Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Nightmare Before Christmas with Michael Rianda

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

We’re wearing our Hot Topic sweatshirts and enunciating every dramatic syllable to pay tribute to one of the greatest animated films of all time - Tim Burton’s (but really Henry Selick’s) THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Academy Award-nominated animator and Blankie Michael Rianda (THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES) joins us to talk about this multi-holiday classic, which is basically just a movie about a creative weirdo trying to fit in at Disney. Is this the boniest movie we’ve covered on the podcast? Does Halloween Town have the best minor background characters since the Mos Eisley cantina? What is the St. Patrick’s Day Town like? Mixed by: Kyle Joseph Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com or at teepublic.com/stores/blank-check

There are few who deny it. What I do, I am the best, for my talents are renowned far and wide. When it comes to surprises in the moonlit night, I excel without ever even trying. With the slightest little effort of my ghost-like charms, I have seen grown men give out a shriek. With a wave of my hand and a well-placed moan, I have swept the very bravest off their feet. Yet year after year

it's the same routine, and I grow so wary of the sound of screams. And I, Jack, the podcast king, have grown so tired of the same old thing. All right, well done, Griffin. Home run. What I do is I replace the word king with podcast.

And you had to do all that other stuff. I had to. You think if I didn't do all the lead up it would make any sense? If I just start with year after year it's the same. You need the high before he drops down to the low. You know? Yes, you do. You're totally right. Is this the

most, both the singing part done by Elfman and the speaking part done by Chris Arandan, the most enunciated performance in movie history? It is very enunciated. I am Jack Skellington! Can we just start out with it?

I know it's boring. Can I just say it? Say it, David! Jack's sexy. Hell yeah. Jack's fucking hot. He's hot as shit. Yeah, man.

He's a bone man. He's a bone... He's a hot bone man and he's cool. He's hot as shit. Yeah, man. He's a bone man. He's a bone. He's a hot bone man. And he's cool. He's hot as hell. Look, I said this to producer Ben the other day, but I said, this is probably the boniest movie we're ever going to cover on the podcast. Good point.

Yeah. Definitely. Right? Definitely. Hard to beat. I would say top contender. What is even the competition? The Bone Collector is nowhere near.

No. Bone Collector, obviously, it's got that in the title there. I assume there's some bones. But if the titular Bone Collector were also a skeleton, it would be in competition. How do you know he isn't? Bones in multiple places, maybe underneath, but he doesn't pull it off.

It stars a skeleton, and then the thing's lousy with bones. It's a whole bone town that runs on bones. What about, I mean, Ben did pick Ernest Dickerson for March Madness once a year. What about Bones? The movie called Bones. Yeah, it's still, I mean, like, truly, guys, like, the TV show Bones, I don't think can give this movie a run for its money.

Now, to be fair, I will say I've watched a lot of Bones. There are a lot of Bones on there. There do be a lot of Bones in Bones, but this is the whole thing. It's not called that ironically. She does solve mysteries through Bones, right? Like, she studies the Bones. But she has flesh all over her Bones. This is the thing. You keep getting stopped at that. She's not has flesh all over her bones this is the thing

you keep getting stuff not made out of bones this is the thing any other narrative that centralizes bones this much doesn't also star a skellington yeah i do want to say though david i think you're right you know i think a lot of this episode will be talking about the bizarre cultural staying power this movie has had because few films have really grown to this size in a cult way over years to become like just the absolute most mainstream movies it is weirdly in that sort of wizard of oz conversation of like movies that came out did okay at the time and are now just like so deeply woven into the tapestry of pop culture i do think that's an underrated element though is that both jack and sally are hot

they're very hot but then i do as you're implying i just have the immediate thought of like oh i guess i think jack's so hot that i should like go to a store that sells hoodies with his face on them yeah you know yeah i start roasting myself right but he is hot okay yes i mean it's this thing where it's like you almost need to clock your embarrassment for liking this movie now because because of the hot topic nature of it and nothing against hot topic but it just became such a thing but then i watched this i'm like right this is just the best fucking thing it is one of those things that above all else is just like an incredible human accomplishment on a

technical level yeah um our guest today who i want i want talking more than just throwing in a yeah have you introduced the podcast or you want to introduce the guest pre-introducing the podcast i want our guests thrown out more than a couple yeahs before I introduce the podcast and then him. Yeah, I want yeahs, but not just yeahs. Let's not stop at yeahs. I'm coming in. I'm coming in. Do it.

