Did You Know? - Fun Facts About The Nightmare Before Christmas

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

Question: What's the one movie that qualifies as both a Halloween movie AND a Christmas movie? Answer: The Nightmare Before Christmas.

While it was directed by Henry Selick, not Tim Burton (as the internet will make clear to you), this movie is still very much a Tim Burton creation. Well, it was more of a collaboration between Tim, Henry, and Danny Elfman. But it was Tim who wrote the poem that the movie was based on. It's beloved, not just by goth kids who shop at Hot Topic, but by a whole lotta folks. And there's a good reason for that - it's a good movie! It's got lots of creepy, kooky characters and a great soundtrack, and some real heart to it.

...so how the heck did Henry Selick go from directing this to being responsible for Monkeybone?

Okay, we're not here to talk about Monkeybone (the less said about that movie, the better). We're here to talk about The Nightmare Before Christmas. You probably already know that Jack Skellington makes cameos in many of Tim Burton and Henry Selick's other films (for example, his head is the yolk of an egg in Coraline). And you probably already know that most of the actors in the film do double-duty - Catherine O'Hara is both Sally AND Shock, Danny Elfman is Jack's singing voice, Barrel, AND the Clown With the Tear-Away Face, and so on. But did you know any of THESE things about the movie?

1) Believe it or not, Danny Elfman wrote the songs for the film before a script was written. According to him, "Tim would show me sketches and drawings, and he would tell me the story, describe it in bits of phrases and words and I would say 'Yeah, I got it.' Three days later, I had a song."

In a 1993 interview, Danny said, "The first thing I told Disney is that there weren't going to be any pop songs. That was exactly what we wanted to get away from. The songs are more classical musical. For this film, my influences are Kurt Weill to Rodgers and Hammerstein with a little bit of Gilbert and Sullivan."

Concept art for Jack Skellington's arrival in Christmas Town.

2) Not only were the songs written before the script, but Henry Selick and his crew started filming the movie before the script was completed as well! One minute of the movie took about a week to shoot, and the film as a whole took three years to finish.

3) How did Tim think up the idea? Well, apparently in Burbank it's common for Halloween and Christmas decorations to be put on display in stores at the same time... just like everywhere else. Tim saw this one day and the gears in his head started turning.

4) Tim originally thought up the film as a stop-motion TV special. Why stop-motion? Some of his inspirations included the work of Ray Harryhausen, the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, Czench stop-motion animator Karel Zeman, Russian/French/Polish stop-motion animator Ladislas Starevich, and even the Chuck Jones adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. He pitched the idea to Disney in 1983. They suggested doing it in hand-drawn animation, with the animation done by Nelvana. "But I just said no, it's got to be stop-motion. That's part of what it is: stop-motion," Tim insisted. So the project sat on the shelf for a while and Tim worked on projects like his 1982 short film Vincent (which an early version of Jack makes a cameo appearance in) and the original live action version of Frankenweenie...

5) ...until the film's producers and Paul Reubens, impressed by Tim Burton's work at Disney, offered him the chance to direct Pee-Wee's Big Adventure at Warner Bros. After that film was a success, Tim directed 1988's Beetlejuice, which was also a box office hit and led to Warner Bros. hiring him to direct a new Batman movie. Edward Scissorhands, his next film, was also very successful, cementing Tim's status as a director you could turn to for a guaranteed box office hit. But he still wanted to do The Nightmare Before Christmas, identifying with Jack Skellington a lot: a guy who, despite being very successful and popular, was bored and wanted to try something new. In 1990, Tim Burton's agent reached out to Disney and asked them if they still owned The Nightmare Before Christmas - they did, and they were thrilled by the thought of working with Tim Burton. To make things full circle, Paul Reubens provided the voice of Lock in the finished film - fitting that the guy who's partly responsible for it getting off the ground got to take part in it!

And while we're on the subject... I'm gonna try not to bring up Monkeybone too much in this post, but it was directed by Henry Selick, so I suppose I should mention this... originally, the monkey was going to be voiced by Paul Reubens. According to at least one review, he left production after reading the script (Monkeybone wound up being voiced by John Tuturro trying way too hard instead). Very wise move, Paul.

Here is the original Marquette of Jack Skellington.

6) At the same time that Tim was crafting Nightmare, he was also working on a project called "Trick or Treat" - about a brother and sister stumbling inside a house filled with monsters on Halloween Night. Nothing came out of the idea, apparently because Disney didn't like it, but you can find concept art online that suggests it was a big influence on Nightmare.

