Written by: Mitch McKinley
I was one of the lucky ones. I grew up watching things like Huckelberry Hound, Quickdraw McGraw and Ricochet Rabbit. I have often spent hours watching “kid-friendly” programming with my kids and wondering what happened to the stuff I used to watch and wishing that I could trust what was being broadcast to be acceptable for my kids. Those options just don’t seem to be available anymore. But then I met Greg Shumsky and was introduced to Jackalope Jim, a bionic bunny lawman with a faith in God, and Jackalope Junction.
Before we give you the history, we must clue you in on the real inspiration behind what you are about to read. In Greg’s own words:
“I believe that God inspired all this and gave me the idea to create something truly unique and wonderful that already has touched hundreds if not thousands of people so far - something that’s wholesome, lovely, and pure. Something that the whole family can enjoy, from a planned television series, to books, to my story park - a fully immersive experience that’s never been done before.”
The idea for Jackalope Junction was born from a combination of thigs in Greg’s mind while he was working for a graphic design studio called Storyland Studios.
“There's a little bit of history to it. Storyland Studios was a company founded and led by Christians. I really wanted to get into theme park design and landed a job with them as a designer,” Greg shared.
He had always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer, so this job became a dream come true, years in the making. He eventually got to work on projects for Disney, Universal and others.
He and his wife also shared a love of collecting vintage items. She likes furniture while Greg prefers “fun and cool” stuff like vintage cameras and toys.
The final piece of the inspiration came from an old amusement park Greg visited as a kid. “There's this little abandoned amusement park out in San Diego in the East County area called Marshall Scotty’s. It was a little western town. It had amusement rides; pony rides, and it had covered wagons to do birthday parties in. So, as kids, we used to go out there for birthday parties all the time and our friends would go.
"It was kind of our miniature version of Disneyland, more or less. We didn't care that it wasn’t Disneyland. It was fun. It was inexpensive for my parents to go. It was really a family place,” Greg said.
That park eventually went out of business and then eventually became another place called Frasers Frontier. Greg’s dad was even involved with both parks. He knew the owners and assisted with paving and grading. Frasers didn’t last forever either and eventually shut down. The site has been abandoned since 1996.
“Since 1996 it's been abandoned. In ‘96, they had a flood. And, because it's in the middle of a massive flood zone, they had had a creek that ran through it that kept everything at bay. Something happened to the creek, and it flooded. It sat empty and a family came in and bought it. They decided they wanted to put up retirement housing. But they couldn’t because of the way the property was zoned. They eventually rented it out at Halloween for a big scary haunted trail.
"They call it the Haunted Amusement Park, or something silly like that,” he recalled.
Greg and his wife would drive past it every now and then on their way to some vintage markets in the same area. “I kept thinking, ‘Gee, it'd be cool to buy it and tear it all down, regrade it. We could rebuild it as a little western town with shops, restaurants, some amusement rides, and a couple of roadside attractions.’”
Greg imagined things like a gravity house like one up in northern California and a walk-through mining cave. It would be a fun little place where to go have dinner or lunch, maybe hit some vintage stores within the park.
“I mentioned this idea to one of my bosses at Storyland, Mel McGowan. I said, ‘You know, it would be kind of cool if there was little Western theme park.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that's a great idea. You should pursue that.’ He told me to go look at Tom's Farms. So, we made a trip up to Corona, which is not far from where I was working. I went and saw Tom's Farms and I thought it was cool."
Unfortunately, that park wasn’t without issues that Greg would prefer to not replicate. Much of what was there was free. You had to buy tickets for certain things, like the train ride. They had some shops and restaurants and a candy store in a farmer’s market.
“The one element I didn't like was biker gangs and stuff coming in, and some of those didn’t really give the impression of being ‘family friendly’ with all their beer and stuff. They go sit, drink beer and listen to live music. They weren't particularly rowdy or anything, but I thought I wouldn’t want that element specifically. So, I thought we could fence it off.
"We'll charge an admission to get in. And I thought, well, this needs to become something more than just a small little theme park. We still want to make it affordable, but we needed a little bit more. It will have some live entertainment and some different areas where people can go do a picnic. We could potentially have an overnight camping experience where they can sleep under the stars, which a lot of families don't get to do.”
The gears in Greg’s mind would not shut down. “I thought, ‘Well, if it's a theme park, it needs to have a Mickey Mouse. What's our Mickey Mouse? Who will our lead character be?”