I know you guys like the guests to talk before. We love it. They're introduced. So I am trying to be a good guest. Thank you. I'm trying my best. But I was being conservative. I will be honest.

And I also, my first experience with The Nightmare Before Christmas was also being annoyed by it because I would go into Hot Topic and look for cool South Park t-shirts because I was such a cool kid. And then I was like, what is this? Nightmare Before Christmas, crap. And then I watched it in college and I was like, this movie is so wonderful. Like, it's the best. So you didn't watch it till college no it took me a long time

because i was rebelling against uh the hot topic crowd um for some reason i don't know i loved animation but i i never watched this movie until i was like 20 or something fascinating okay good to know i saw this film in theaters yeah uh i don't think I did as much as I wanted to. You would have been quite little. I know, but I really fucking wanted to see it. And I think my mom thought it was too scary. Saw it on a porch. Keep going.

He's leaving the frame now. Ben's going to have a lot of opinions on this movie. It is funny that when Hot Topic, not exclusively, but is partially responsible for the reclamation of this movie, it's like this identity of like, yeah, but that's the weird Disney movie. That's not like your happy singing princess talking animals Disney movie. This is the weird movie. Disney didn't even want it. They put it out under Touchstone and now Hot Topic is reclaiming it. And now you go to Hot Topic and it's like 90% Disney store. Hot Topic is just, Hot Topic sells like frozen merchandise now. Yeah, it does. And that's, we can leave Hot Topic there. It's like, that's it. The culture war is over. It's just all blended together. Just like everything else.

It's all blended together. Right. It's just a pop culture store, but it's like cooler merch of the most mainstream things. Right. Is what Hot Topic identified. Well, it's like this is like it's like a Hercules bag, but it looks like the VHS box or whatever. Sounds pretty good, actually. Yeah, I'm going to buy it for your birthday. Thank you.

This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers, sometimes success that takes like a decade or two to become clear. Your biggest movie is your first movie, but no one really realizes it at the time,

and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want, and sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce baby, and sometimes you take inexplicable 16-year gaps in between movies. 13. 13. This is 13. We talked about this. This is Avatar and Wendell and Wilde are Selick and Cameron both coming out of, yeah, yeah, 13 years. Same gap. Yeah.

It's a miniseries on the films of Henry Selick. A brand new miniseries. And the title of the miniseries is Ben Hosley's The Podmare Before Casmas. It is good. I do think it's, I do think it's one of your best efforts. I will give it up. You texted that right away and we were all just like, okay, yep. Well, cause we were, we were like, I guess it's pod mara for castness, right? What else are you going to do? Do you do, you know, night pod?

I mean, it's like, whatever. And then I had the breakthrough the other night of producer needs to get top billing on this series. Ben Hosley will forever be associated as the auteur of this miniseries, whether or not he's the main one talking. I'm the biggest fan of this. whether or not he's the main one talking. I'm the biggest fan of this. I always want the sweatiest, most clumsy possible names for the miniseries. So this is really making my heart sore right now.

Ben Hosley is the pod mayor before castmas. And we're so excited to have Han. Ha ha ha ha! To have Han as a guest. Long overdue, someone who we found out a year and a half ago, whenever it was, when your movie came out, that you were a fan of the podcast and could not believe it. It was absurd, and we have been waiting for the right opportunity to bring you on. But the director and co-writer of Mitchell's versus the machines, Michael Rionda. Hello. Now I, I looked it up. Do you technically get the Academy award nomination with the animated film? Like, can you refer to yourself as an Academy award nominee or is it

my film was nominated? Oh, that's interesting. Uh, Hey man, I'm running with it. I'll, I'll, I don't know. There's's no rules there's no laws fucking oscar nominee but you know i've i've never said that out loud out of uh shame of i'll say it i'll say being an idiot academy award nominee that's very nice and you personally won three annie awards yes that's true that's true. That's true. You won Screenplay Director Picture, right? Those were fully, you got to fucking hold those things. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I've got the statue and stuff. They're very nice. They spin around. No, it was really wild, you know, because it's like the movie was just, we were doing it for fun and it's so wild that anyone liked it or cared but uh i'm really glad and let me tell you something i'm a dang ass freak for this podcast

i love this podcast i it it's you guys are so smart and funny and it you have this like infectious love of movies that sort of makes me fall in love with movies all over again every time I listen? That's pretty sweet of you to say. And I've also tried to put the word dang-ass freak into three upcoming film screenplays. Ben! I'm really hoping. I'm just trying to propagate this into the culture. And it's my dream that teenagers are calling each other dang-ass freaks by at least 2021.