7) Henry Selick was the one who added white pinstripes to Jack's suit - he thought it would help Jack stand out in front of the already dark set.

8) If you pause at the right time during "This Is Halloween", when Oogie Boogie's shadow on the moon becomes a flock of bats, you can actually see the strings holding up the bats! (This was the 1990s, they likely didn't have the technology to go in and digitally remove the strings)

9) The first test animation for the film was done in office space rented at Tippett Studio, owned by stop-motion animator Phil Tippett. For those who don't know, Phil worked on such films as the first two Star Wars movies, Jurassic Park, DragonHeart, My Favorite Martian, and The Spiderwick Chronicles.

Tom St. Amand, who created the armatures that gave the characters their range of motion, said, "The main challenge with the puppets on this film was to make them animator friendly. Some of the puppets have really small feet and spindly bodies, not typical at all for stop-motion, and we had to make them move with as few restrictions as possible."

10) Originally, Zero was going to be hand-drawn animation, adding the characters on top of the stop-motion footage at a percent to effect a transparent look. For whatever reason, they eventually decided to just have Zero be stop-motion like everyone else.

Concept art for some of Halloween Town's residents. I think the only one who didn't
make it into the movie is the one-eyed green blob thing.

11) Oogie Boogie was inspired by Betty Boop cartoons - specifically, the ones where Cab Calloway would perform a song and they'd rotoscope his dance moves (remember that one where he was a walrus?). Writer Caroline Thompson felt Oogie was a racist stereotype and tried to get Tim and Henry to overhaul the character, to no avail.

11) The animators had special trapdoors cut into the soundstages where the sets were built so they could more easily reach in and manipulate the puppets.

12) Tim thought it would be great to give life to characters who had no eyes ("I used to torture Disney by saying 'It's great, there's the first character with no eyeballs. Then they'd get all paranoid," he said in an interview with Cartoon Research). Disney didn't agree, and fought very hard to give Jack some eyes. Tim and his crew wouldn't budge - which is good, because honestly, I think Jack would've looked even scarier with eyes...

Tim Burton with some of the film's puppets.

13) Tim's original choice for the voice of Santa Claus was Vincent Price. Yes, THAT Vincent Price.

14) At some point, it was going to be revealed that Oogie Boogie was actually Dr. Finklestein in disguise, much to Jack, Sally, and Santa's confusion. He was mad because Sally had a thing for Jack and wanted revenge. Tim rejected the idea (which I agree would've been pretty stupid), and apparently hated it so much that he punched a hole in a wall.

15) Two of the kids who receive toys from Jack are wearing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck pajamas.

16) Danny Elfman said in an interview that the hardest song for him to write was Sally's song. "That was a big challenge, because there always is a ballad in a musical and Tim and I both really, really did not want to do the obligatory pop ballad, so I really wanted to find a ballad that would work for Sally, that would not schlock up the score," he explained. "In musicals for a long time, when the ballad starts is when I always go get something to drink. It's like I just want to come back afterwards. I know it's the one part of the score that I have no interest in, that loses me completely. It was my biggest challenge in a way to come up with a ballad that, if I were watching it, I wouldn't want to think because, 'Oh God, here comes the schlock time.' If she suddenly burst into a really gutsy song it wouldn't really fit her character. She is a wispy thing and she's not sure who she is or what she is. She's fresh. She's just recently made, in fact. So it was my desire to find something that felt very ethereal and gentle for her."

Catherine O'Hara was also insecure about doing Sally's singing. "She was insecure going in because, at that point, she had never really done that sort of thing," Danny explained, "But I knew she could do it and I thought she did it perfectly."

17) Speaking of the songs, at one point in production Henry became concerned that maybe there were too many musical numbers in the film. "I was telling Tim, 'People aren't used to this many songs in an animated film*. I'm worried that that's going to lose some of the audience'," he said. "So we finish the film, and they do their trims, and then he comes to me and says, 'You know, Henry, I think you're right, we've got too many songs. We've got to cut one or two.' There weren't many times I could really go to Tim and say 'No, we're not going to,' but that was the time. I said, 'Tim, I'm convinced that every song has to stay because every song is so important to tell the emotional story of the film.' And I convinced him that I hadn't been right and we need to keep the songs. They had become such an integral part of the film - character development, the emotional center and just basic storytelling - that I felt there would be a huge hole that would leave confusion. And also the running time - the movie was a very short feature, like 74 minutes, and I felt it just wasn't going to be long enough."