Greg immediately drew from his childhood. As a child, he and his family would visit North Dakota. As they traveled through Wyoming, he started to see items centered around a creature called a jackalope.
“I've always loved jackalopes since I was a kid,” he said. “When I saw those on our trips, I thought that is the coolest thing ever. I love rabbits and these are like warrior rabbits. How cool is that, so, we landed on the jackalope.”
Greg’s dad was James Robert, but he went by Jim. In a nod to honoring his father, Jackalope Jim was born. So, now Greg had a leading character. But….
“What am I going name this place? What sounds Western? What sounds, you know, Old West? Junction? Jackalope Junction. Sure, why not?” Greg said.
But what would he look like?
“One of my kids said, ‘Why don’t you give Jim a bionic arm?’” And the concept of fusing the old west with steam punk as the theme began to take shape. The author Jules Verne used some of the same conceptually imagery in his writing.
“Jules Verne is more a technological version of the Old West, but it's still about, you know, people,” he told us. “People love the idea of forging out into danger in the wilderness, surviving, facing death and overcoming that. That's just innately within every one of us.
I believe the Old West happened that Jules Vern tapped into that, and I thought, ‘OK, we're gonna do steampunk western park.’”
So, Greg started doing some sketches of Jackalope Jim but didn’t really like him.
“I had some friends that were some famous cartoonists. I had a buddy of mine from Pixar, Victor Navone, who's a great guy, and I've known him forever. I said, ‘Hey, can you take a look of this?’ He said, ‘No, I'm too busy.’ So, we kept working on this and then I finally said, ‘Can you try one more time?’ he said’, ‘Yeah, I got time now.’
"So, he gave me a bunch of sketches and I picked out one of these and one of these, and one of these, and started photoshopping different elements as our guide. So, he did the the the sketch we have now. The cartoon version of Jackalope Jim that we have now is his.”
Names and a character and a look…but something was still missing…a story. “OK. Well, if Jim is missing an arm, I thought to myself, why is he missing an arm? It is the late 1800’s. Was he in the Civil War? Did he lose his arm in the Civil War like lots of other men did.
Yeah, that's possible…but that's not tragic enough, though. What's a good tragedy?
"And I thought, ‘Well, he was born without it.’ He was born without an arm, so now you've got this character. He's got a mom and a dad. His mom is a jack rabbit, his dad is an antelope. So, he is a mixed breed to start with, and he is born with no arm.” His parents love him to death, His grandfather is a preacher. They are all inventors and tinkerers and stuff. And his dad and grandad build him a bionic arm, complete with a specialized gun that only he can use.
“So, I thought, ‘OK, I got something there.’ And of course, he becomes the fastest draw in the West. That invites trouble to his house because bad guys are bad guys. The protagonists I created are called the Slippery Slope Gang and they're the worst of the worst.”
They find out about Jim and his bionics. They want the arm. They want the gun.
"So, they come to the house one night where Jim lives, and they break in. His mom and dad put up a big fight and get killed. Jim's only 10 years old at this point. They are killed and he barely escapes with his life and goes live with his grandpa. In that life, he gets raised in the church, but he has his chip on his shoulder.
“So, he's now 15, and he gets word that the Slippery Slope Gang are in another town. He goes this other town to go find them and kill them,” Greg detailed. “But he gets there, and the town is messed up. The bad guys are gone and the town’s a mess.”
The townspeople have heard of Jim and the legend of the bionic arm. They have heard that he is the fastest draw in the west. They want him to stay and be their sheriff. So, he agrees to stay for a few years and clean up the town. Then he hears another town where this gang may be, and he arrives to find the same scenario. This cycle repeats itself for years.
Finally, when Jim is in his 30’s, he arrives at a town that is almost completely abandoned. But he meets some people who stayed behind to rebuild, and he joins them. That town is called Jackalope Junction.
And this is where everything transpires. This is where all the characters come together. “Now, we do have some human characters. We have Cyborg gunslingers. We have robots," Greg said.
There are scores of characters, both good and bad, that lend themselves to the overarching story of Jackalope Jim and his pursuit of the Slippery Slope Gang, but we cannot give you all their names and their stories. Something must be left to your imagination and pursuit of this story as Greg and his team create and portray it.
Greg wanted characters that were relatable to everyone (without including all the DEI nonsense) and added to the story. And he certainly captured that.
“If you write the characters well enough and you base them off reality, off people I knew growing up that became cops, that became sheriffs, and friends that were this or that that, it just plays better. The bad guys are based on people that I encountered in my life that are just the worst of the worst. But we make them almost a comic element because they're so bad that they are bad at being bad. Kind of the Dastard and Muttley type.”