And it's my dream that teenagers are calling each other dang-ass freaks by at least 2021. I mean, I am truly astounded. Thank you. That is my dream, too. And any royalties, I will throw your way. Well, I mean, now we're talking. Now. I need Congratulations industries to grow, so I'm trying to get you some new income sources.

How are sales so far, Ben? They've been pretty good. Ben's clothing line, congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah, Y-O-U-Lations.com. Here's the thing. I started filling the orders. A lot of work.

Yeah. You're actually hand mailing and packing everything. Yeah. But Nelly's so happy that they're leaving, though. That's true. Because I do have a bunch of boxes of all this stuff. But yeah, Michael is a patron. He ordered a shirt.

That's true. I have a shirt coming. Was it the dang ass freak shirt Or the congratulations shirt Absolutely dang ass The dang ass freak shirt Which for people who don't know was inspired by a puddle As it says on the website

It looked like E.T. kinda Michael, can I ask Yes There was some point in the like Marketing of Mitchells vs. Machines And I don't remember if it was in the lead up to the movie Coming out or if it point in the marketing of Mitchells vs. Machines, and I don't remember if it was in the lead-up to the movie coming out or if it was in the lead-up to the Oscars after the movie was released, where Katie Mitchell started – the lead character of the film, who's a film fan, started being identified as a blankie. Uh-huh. And then it led to a Letterboxd account that was done in character, but through the official marketing team, right?

Yes. The marketing team being me. I wrote all of that. Okay, this is my question. Okay. Because there was this Katie Mitchell Letterboxd account that was watching the Campion movies along with us in real time.

Yes. And it was just because I was and I needed content and I, and I was like, well, she would be a blankie if she was a film fan. Um, and it was also a good excuse for me to like, right. You know, get quote unquote content. No, this was my only question. I was, I couldn't, I wanted to know if it was you gave some poor marketing person marching orders to listen to our podcast and play act being a fan of it. Or if it was you gave some poor marketing person marching orders to listen to our podcast and play act being a fan of it or if it was you doing it no it was it was me uh at my house at like 3 a.m you know talking about sally bongers and having a blast and it was really fun i will

say it was like so purely enjoyable because you know with animation you write a joke and then nine years later you find out if anyone laughed at it or not and it's like nice to write something and have people immediately like like it or not or whatever um so it was it was a blast i i i only stopped because uh i got busy but i i would i would i would do that if anyone was paying me. So in Mitchell's vs. Machines, there's a moment where you see Katie's Mount Rushmore, her like four sort of inspirational idol filmmakers. And it's Ashby, Gerwig, Ramsey, Sciamma, right?

Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Did you at this age, at that age rather, have like a big four like that you end up going to CalArts we were talking about this right before recording the school that I dropped out of yes and I didn't realize you dropped out of as well and we both started there the same year yeah were you in experimental or character animation I was in character animation okay and were there like Mount Rushmore animator filmmakers like that who got you like what was your process of getting into uh the idea of being an animator doing animation oh no i mean

you know it was yes i mean when i was you know like i that actually idea of the mount rushmore was inspired by just a thing that was in my office of miyaki, Hal Ashby, Celine Sciamma, and Lucas Moodison, who I love. Oh, wow. And they had a word bubble that said, don't fuck this up, make a movie we'd respect. And I don't know if we did it or not. I haven't called Marty or anything. But that's

sort of where that idea came from and just sort of like becoming an animator and stuff oddly and sort of embarrassingly at this point it was like i just loved ren and snippy so much and i was like this is the best cartoon and i love the simpsons and that was just sort of like my whole diet growing up. And I was like, is there a way that I can do this? Question mark. And, you know, I sort of applied to CalArts after going to another art school and failing. And I like applied there several times. And then eventually they let me in with the lowest portfolio score of all time. Wow.

