18 things you probably didn't know about 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'

the nightmare before christmas

This Disney classic is over 25 years old.
Touchstone Pictures/Dusk Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
  • "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) is over two decades former and information technology's widely considered to exist a Halloween movie (even the film's manager agrees).
  • The motion-picture show's songs were written before its script was.
  • The moving picture is based on a poem that originally had merely 3 characters.
  • Visit Insider'southward homepage for more stories.

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) is one of the most iconic Halloween movies of all time that'due south also popular in Dec.

The beloved blithe feature is over 25 years old, only in that location'due south a lot you still may not know most it.

Read on for some surprising things you never knew about "The Nightmare Earlier Christmas."

Tim Burton was the producer, not the managing director.

Tim Burton didn't direct the film.
YouTube

Although his proper name is to a higher place the championship, Tim Burton was not the director of "The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Instead, Henry Selick made his directorial debut with the animated Disney film.

The movie was based on a poem.

The poem was written past Tim Burton.
Buena Vista Productions

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" was based on a poem written by Burton when he was an animator for Disney.

Selik told the Daily Animate being in 2013, "Tim rewrote the archetype verse form, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,' along with designs for Jack Skellington, his dog, Zero, and Santa Claus."

Co-ordinate to the Daily Beast, Burton too pitched the verse form to Disney as a cease-motion characteristic in 1983, but it didn't work out at the time.

In the original poem, at that place were only three characters.

I of them was Santa Claus.
YouTube

Despite the colorful bandage of characters in the moving picture, Burton's original poem but featured 3 characters: Jack Skellington, Zero, and Santa Claus.

The picture's songs were written before a script was.

They were written based on a clarification of the movie's plot.
Disney

Composer Danny Elfman wrote the songs for "The Nightmare Before Christmas" before at that place was a script to go off of.

He wrote the iconic songs later on Burton described bits and pieces of the story to him.

"Tim would testify me sketches and drawings, and he would tell me the story, describe information technology in bits of phrases and words and I would say, 'Yeah, I got it.' Iii days later, I had a vocal," Elfman told the Los Angeles Times in 2015.

Elfman voiced two other characters in the film.

Overall, Danny Elfman voiced iii characters.
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In improver to acting as Skellington's singing voice, Elfman provided the voices of Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face up in "The Nightmare Before Christmas."

Oogie Boogie was the toughest grapheme to blueprint.

It'south partly because of his size.
Disney

"Oogie Boogie was the toughest because he's large and pretty shapeless," Selick told the Daily Brute in 2017.

"Ultimately, Rick Heinrichs had to re-sculpt it, so, when he gets his pare pulled off and he'south filled with bugs, that took some years off a few animators' lives — it's three or four killer shots and took about four months," he added.

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" took over three years to make.

One minute of filming took a week.
YouTube

Because the moving picture was stop-motility it took animators well-nigh three years to complete the picture.

"I was on the film for iii-and-a-half years. The stop-motion animation took nigh 18 months, just with pre-production, where y'all storyboarded every single shot, it did add up," director Selick told the Daily Fauna in the 2017 interview.

"At its tiptop, it was nigh 120 people working on information technology, and nosotros had between 12-17 animators on the job," he added.

Jack Skellington seemingly appeared in "Beetlejuice."

You have to look really closely.
YouTube

Skellington's showtime feature film appearance wasn't the moving picture based on his story, simply rather the 1988 flick "Beetlejuice," another of Burton'south creations.

Jack Skellington also seemingly makes a cameo in "James and the Giant Peach."

It looks just similar him.
YouTube

In another Burton-Selick moving-picture show, the famed Jack Skellington's likeness makes a cameo in the haunted shipwreck scene in 1996'due south "James and the Behemothic Peach."

The Pumpkin Rex's accommodate was originally blackness.

The suits were changed to make them pop on the black backdrop.
Disney

Selick was the reason Jack's signature conform was adorned with thin white pinstripes, co-ordinate to the film's 15th-anniversary DVD commentary track.

The decision was made in order to take the character stand up out on an already dark-colored gear up.

At that place'due south one scene that the director said he "actually regret[s]" replacing.

The Mayor in "The Nightmare Before Christmas"
Disney

Selick told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that he actually regrets replacing a scene from the end of the movie, when Christmas comes to Halloween Town.

"Nosotros prove a lot of Halloween Towners enjoying winter sports and snowfall, and you see the vampires playing hockey and they hit the puck right at the camera — and originally it was Tim Burton's caput," said Selick. "And information technology was really funny. And Denise Di Novi or 1 of the Hollywood producers told me, 'I don't recall Tim's going to similar that.' And I feel so stupid for not just asking him."

He added, "But that's one of the shots that nosotros reshot and we put in a pumpkin instead."

Tim Burton has said he doesn't want the film to take a sequel.

Tim Burton has said he's confronting a sequel.
YouTube

Seeing every bit Burton owns office of the graphic symbol rights to "The Nightmare Before Christmas," he has been staunchly against creating a sequel of the film.

Burton told MTV in 2006, "I was always very protective of ['Nightmare'], not to exercise 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."

There was reportedly in one case going to be a "The Nightmare Before Christmas" ride at Disney.

Tim Burton nixed it.
Getty Images/Allan Grant/The LIFE Pic Collection/TASCHEN

According to a Slashfilm written report from 2017, Disney wanted to create a ride dedicated to the film and even created sketches of what information technology would expect like, simply it never came to exist.

For now, fans can enjoy Halloween Boondocks when The Haunted Mansion is transformed each Halloween season.

An extended ending of the motion picture showed Jack as a father.

The soundtrack points to the pumpkin king as a begetter.
YouTube

The official soundtrack for the film has an epilogue that has Santa Claus returning to visit Jack years later and finding that the Pumpkin King has become a father.

Jack Skellington was never meant to take optics.

Tim Burton fought for Skellington to have no eyes.
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Despite pushback from Disney, Burton and Selick fought confronting animating Jack Skellington with eyes.

According to a 2018 Mouseplanet study, Burton said, "The first rule of drawn animation is that you have to accept optics for expression. I thought it would be not bad to give life to these characters that have no optics."

He added, "Disney actually fought for the states to give Jack these friendly optics instead of nighttime holes just we wouldn't budge."

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