October 29 - The Nightmare Before Christmas

On this day, in 1993, one of my favorite films of all time, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, opened in theaters. In 1982, when Tim was an animator with Disney, he wrote a three page poem about a Halloween skeleton who discovers Christmas, takes it over and the chaos that ensues. He'd had some success with his delightful little short Vincent earlier that year and thought maybe his poem could be developed into a half hour special or something. The studio, however, didn't think it (or Tim, for that matter) fit in with the Disney aesthetic and fired him instead. The poem decided that it wouldn't let Tim forget about it.

After the major successes of Beetlejuice and Batman, Tim's thoughts kept returning to Halloween Town and its Pumpkin King. It turned out that Disney still owned the production rights to his poem, but now that he was a big time movie director, suddenly the studio thought that a deal could be made. Tim teamed up with another former Disney animator, Henry Selick, to flesh things out. While Tim would produce the movie, he wasn't interested in the long process of stop motion animation, so the directing chore fell to Henry.

As work on the story progressed, Tim became convinced that it should be a musical and knew that Danny Elfman, who has done most of the scores for Tim's films, would be able to make that happen. Danny once said that writing the eleven songs for Nightmare was one of the easiest gigs he ever had. And he got to be the singing voice for Jack Skellington.

Filming began in July 1991 in San Francisco, California. A crew of over 120 toiled away, using 20 sound stages simultaneously. 227 figures were created for all the characters and Jack Skellington alone had over 400 heads that could be swapped out to represent any emotion or facial expression. By contrast, Sally only had around 110 heads.

When Nightmare opened, it was the first feature length stop motion animated film by a major US studio. And even though some Disney executives felt it would showcase the fact that the studio could think outside the box when it came to kinds of entertainment, they still didn't know what to do with it. They even released it under the Touchstone Pictures name because they thought it would be too scary for kids. Without a whole lot of support from the studio, Nightmare would still earn 50 million dollars on an 18 million dollar budget. The initial reviews were positive and, since then have basically recognized the brilliance of the film. It was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar, a Best Musical Score Golden Globe and won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film.

Since its initial release, Nightmare has grown almost exponentially for Disney. It's been re-released several times in theaters and is the only stop motion feature to be converted into 3-D.  It is both a bona fide cult classic (I count myself among the people who have loved it since day one and just smile knowingly at more recent fans, especially if they're old enough to have seen its debut) and a commercial success. The only question that remains about Nightmare: is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie?

Also on this day, in American history: Black Tuesday