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 Dark Hand Returns 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—the Dark Hand of Evil. In the first tale, they hook up with a jewel thief named Viper to hunt the snake talisman; in the second, their adventure is a fun take on the tortoise and the hare as they search for the rabbit talisman; in the third, Jade learns astral projection, thanks to the sheep talisman!

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 Dark Hand Returns 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.