In This Town We Call Home, Everyone Hail To The Pumpkin Song

Twas a long time ago, longer now than it seems,
In a place I have often seen in my dreams
For the story that you're about to be told...

...Is that Nightmare Before Christmas is 20 Years Old...this month....




Disney and Tim Burton have long had a weird history. They consistently recognize his talent and then try to bury it when he gives them more than they can handle. It's interesting that even as a kid I remember this movie having very little press, and I was thoroughly uninterested in seeing it based on the miniscule previews we were shown. Ironic then, that my mother took me to see it on a whim and it ended up being one of my favorite films of all time, second only to the Star Wars Saga.

Before I continue, I want to stress what a gigantic pain in the butt this film is to talk about when discussing Tim Burton's work because while Tim wrote the story and was very involved with production, it was actually directed by Henry Selick who would later put his stop-motion expertise to use with such films as "James and the Giant Peach," "Monkeybone," and "Coraline." Naturally, these have all been attributed to Tim Burton at one point or another because trailers like saying "from the director of Nightmare." For the record, Tim was merely a producer of "James" and had nothing whatsoever to do with the other two. And yet "Nightmare" is still very much his baby even if he was too busy with "Batman Returns" to actually direct the thing...

See what I mean? Giant pain in the butt.

ANYHOO...

I have probably watched this film more than any other film in my life. I have watched this film so much that I have it memorized. No other film do I have memorized shot for shot, line for line, note for note, to the degree and accuracy that I do this film. I rarely even ever feel like watching it because I can just let it run through my head when I close my eyes, all 74 minutes of it.I even wrote a stage script for a college project completely from memory, and when our group watched the film afterwards to check for accuracy, I had it essentially 99% (I think a few pronouns were out of place).

This was the Christmas special for weird kids. And don't be fooled, it's a Christmas movie. It may take place predominantly in Halloweentown. It may have come out in October and I may be writing this to be posted on Halloween. But there is no doubt that this is, first and foremost, a Christmas movie.

This film was the final film of the "Big Three," what I believe are both Tim Burton's and composer Danny Elfman's trio of masterpieces. The other two being "Edward Scissorhands" and "Batman Returns." They've done good work before and since, but these three are in my mind the best of the best. Elfman especially gave this film his all, and was saddened when the studio would only let him sing for Jack Skellington rather than voice the whole character (supposedly this was one of the triggers for the brief falling out Tim and Danny had after this film, resulting in Howard Shore writing the music to "Ed Wood").

While I will usually defend Disney's products, their business practices usually disgust me, and this was one of the most egregious eyebrow-raisers. Scared as always about the movie they were getting, they released it under Touchstone and quickly buried any and all merchandising. Of course, when it celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2003 and Disney saw what a cult following it had, well, it made up for the ten years of drought by saturating the market with Nightmare stuff and slapping the Disney logo onto all future prints of the film. Yeah, for me at least, too little too late.

But still, it's a fantastic movie and if you haven't seen it yet, what the hell's wrong with you? Make it part of your holiday lineup this year.

For it is plain, as anyone can see...we're simply meant to be...