Greg pointed to seemingly bygone generation. “When you and I grew up, we had heroes, right? Sports heroes, comic book heroes, people that you could aspire to be alike, that you can model and become a good person from. You don't have that anymore. Peppa Pig is not that. She's terrible to her parents, which I don't get how popular that is, and then you have all these shows where the kids are right?, the parents are wrong. You can get away with breaking the law. You can get away with not following the rules. There are no consequences for making wrong choices.”
But there is hope.
“It's not the end of the world. You can overcome it. And that is what Jackalope Junction is about. It becomes this town where people have come to because they know they're not gonna get laughed at. You know, people get along. They care about each other. They support each other. They love each other. It becomes a big family and there's new people that show up that are outcasts from somewhere, because the church calls us to love one another.
"This is not just a story, but it's about bringing back wholesome values to family entertainment as the other companies out there that we trusted so much are doing the whole wokeness thing.
"Our job is to bring back Biblical values to family entertainment. We want to go back to the times of the Waltons or to the Andy Griffith show or other shows that taught lessons.” So, how exactly is Greg going to do this?
“So, we're doing a television show, a TV series. We're working on the pilot right now, which is live action with some animation for flashbacks. And the park, it turned from this idea of this little park to what I call story park. It will be a fully immersive experience. Jackalope Junction, where you walk in and you actually will time travel you into the town through some Imagineering cause I've got Imagineers working with me through some special effects and you'll you think you're there.”
They eventually want to put in a hotel and an event venue with a banquet hall and similar offerings so that they can host corporate events, family events, weddings, and other gatherings.
“We want to grow eventually over time, but but stay within the story. That's what Jackalope Junction is at its heart, a place where people can feel loved.”
Who wouldn’t be on board with this type of creativity and endeavor to provide family entertainment and restore some values in our everyday thinking, especially in the hearts and minds of our kids.
Greg sums it up perfectly: “We just need to find the perfect home for it, and the perfect partners or investors who believe in it just as much as I do.”
If you are looking for a way to invest, contribute or just be a part in some way, please email Greg at info@acornentertainmentgroup.com.
I was one of the lucky ones. I grew up watching things like Huckelberry Hound, Quickdraw McGraw and Ricochet Rabbit. I have often spent hours watching “kid-friendly” programming with my kids and wondering what happened to the stuff I used to watch and wishing that I could trust what was being broadcast to be acceptable for my kids. Those options just don’t seem to be available anymore. But then I met Greg Shumsky and was introduced to Jackalope Jim, a bionic bunny lawman with a faith in God, and Jackalope Junction.
Before we give you the history, we must clue you in on the real inspiration behind what you are about to read. In Greg’s own words:
“I believe that God inspired all this and gave me the idea to create something truly unique and wonderful that already has touched hundreds if not thousands of people so far - something that’s wholesome, lovely, and pure. Something that the whole family can enjoy, from a planned television series, to books, to my story park - a fully immersive experience that’s never been done before.”
The idea for Jackalope Junction was born from a combination of thigs in Greg’s mind while he was working for a graphic design studio called Storyland Studios.
“There's a little bit of history to it. Storyland Studios was a company founded and led by Christians. I really wanted to get into theme park design and landed a job with them as a designer,” Greg shared.
He had always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer, so this job became a dream come true, years in the making. He eventually got to work on projects for Disney, Universal and others.
He and his wife also shared a love of collecting vintage items. She likes furniture while Greg prefers “fun and cool” stuff like vintage cameras and toys.
The final piece of the inspiration came from an old amusement park Greg visited as a kid. “There's this little abandoned amusement park out in San Diego in the East County area called Marshall Scotty’s. It was a little western town. It had amusement rides; pony rides, and it had covered wagons to do birthday parties in. So, as kids, we used to go out there for birthday parties all the time and our friends would go.
"It was kind of our miniature version of Disneyland, more or less. We didn't care that it wasn’t Disneyland. It was fun. It was inexpensive for my parents to go. It was really a family place,” Greg said.
That park eventually went out of business and then eventually became another place called Frasers Frontier. Greg’s dad was even involved with both parks. He knew the owners and assisted with paving and grading. Frasers didn’t last forever either and eventually shut down. The site has been abandoned since 1996.
