clown. It was only a matter of time before he created something specifically for the kiddies.

The hour-long Jackie Chan Adventures: The Shadow of the Shendu collects three pieced-together but interconnected cartoons. Jackie and his 11-year-old niece Jade need to prevent three magic talismans from falling into the wrong hands. In the first tale, they hunt for a powerful dragon talisman; in the second, a rat talisman animates one of Jade's toys; in the third, a serum turns Jackie into a statue—only the horse talisman can save him!

The animation is pretty clunky, certainly not to the standards of recent feature animation, and not even up to such TV fare as Samurai Jack and Invader Zim. This is typical Saturday morning cartoon material. To give it its due, though, the writing is above average, and some of the jokes are amusing.

Columbia Tristar presents Jackie Chan Adventures: The Shadow of the Shendu in its original 1.33:1 full-frame aspect ratio. Video quality is a mixed blessing. Sharpness and detail are fine. Colors are vibrant and well-rendered, and blacks are deep. However, aliasing is a real problem on large sets, lending a blurriness to the image.

The audio presentation is in stereo, and is obviously not a surround-sound powerhouse. That being said, the dialog and music come across very cleanly.

The disc includes a very short featurette that has children interviewing the real Jackie Chan.