Which I'm very proud of. So sheer force of personality, essentially. It was sheer will, absolutely. Yeah. Just they were like, this kid is not going to leave us alone until we let him in the door. I mean, we'll get into this in the run of this episode because it's kind of important to the formation of this movie. But at CalArts, which is the best animation school

in America, right? I mean, I feel like it's... Yeah, definitely in America, I think. Yeah. And was founded by Walt Disney as a sort of pipeline to develop new employees. Back when there were very few places

you could go to do animation afterwards. And even, I mean, in the 70s when Selick and burton are going there they talk about where they're both like i guess we work at disney now like there weren't multiple uh places you could you could land that would give you consistent work but um character animation is much more about performance classical sort of like Nine Old Men, animation acting, and that traditional style, which obviously was originally hand-drawn, but

has shifted over to CGI. And I guess stop-motion's covered there as well, but I felt like the people I knew doing stop-motion at CalArts were more the experimental animators. Yes, 100%. And it was just by the nature of, these are people who just have visual ideas. They want to make sort of tonal explorations

rather than needing to convey a very clear narrative or doing something that has consistent laughs or an emotional arc or anything like that. Yeah, well, and Henry Selick is kind of the perfect experimental animator. You know what I mean? Like if you look at his student films and the films that he made right before Nightmare Before Christmas and Slow Bob and The Lower Dimensions and stuff like that, like it's textbook experimental animation. But I think that's one of the reasons he's such an exciting filmmaker

of narrative films because he brings that madness and like and and and sort of like a an inability to or it's not it like just a relentless need to innovate um you know like that you could see in his short films and then are is like carried on to all of these movies um and it's really kind of wonderful to see and and i always feel like i feel like looking at his movies, it seems like he's always trying to get back to those short films where it's like because it seems like Monkey Bone, which is his biggest like blank check or whatever, is the one that's most like those short films. And he's like reaching towards those, you know. forward to those, you know? Um, um, so it's, it's really interesting in that context because, you know, at CalArts, you do make these four films for, or, you know, you know, make a film a year and seeing Henry Selick's early films really was informative of like what his later films were. And if you're out there listening, watch them. They're really fun.

Yeah. And you know, I am, I, I defend late period Burton, or at least a larger percentage of late period Burton more than most people. But when you watch Vincent, it's hard not to feel depressed. Like, you watch Vincent, and there is an energy and creativity there that even I can't argue consistently exists in any of his films in the last 20 years. Whereas Selick still feels like he's making student films. Oh, yeah. It does not feel like anything's gotten watered down. It's maybe to the detriment of his career and the consistency of his work that he just seems to be so stubborn about the way he makes things and how unwilling he is to budge. David, we should crack into the dossier,

but there's a thing I saw in there that jumped out to me based on what you're saying, Michael. Burton says, you know, there was a, there's a tribalism to the two different animation camps at CalArts and that the character animators would look at the sort of experimental animators and go like, well, they don't know how to tell a story. They're just doing sort of like jerk-off art pretension shit. And the character animators, the experimental animators look at the character animators

and go like, they're sellouts, they're sentimental, they're doing like, buy the book. That's accurate. And Burton said that Selick was the only guy in his time who actually coexisted between the two camps. Sure, he could, yes. He moved between the two tribes sure he could yes he he moved between the the two tribes is how burton puts it the only one yes because i mean it's bird the pixar guys

you know joe ramft uh selick burton all there at the same time all these guys are contemporaries within the same couple of years at cal arts and selick was the only guy who seemed to be able to have a foot in each world. Well, part of that seems to be he was worldly, is a thing they note, because he'd already studied at Rutgers and Syracuse and the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. So maybe he'd already been through the tribalism. Before I crack into this, Michael, you like, have you met Selick? I assume you maybe have crossed paths with him in some way.

Yes. No, no, I, I did. Um, at some point, uh, Netflix flew us up to like meet all the stop motion people. Cause Guillermo del Toro is making a movie up there and Henry Selick is making a movie and like is up there. And we met Henry Selick and he was so wonderful and nice. And also I was struck by the same thing you guys are talking about, where I was like,

he was showing us footage from this movie and I was like, how cool is it this late in your career that you're like swinging harder? Yeah. Yes. Which that movie is that like, you're not shaving any of the edges, any of the edges away you're actually sharpening them um and it was really cool and we had a beer with him and we got to see the sets

and i will also say like seeing a stop-motion animation set is probably the closest you can ever come to like going to you know the willy wonka's chocolate factory it's like exactly what you want it to be. It's like all these beautiful sets and these artisans making like little eyeballs and stuff. It was really wonderful. So I was I was really amazed by that. But yeah, so I have met him once. We're not like bros.

