The first disc has the movie itself,
letterboxed at 1.66:1 ratio, and still preserving the muted color
schemes of Halloween Town, a comically creepy location where Jack
Skellington, the Pumpkin King (voiced by Chris Sarandon, with singing
duties performed by Danny Elfman, the movie’s composer), becomes
intrigued by the peculiar joys of the holiday season at Christmas Town.
A quirky mixture of George Pal Puppetoons and Grand Guignol-as-opera,
this movie will surely receive its share of DVD pauses, as animaniacs
investigate every lovingly ghoulish detail. (Interestingly, Disney’s
subsidiary Touchstone Pictures featured its logo during the 1993
release because of the PG rating, but now the familliar Disney logo has
taken over.)
The brand-new commentary track with
Burton, Elfman and director Henry Selick, alas, feels as stitched
together as Skellington, almost as if all three were recorded
separately. It’s not until the final third when the participants seem
to be directly reacting to the film’s events (during Skellington’s
midnight sleigh ride, Selick points out that the clouds are indeed made
of cotton), but much of the aural commentary still seems like a
disembodied experience.
Also new is a vignette featuring
Burton’s original poem for the movie that is narrated by Hammer Films
horror legend Christopher Lee, with animated visuals from Burton’s
original conceptual art. There is also a seven-minute tour of
Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion thrill ride, which is redone during the
winter months in full Skellington mode; a separate trivia track reveals
such factoids as the 59-degree room temperature that adds shivers to
the patrons, and the statistic that 2,500 people are whisked through
the tour in one hour! A 37-minute explanation of the ride, with chatter
from various imagineers and art directors, tells viewers far more than
they’ll ever need to know.
The second disc carries over most of the
extras from the 2000 special edition DVD. Two early Burton short
subjects display the budding auteur’s gifts for the grotesque;
distributor Disney deemed both shorts too out there for mainstream
consumption, however, so they were shelved for several years until
Burton’s Batman movies stormed the box office. The seven-minute stop-motion cartoon Vincent
(1982) features a 7-year-old boy, looking a lot like Burton, who
conjures a fantasy world devoted to his horror-movie idol Vincent
Price—and narrating Burton’s Seuss-ian prose is none other than Price
himself, a year before he delivered the soliloquy for Michael Jackson’s
“Thriller.”
Seasons cretins: Jack Skellington brings cheer in Nightmare Before Christmas.
And the 30-minute Frankenweenie (1984) is a black-and-white, live-action homage to the 1930s Universal Frankenstein
features, as a young boy (Barret Oliver) uses the power of electricity
to jolt his beloved dead dog Sparky out of the pet cemetery. Burton’s
new introduction to this short drops the news that he is planning a
feature-length, stop-motion animated remake of Frankenweenie, which will be a tough act to follow.
A six-part making-of vignette runs 25
minutes, with old footage of the creators jawboning about the arduous
animation process. Also on board: a comparison between the storyboards
and finished product runs four minutes; a trio of storyboards that were
never animated takes up three minutes; a pair of trailers runs two
minutes; and there are extensive visuals of character designs,
animation tests, conceptual art and movie posters. A quartet of deleted
sequences adds up to five minutes, with one great gag that was replaced
at the last minute: The finished movie displays vampire hockey players
smacking around a pumpkin on the ice, but the outtake shows that at one
point they were high-sticking a likeness of Burton’s decapitated head!
—Bill DeLapp
