Why didn't Jack Black's character respawn after donating one of his lives in Jumanji?

Every character in Jumanji gets three lives and as noted here the characters would most likely die for real were they to lose those three lives. Whenever any of the characters lose one of these lives, they either explode or disappear, and then respawn into the game by falling from the sky.

After Nick Jonas' character (Jefferson "Seaplane" McDonough) gets stung by a mosquito (one of his weaknesses), and is in the process of losing his last life, Jack Black's character (Professor Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon) saves him by performing mouth-to-mouth and simultaneously transferring one of his lives to Nick Jonas' character. The Professor is then a little tired but nothing happens to him.
My question is, since the Professor essentially lost a life, why did he not re-spawn into the game like every other time a character loses a life?

plot-explanation jumanji-welcome-to-the-jungle

Best Answer

So I'll bring a little bit of programming into this (after all, this is a video game movie) to explain why he didn't explode.

If Jumanji were an actual game, based on the mechanics I would assume the game was programmed in the following way. The below represents the player's life tracker at the beginning of the game, where X represents a life and X* represents the life they're currently using. I've included ID numbers below each life to help make them more distinct.

      LIFE TRACKER
|     X*   X    X     |
|_____1____2____3_____|

When Oberon is eaten by the hippo at the beginning of the game, whichever life he was using at that time is removed from the game, and he is respawned.

      LIFE TRACKER
|          X*    X    |
|__________2_____3____|

Now, when he begins the life transfer, the game is not transferring his current life, but rather his 'spare' life, resulting in the diagram below.

      LIFE TRACKER
|          X*         |
|__________2__________|

The game is set up in such a way that the asplodey respawn is only triggered when the currently used life changes, i.e. when the asterisk notation changes which life it's attached to. In programming lingo, we call this an event handler. The event handler (which has the "make the person in question go kablooey" logic baked into it) is only kicked off when the currently used life changes.

Now, I can't find any clips to back up this logic, and in fact I think I recall that in the movie the life marked as ID 2 in my diagram is the one which fades. In which case I blame the GUI designers for translating my beautiful logic which supports the edge case of life-transferal into something the users can understand superficially, but which masks the true intent of my programming skills.

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What would happen if you lost all your lives in Jumanji?

It's not explicitly stated anywhere that if they lose all of their three lives they'll die in real life, but that's the assumption the players make. As such, we should probably take that to be the intention of the film maker.

Does everyone survive in Jumanji?

The characters ended up in different bodies and two more characters join the adventure: Spencer's Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito) and Eddie's old friend Milo (Danny Glover). Still, the danger remained the same -- three deaths end a person's life. By the film's conclusion, everyone was just one death away from game over.

How did Jumanji end up at the school?

Alex spends the next 20 years inside the game, and as with Alan's disappearance before him, the town suspects foul play. At some point, Alex's family donates some of Alex's belongings to the high school, and the game winds up in the school basement.

How many lives do you get in Jumanji?

While in the game, the players have three lives. Smolder Bravestone's parents - Mentioned to have been killed by Jurgen the Brutal. Fridge/Professor Sheldon Oberon - Head eaten by a giant anaconda snake. Respawned with two lives left.

Why Didn't You Stop Me?

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