Not yet. Have you gotten to see Wendell and Wild yet? No, unfortunately, I just saw clips, and I saw them animating some of the shots and stuff, which was really cool, but I haven't seen the movie. I'm really stoked to see it. I've seen the movie, and when this movie, when this episode's dropping,

I guess everyone will have been able to see it because it will be on Netflix. Is that right? This episode's dropping basically Thanksgiving. Yes. And I think Wendell and Wild is coming out early November. Yeah. From what I remember. And I thought it was great.

And we'll talk about that later. That's great. It's coming out late October. Wow. It's coming out soon. Damn. Yeah. Your thing to me, David, was like, it's kind of amazing and I can't believe they let him make it.

Right. But it is also one of those movies where you're like, I can see why this wasn't green lit instantly. It's tough to summarize. It's got tons and tons of ideas, but it's very nice. And of course, I'm going to tell my famous, long-anticipated Toronto Airbnb story when we get to that episode. A mere few weeks from now. Folks, it's going to live up to all expectations.

Oh my God. Wow. I'm shaking. I'm literally shaking. Five months in the making at that point? Wow, this story that is really five minutes long. Should I tell my Michael Shannon story? Yeah, tell it on this episode.

Okay, but we'll get to Michael Shannon. There's a tease. Okay. Because I should crack open the dossier, right? We should not linger any longer. I'm telling you to crack it open. Then we can talk about our relationships to this movie. Yeah.

One person involved with this film is Tim Burton, of course. We did a whole miniseries on Tim Burton. It was very long. We didn't have the dossiers back then, I know. No. But we did get quite into, you know, the wiry-haired nightmare child of Burbank. You know, this little creature of the suburbs who cooked up his crazy imagery in his head before he went to CalArts, right?

Talked about how he was an animator. I feel like a lot of this stuff has been discussed on the podcast. Yeah, and people still will ask am i missing something or did the boys not cover nightmare before christmas in the burton series we were always adamant of like no that has to be a select series and people either still don't know that tim burton didn't direct it or even if they know someone else directed it give burton most of the credit for it but basically his involvement is he he does vincent at cal arts which is an incredible short film i recommend everyone watch he does and uh that does well in

like the festival circuit and vincent comes out at disney being like we don't know what to fucking do with this guy you know he's drawing like the lady fox and fox and the Hound. And he wants to do the monsters for Black Cauldron. And they're like, this is too much even for Black Cauldron. So post Vincent, they're like, what else you got? And he wants to do like a holiday television special. He wants to do like the Tim Burton version of a Rankin Bass special, basically. Yes. And it was pretty much, it was vaguely inspired by the poem. Sorry. Yeah. Began with a poem inspired by Clement Clark's Moore's seminal holiday classic, The Night Before Christmas. He calls it The Nightmare Before Christmas. And he writes this poem about the pumpkin king, Jack Skellington, who becomes obsessed with Christmas.

becomes obsessed with christmas uh so he does have it all right there but uh first he pitches it as a tv special to rick heinrichs as you say or he's or he's working with rick heinrichs uh rick heinrichs is yeah is a disney cohort right and becomes his big sort of art director for years and years yeah uh and burton's quote on this which is is funny it's like he was it was a really funny project everyone was nice about it it was like being in that show the prisoner everyone's nice Yeah. And Burton's quote on this, which is funny. It was a really funny project. Everyone was nice about it. It was like being in that show, The Prisoner. Everyone's nice, but you're never going to escape. It's basically like he would have all these meetings with people

and everyone would be like, this is such a great idea. Obviously, I will not be producing this movie. And then obviously Tim Burton goes on, moves on from Disney, makes Pwee's big adventure you know goes over to warner brothers and right that tim burton's story unfolds disney basically gives him the money to make live action frank and weenie rather than make this because frank and weenie would be cheaper and faster and then that becomes his director's reel for live action that gets him hired on peewee and right by the time he's done the first batman he's on scissorhands he goes like you know what i'd really like to do is that thing uh does disney still own the rights