Concept art of Lock, Shock and Barrel.

18) Behemoth - the big grey-skinned guy with a hatchet in his head - is based on Swedish wrestler and Plan 9 From Outer Space actor Tor Johnson.

19) The sewing machine that Sally uses features a spider spinning a web - the web's string is used as "thread" for the machine. Very reminiscent of a joke you'd see in The Flintstones, isn't it?

20) And while we're on the subject of spiders and webs, you might notice that the stones in the walkway at Jack's house are arranged in a spiderweb pattern.

21) Mr. Hyde has a smaller duplicate of himself under his hat, and that duplicate in turn has an even smaller duplicate under HIS hat. And then, during the "Making Christmas" song, we see the three Mr. Hydes working on a set of nesting dolls. Now THAT'S a clever joke.

22) According to Henry Selick, Oogie Boogie was the toughest character to design because he's "big and pretty shapeless". "He was a bear of a puppet to move," he explained, "He was much bigger, much heavier... Oogie was a wrestling match. It was the most taxing, draining character to give him some sense of fluidity, keep him big, have him be fun, and then, of course, when the threads are pulled from his burlap sack of skin and all the bugs are revealed, that was a pretty nightmarish shot."

23) The Clown With the Tear-Away Face is, in my opinion, one of the creepiest characters in the movie (which likely stems from my being afraid of clowns). But would you believe that he was originally even creepier? Henry said in an interview that in the storyboards, when he tore his face off, it was far more disgusting. "He would tear his face away and it was like flesh and blood underneath," he stated. "We didn't shoot that, but it was in the storyboards and I just knew that that was kind of grotesque. It suddenly became like a horror film, like Halloween or something John Carpenter. We self-edited that and just made it an empty space."

24) Remember Tim Burton's 2012 animated film Frankenweenie? That movie based on the aforementioned live action short film Tim made in 1984, right? Well, look closely at the box of dog biscuits that Dr. Finklestein has:

That's Frankenweenie on the box.

25) Bonita DeCarlo, who'd previously worked with Henry Selick on fifty-two Pillsbury Doughboy commercials, was the film's character fabricator supervisor. Her favorite puppet used in the film was the one of Jack in his scarecrow costume during "This Is Halloween". "It was the first time we see Jack in the movie," she said. "There was only one created, and I insisted on doing the fabrication myself."

26) The hardest shot in the movie to film was the close-up shot of the knob on the door to Christmas Town with Jack's reflection on it. Getting the reflection just right took a lot of time, care, and attention.

27) Disney initially considered setting up a new division called "Touchstone Animation" to make the film. Instead, it was made and released under the regular ol' Touchstone banner. Why not just release it under the Disney banner? Well, they were afraid it was too scary for the typical Disney animation audience (and yet The Black Cauldron, which was considered so scary that Jeffrey Katzenberg started physically editing scenes in an attempt to tone it down, WAS released under the Disney banner. Go figure).

28) You likely already know about Disneyland's annual Haunted Mansion Christmas overlay featuring the characters from the film. But before that, in 1996, an Imagineer named Chris Merritt submitted a proposal for a dark ride based on The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Concept art for the attraction.

His idea was to have guests enter Halloween Town through the tree with the Jack O'Lantern-shaped door featured in the film, then board coffin sleighs for a tour of Halloween Town. Apparently, the reason this didn't get off the ground is because people around Imagineering didn't think The Nightmare Before Christmas was a good enough movie.

In case you're wondering if anything Nightmare Before Christmas ever made it to Walt Disney World... well, we've never gotten a Christmas overlay of the Haunted Mansion for some reason, but if you go on the ride there are several hidden Jack Skellingtons to look for. For example, in the library, one book has a picture of Jack on it, while another is labeled "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and has Jack's face on the spine. And in the attic, you can find another book with Jack on the cover, a Jack snow globe, and a Jack plush doll. Puppets and sets from the film were also displayed at the Backlot Tour featured at Disney's Hollywood Studios (or, as it was called in the 1990s, Disney-MGM Studios) for a while as well.

