DISNEY HAS DREAMS OF PROFITS FROM 'NIGHTMARE'

By Paul Sherman

From The Boston Herald, 10.28.2000

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is getting the classic treatment from Disney--"special edition" re-releases on video and DVD earlier this month and, starting this weekend, a return to theaters. But Disney wasn't always so supportive of the 1993 imaginative and dark puppet-animated fairy-tale musical produced and conceived by Burton.

Inspired by such animated childhood fare as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and Mad Monster Party, Burton first came up with the character of Jack Skellington while a young animator toiling at Disney in the early 1980s. But Disney then had little liking for Jack, the "Pumpkin King" of Halloweentown who's tired of scaring people and decides to take over Santa Claus' job one Christmas, with black comic results. In fact, Disney had little liking for most of what Burton wanted to do then, burying his clever shorts Vincent (about a boy with a Vincent Price fixation) and Frankenweenie (a Frankenstein story featuring a revived family dog), which prompted Burton to quit the studio.

After scoring as the director of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman, Burton returned to Disney to shepherd Nightmare, which fellow animator Henry Selick directed and for which longtime collaborator Danny Elfman wrote music and songs.

"I was a little freaked out," he said when I interviewed him in 1993 about the return to Disney. "It's like when I did Frankenweenie, everybody got all freaked out because it was Disney and it was this dead dog. The piece was the safest thing you've ever seen in the world. It's completely not negative; there's nothing wrong.

"I was worried about that with this, about how it would be perceived. I also knew that the story was not negative. It's a positive fairy tale, and it's about perception. It was so funny, because when people started to see images of it, it was like they were reacting like what the film was about. About characters that look a certain way that aren't bad, but are perceived as bad. So it was mirroring what the whole thing was about, really."

Stylistically, Nightmare suggests a stew with equal parts Dr. Seuss and the Brothers Quay. So it's hardly typical Disney. Although the studio heeded Burton's creative wishes, it infamously underestimated the movie's appeal, making half-hearted merchandising deals that didn't meet consumer demand and caused much of the original merchandise to become instant collector's items.

Of course, the re-releases have brought a new wave of merchandise. Ironically, among the extras on the new Nightmare video and DVD are the two wonderful shorts Disney couldn't be bothered to market in the early 1980s. The version of Frankenweenie included is even longer than previous versions.