to that he is a little concerned doing it at disney right because he sort of has this thought of like or i guess is there there's the fear that disney actually has to do it because he had pitched it there or originated it there like whether they own the rights to it yeah right there's a funny thing in the dossier that burton was like the time that i pitched it to them it was actually unclear whether or not any of us were still employed it was one of those periods where they were getting changed over right people right there was a change in like bosses and people were getting fired in between movies so he was like I might still own that through a loophole or I might have to do it with them and I can't imagine Disney wanting to make this movie because at the time it just seemed too weird for them but of course after everett scissorhands and batman and all that uh

he can get something made and david hoberman who was a big disney exec at the time was just like you know we wanted to go to tim burton say we can think outside the envelope we can do something different and unusual uh i believe at this point, they still are basically going off of a weird poem Tim Burton wrote. You know, it's not like there's a screenplay. Correct. There's a poem and drawings. And credit to Katzenberg.

I mean, A, I think Disney wants to be in the Tim Burton business, right? I think to some degree, Disney is kicking themselves of letting this guy go, who now has made so much fucking money for Warner Brothers. So they're like, how do we get him back here?

And obviously the next 20 years becomes Disney trying to fully pull Tim Burton back into their fold to a degree that maybe starts to kill him. But the other thing is like, Katzenberg, the Disney renaissance

is going so fucking well that to his credit, he's like, we should try branching out. We should use the birth we've been granted by Disney animation being as strong as it ever can, as it ever has been, to move into different areas. Stop motion is a thing that has not really been done

at a studio level in Hollywood. And I think he's looking at the success they had with Roger Rabbit and saying, we should try different styles. We should try different techniques. And Burton's brand is so strong at this point that there's finally like a clear marketing hook for this movie. Yeah, it finally seems like a profitable, good idea. Right. He's a name. A name you can put on top of a movie that people

actually will notice at that time yeah and they would now too honestly i mean it's the problem with putting his name above the movie and it diminishing selleck's sensibilities like selleck even says i understood why they needed to do that did you hear the audio commentary where henry selleckfully says, and I'm the director of Tim Burton's The Night Before Christmas. He has such a complicated relationship to it because it's like he knows he will never get the credit he deserves for this movie, and yet the movie never would have gotten made or seen

if that name was not permanently affixed to the title. Yeah. All right, Burton first brings in Michael McDowell, who wrote Beet beetlejuice uh that doesn't come together although mcdowell is credited for adaptation uh in the credits right but did you hear the story that um carolyn thompson did this podcast and said that michael mcdowell totally panicked and just delivered the songs in screenplay form and nothing else. And everyone was losing it.

She put it, quote, that he had snorted his salary because I guess Michael McDowell had a bit of a drug problem at the time. And so just reformatted the Danny Elfman lyrics into a screenplay. So just reformatted the Danny Elfman lyrics into a screenplay. And production began based on that because they had to start. And that wasn't really a problem because obviously stop motion is slow and they had songs so they could do the songs. Yeah. Well, yeah, just to back up for a second, because the development of this movie is bizarre, but it is like, right, Burton comes back to them.

They're saying we're all in. He says, I don't have the time to do this. He's filming Batman Returns. The production and development of this movie will span Batman Returns and Ed Wood. Right. So he recommends Selick, who at this point has been doing a lot of stuff for MTV, not just like he's won two Academy Award, Student Academy Awards. Well, we'll get to Selick. We'll get to Selick.

No, no, but I understand. I understand. But he throws it to Selick and then goes to Elfman and essentially pairs the two of them up and goes, Danny, just start writing songs. And Burton is basically describing the story beats and Elfman is writing songs off of the story beats, but there's an outline and there's songs and there's

no script. They go to McDowell. He doesn't give them anything usable. Caroline Thompson is dating Danny Elfman at this point in time. She is. She also wrote Edward Scissorhands, of course. She is. She also wrote Edward Scissorhands, of course. And she basically says everything was kind of there. Danny had written all the songs. The thing I had to do was write Sally's story, which she says is sort of her major contribution. And obviously just turn it into a script. They had a pretty tight budget, $18 million dollars which i guess that seems low right i mean i know nothing of animation budgets in the 90s but that seems pretty low i do think um stop motion