29) Tim Burton told MTV in 2006 that he's never had any interest in doing a sequel to the film: "I was always very protective of [the film], not to do sequels or things of that kind. You know, 'Jack visits Thanksgiving World' or other kinds of things, just because I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it. Because it's not a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it. I try to respect people and keep the purity of it as much as possible."

30) However, at some point Michael Mullin and a bunch of artists met with a business team from Disney's offices in Japan, who told them that since The Nightmare Before Christmas was so popular there, they wanted to expand the property so they could make more merchandise. They asked, "What if Jack Skellington went to the OTHER holiday lands?" Everyone agreed that would be cool, but they knew Tim Burton probably wouldn't approve of a sequel to the movie, one that he would have nothing to do with at that, just to sell more Jack Skellington dolls. And Michael was the only writer in the room, so the chances of them whipping up something good enough for Tim were very, very small.

So Michael thought up two ideas: The Nightmare Before Easter ("I know that's a lazy title, but it was necessary from a branding perspective," he admitted) and A Midsummer Night's Scream. He showed the stories to folks at Disney Publishing, who said that they were great but they couldn't do anything with them. As it turned out, though, Tim Burton still approved all Nightmare products and their packaging, AND Michael knew the woman who sent him these items to approve of. So he printed out both stories and had her send them to Tim with the next batch. About a week later, he got a call from Mr. Burton's agent. Tim loved the stories and wanted to meet Michael.

At the meeting, Tim and Michael discussed the popularity of the characters, recent shifts in licensing and the retail industry, and the stories. Since Tim didn't want to do a sequel MOVIE, he agreed with Michael that the best thing to do would be to publish them as books. Michael's mindset was, since The Nightmare Before Christmas was a year-round merchandising property with a particularly big push in the fall (Halloween) and winter (Christmas) seasons, the books he wrote could extend that push through spring (Valentine's Day and Easter), guaranteeing the company more revenue as a result. He even got Deane Taylor, the film's art director, to whip up the illustrations for The Nightmare Before Easter I've been including here.

But no one at Disney moved forward with the stories in any way. A couple of years later, Michael reconnected with the executive who'd become Disney's President of Feature Animation and told her the whole story. He made it clear that he intended to make these stories into books, but of course she wound up getting Dick Cook (then the chairman of Walt Disney Studios) and Michael Eisner involved, and they essentially ambushed Tim Burton with a pitch for two sequel movies. They also offered Michael the screenwriting gig on both, which he accepted, even though he knew that Tim would never go for the idea. And he didn't.

Michael summed up the whole mess like this: "Disney is an enormous, very complex company. Despite all that happened, I never blamed any one person or department. A colleague at the time put it best when he said: 'Creatively, Disney can't get out of its own way.' I'd argue this is still the case, best exemplified with the trend of live-action remakes of animated films. It's all driven by ROI, and the practice is creatively lazy. The same, tired stance about pleasing stockholders, blah, blah, blah."

You can read the two stories that Michael wrote on his website - here is part one of The Nightmare Before Easter, here is part two, and here is A Midsummer Night's Scream.

30) In 2003, Tim was asked at a Disneyana Fan Club convention if there were plans for a Broadway adaptation of the movie. He said no - "We thought we'd go right to the ice show."

Concept art of Jack filling in for Santa.

31) Near the end, when Santa gives Halloween Town snow, at one point we see the vampires playing hockey. They're using a pumpkin as a puck. Originally, the pumpkin was going to be a severed head - Tim Burton's, to be precise. "And it was really funny. And Denise Di Novi or one of the Hollywood producers told me, 'I don't think Tim's going to like that.' And I feel so stupid for not just asking him," Henry told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

Sources:
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/influences-before-the-nightmare-began/
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-nightmare-before-christmas-puppet-fabrication-part-1/
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-nightmare-before-christmas-puppet-fabrication-part-2/
- https://www.insider.com/nightmare-before-christmas-facts-2018
- https://www.mouseplanet.com/12183/The_Making_of_Tim_Burtons_The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas__Part_One
- https://www.mouseplanet.com/12188/The_Making_of_Tim_Burtons_The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas__Part_Two
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-tim-burtons-the-nightmare-before-christmas/
- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/60723/21-things-you-didnt-know-about-nightmare-christmas

* Clearly, Henry never heard of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure, which came out two decades earlier and contained... how many songs? It has to be at least fifteen. Of course, that movie was a flop, so maybe he was right to be concerned about the number of songs...