“Since 1996 it's been abandoned. In ‘96, they had a flood. And, because it's in the middle of a massive flood zone, they had had a creek that ran through it that kept everything at bay. Something happened to the creek, and it flooded. It sat empty and a family came in and bought it. They decided they wanted to put up retirement housing. But they couldn’t because of the way the property was zoned. They eventually rented it out at Halloween for a big scary haunted trail.
"They call it the Haunted Amusement Park, or something silly like that,” he recalled.
Greg and his wife would drive past it every now and then on their way to some vintage markets in the same area. “I kept thinking, ‘Gee, it'd be cool to buy it and tear it all down, regrade it. We could rebuild it as a little western town with shops, restaurants, some amusement rides, and a couple of roadside attractions.’”
Greg imagined things like a gravity house like one up in northern California and a walk-through mining cave. It would be a fun little place where to go have dinner or lunch, maybe hit some vintage stores within the park.
“I mentioned this idea to one of my bosses at Storyland, Mel McGowan. I said, ‘You know, it would be kind of cool if there was little Western theme park.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that's a great idea. You should pursue that.’ He told me to go look at Tom's Farms. So, we made a trip up to Corona, which is not far from where I was working. I went and saw Tom's Farms and I thought it was cool."
Unfortunately, that park wasn’t without issues that Greg would prefer to not replicate. Much of what was there was free. You had to buy tickets for certain things, like the train ride. They had some shops and restaurants and a candy store in a farmer’s market.
“The one element I didn't like was biker gangs and stuff coming in, and some of those didn’t really give the impression of being ‘family friendly’ with all their beer and stuff. They go sit, drink beer and listen to live music. They weren't particularly rowdy or anything, but I thought I wouldn’t want that element specifically. So, I thought we could fence it off.
"We'll charge an admission to get in. And I thought, well, this needs to become something more than just a small little theme park. We still want to make it affordable, but we needed a little bit more. It will have some live entertainment and some different areas where people can go do a picnic. We could potentially have an overnight camping experience where they can sleep under the stars, which a lot of families don't get to do.”
The gears in Greg’s mind would not shut down. “I thought, ‘Well, if it's a theme park, it needs to have a Mickey Mouse. What's our Mickey Mouse? Who will our lead character be?”
Greg immediately drew from his childhood. As a child, he and his family would visit North Dakota. As they traveled through Wyoming, he started to see items centered around a creature called a jackalope.
“I've always loved jackalopes since I was a kid,” he said. “When I saw those on our trips, I thought that is the coolest thing ever. I love rabbits and these are like warrior rabbits. How cool is that, so, we landed on the jackalope.”
Greg’s dad was James Robert, but he went by Jim. In a nod to honoring his father, Jackalope Jim was born. So, now Greg had a leading character. But….
“What am I going name this place? What sounds Western? What sounds, you know, Old West? Junction? Jackalope Junction. Sure, why not?” Greg said.
But what would he look like?
“One of my kids said, ‘Why don’t you give Jim a bionic arm?’” And the concept of fusing the old west with steam punk as the theme began to take shape. The author Jules Verne used some of the same conceptually imagery in his writing.
“Jules Verne is more a technological version of the Old West, but it's still about, you know, people,” he told us. “People love the idea of forging out into danger in the wilderness, surviving, facing death and overcoming that. That's just innately within every one of us.
I believe the Old West happened that Jules Vern tapped into that, and I thought, ‘OK, we're gonna do steampunk western park.’”
So, Greg started doing some sketches of Jackalope Jim but didn’t really like him.
“I had some friends that were some famous cartoonists. I had a buddy of mine from Pixar, Victor Navone, who's a great guy, and I've known him forever. I said, ‘Hey, can you take a look of this?’ He said, ‘No, I'm too busy.’ So, we kept working on this and then I finally said, ‘Can you try one more time?’ he said’, ‘Yeah, I got time now.’
"So, he gave me a bunch of sketches and I picked out one of these and one of these, and one of these, and started photoshopping different elements as our guide. So, he did the the the sketch we have now. The cartoon version of Jackalope Jim that we have now is his.”
Names and a character and a look…but something was still missing…a story. “OK. Well, if Jim is missing an arm, I thought to myself, why is he missing an arm? It is the late 1800’s. Was he in the Civil War? Did he lose his arm in the Civil War like lots of other men did.
Yeah, that's possible…but that's not tragic enough, though. What's a good tragedy?
