Mel

Mel, also referred to as The Amazing Mel, is the antagonist of JumpStart Reading for First Graders.

Appearance
Mel has fair skin, a long, thin nose, and a black mustache and hair. He wears a dark blue shirt, a dark blue cape with purple on the underside, a dark blue top hat with a purple band around it, black pants, and purple boots.

Personality
Mel is mean-spirited and prideful, and enjoys playing practical jokes on others. He has a strong dislike of clowns. He has a tendency of using alliterative insults to mock others, such as "pathetic pups", "dunderhead dogs", and "silly sausage dog".

In the Game
In the game's opening scene, Katia recounts how Mel was a magician who liked to play mean pranks on people in the carnival, mostly on the clowns who he has never liked. He became jealous of Katia, because people began paying attention to her since she worked hard and diligently practiced her magic. Eventually, Mel went too far with his jokes, and the ringmaster fired him, replacing him with Katia. Mel was so angry that he turned all the Big Top performers into puzzle pieces and hid them somewhere in the carnival, and cast a spell on Katia that shrunk her and trapped her in a magic force field.

Mel will sometimes appear at the Main Fairway screen, where he will pull one of three pranks on unsuspecting circus performers: attaching a rocket to a rabbit's back making him zoom away, dropping a beehive on a clown's head, and making some balloons lift a panda high into the air.

Mel also appears in the Strong Dog activity where he mixes up Samson's weights every time the player earns a ticket.

In the ending cutscene, Mel appears when all the performers have been freed. He's devastated by his prank being ruined, and then Crinkle the clown and his assistants restrain him and drag him away. Mel appears one last time during the ending show where he is forced to perform with the clowns while dressed as a baby. The clowns smash several objects over his head, such as a cake, a pumpkin, and a flower pot, and then blast him through the roof with a cannon.