"And I thought, ‘Well, he was born without it.’ He was born without an arm, so now you've got this character. He's got a mom and a dad. His mom is a jack rabbit, his dad is an antelope. So, he is a mixed breed to start with, and he is born with no arm.” His parents love him to death, His grandfather is a preacher. They are all inventors and tinkerers and stuff. And his dad and grandad build him a bionic arm, complete with a specialized gun that only he can use.
“So, I thought, ‘OK, I got something there.’ And of course, he becomes the fastest draw in the West. That invites trouble to his house because bad guys are bad guys. The protagonists I created are called the Slippery Slope Gang and they're the worst of the worst.”
They find out about Jim and his bionics. They want the arm. They want the gun.
"So, they come to the house one night where Jim lives, and they break in. His mom and dad put up a big fight and get killed. Jim's only 10 years old at this point. They are killed and he barely escapes with his life and goes live with his grandpa. In that life, he gets raised in the church, but he has his chip on his shoulder.
“So, he's now 15, and he gets word that the Slippery Slope Gang are in another town. He goes this other town to go find them and kill them,” Greg detailed. “But he gets there, and the town is messed up. The bad guys are gone and the town’s a mess.”
The townspeople have heard of Jim and the legend of the bionic arm. They have heard that he is the fastest draw in the west. They want him to stay and be their sheriff. So, he agrees to stay for a few years and clean up the town. Then he hears another town where this gang may be, and he arrives to find the same scenario. This cycle repeats itself for years.
Finally, when Jim is in his 30’s, he arrives at a town that is almost completely abandoned. But he meets some people who stayed behind to rebuild, and he joins them. That town is called Jackalope Junction.
And this is where everything transpires. This is where all the characters come together. “Now, we do have some human characters. We have Cyborg gunslingers. We have robots," Greg said.
There are scores of characters, both good and bad, that lend themselves to the overarching story of Jackalope Jim and his pursuit of the Slippery Slope Gang, but we cannot give you all their names and their stories. Something must be left to your imagination and pursuit of this story as Greg and his team create and portray it.
Greg wanted characters that were relatable to everyone (without including all the DEI nonsense) and added to the story. And he certainly captured that.
“If you write the characters well enough and you base them off reality, off people I knew growing up that became cops, that became sheriffs, and friends that were this or that that, it just plays better. The bad guys are based on people that I encountered in my life that are just the worst of the worst. But we make them almost a comic element because they're so bad that they are bad at being bad. Kind of the Dastard and Muttley type.”
Greg pointed to seemingly bygone generation. “When you and I grew up, we had heroes, right? Sports heroes, comic book heroes, people that you could aspire to be alike, that you can model and become a good person from. You don't have that anymore. Peppa Pig is not that. She's terrible to her parents, which I don't get how popular that is, and then you have all these shows where the kids are right?, the parents are wrong. You can get away with breaking the law. You can get away with not following the rules. There are no consequences for making wrong choices.”
But there is hope.
“It's not the end of the world. You can overcome it. And that is what Jackalope Junction is about. It becomes this town where people have come to because they know they're not gonna get laughed at. You know, people get along. They care about each other. They support each other. They love each other. It becomes a big family and there's new people that show up that are outcasts from somewhere, because the church calls us to love one another.
"This is not just a story, but it's about bringing back wholesome values to family entertainment as the other companies out there that we trusted so much are doing the whole wokeness thing.
"Our job is to bring back Biblical values to family entertainment. We want to go back to the times of the Waltons or to the Andy Griffith show or other shows that taught lessons.” So, how exactly is Greg going to do this?
“So, we're doing a television show, a TV series. We're working on the pilot right now, which is live action with some animation for flashbacks. And the park, it turned from this idea of this little park to what I call story park. It will be a fully immersive experience. Jackalope Junction, where you walk in and you actually will time travel you into the town through some Imagineering cause I've got Imagineers working with me through some special effects and you'll you think you're there.”
They eventually want to put in a hotel and an event venue with a banquet hall and similar offerings so that they can host corporate events, family events, weddings, and other gatherings.
“We want to grow eventually over time, but but stay within the story. That's what Jackalope Junction is at its heart, a place where people can feel loved.”
Who wouldn’t be on board with this type of creativity and endeavor to provide family entertainment and restore some values in our everyday thinking, especially in the hearts and minds of our kids.
Greg sums it up perfectly: “We just need to find the perfect home for it, and the perfect partners or investors who believe in it just as much as I do.”
If you are looking for a way to invest, contribute or just be a part in some way, please email Greg at info@acornentertainmentgroup.com.
For corrections or revisions, click here.
The opinions reflected in this article are not necessarily the opinions of LET
Comments