people are are paid a uh sickeningly small amount of money for what they do because they're so passionate and they love it so much they're like i just want to do this and oh you'll give me you know twelve dollars i'll take it because i get to you know uh play with puppets all day and not in a bad way just in in a yeah it's it's it i do think that happens in the stop motion industry uh to uh to this day to sort of a not great extent um henry selick who jj's sort of already been telling me this but he but he's a candid man. There's going to be many a quote from Selick over these movies, I feel like. The guy would hit the press and really just bounce basketballs

off of people's faces. But he says there are very few final lines of dialogue in the movie that are Caroline's. We worked with her, but she was off on other movies. We were constantly rewriting. But then he also says, I'd like to do a silent movie, honestly. In stop motion, I think characters can tell the story without any dialogue, which is interesting.

Yeah. I mean, there's a world of, you could do this movie with just the songs. Absolutely. It barely needs the interconnected dialogue. It's also like, it's 85 percent it's mostly 100 yes no 85 michael pay attention it is the weirdest of this like the development of it is so backwards uh where it's like a notion songs based off the notion a script written to fill in the space between the songs um it makes sense that most of the dialogue narrative stuff

that happens in between does feel like the Sally Finkel scenes, which is just like, okay, now getting a new perspective in here. There's that Netflix show, The Movies That Made Us, and they do an episode on it where there are a lot of good interviews with Selick and Thompson. I think Elfman's part of it too. But she basically talks about like, she's just done a movie with Tim Burton. She's living with Danny Elfman's part of it too. But she basically talks about she's just done a movie with Tim Burton. She's living with Danny Elfman.

She's just waiting for them to ask her to write it. She's watching them not get the script figured out. She's like, I can do this in a weekend. And basically wrote it in a week, as you said, went on to other jobs, but finally gave them the shape of the thing. But they are animating this movie before they have a script.

They're just like, well, let's start doing the songs. This is Halloween. We know we can do that. Right. So in comes Henry Selick, Burton's old pal and classmate. Burton, as you say, Griff is busy on Batman Returns and then eventually on Ed Wood. He doesn't want to deal with stop motion himself. Selick says Tim doesn't enjoy directing stop motion.

It makes him nervous to be on the set so much. They started production in 1990. This film comes out in 1993. Yeah. It came out actually on Halloween. Of course, if they released it now, it would come out in April because that's how you do it now. You got to release the holiday movie a good few months

before the holiday yes but it was it was 18 months of production 18 months of pre-pre i mean that's the thing that i think people don't understand about animation is it is now i feel like there's a little less of this but it used to be like you need to have every single fucking thing figured out before you start start right no 100 well and and and i think that i do i do think that on this movie it's it sort of seems like it was almost freeing for them to not have a script because like so much of the joy of the movie is just like in the spaces like how can we make this song that we already have as dazzling as possible? And it's like, well, a guy's playing a guitar. Maybe there's a weird little face in there.

Do you like that? And it's like, yeah, I love that. And a guy doffs his cap. And guess what? There's three little freaks in there. Do you like that? And I'm like, yes. I'm clapping and begging for more.

And it just seems like the storyboard artists really, like, wrung all the joy they could have out of it um and yeah and it's it's an incredibly laborious process like regular animation takes forever and stop motion animation is like glacial and i talked to some some people who worked on this movie and it's so striking to me anytime we talk to anyone who works in slow in stop motion they are the chillest human beings you've ever talked to in their life they're so calm they're like yeah you know i just did the shot after you know it took three and a half weeks but we got it you know and i'm like what it took three and a half weeks to have jack scratch his

chin and gesture at the moon but then you watch it and you're like well that that was worth three and a half weeks that was great you know it looks like nothing else. That is why you do it. Right. Yeah. A hundred. It's so good. If you sneezed, could you ruin a month's worth of work?

I just always think about slipping, spilling a cup of coffee. I'm that guy. Yeah. Like I'm like visiting set. I'm like, Oh wow. Cool.

And just like, yeah, everyone's mad. I mean, I don't know if you watched any of this sort of like, of like making of documentary stuff that's been done around Phil Tippett recently with Mad God coming out. But he talks about, I think he talks about this also in the ILM series on Disney Plus, which is really good. to realize that he was bipolar and uh that his life was just like constant like mania tension nerves discomfort other than when he was doing stop motion that he would go into this zen state and there was something about what you're talking about of just like everything is just moving at

this glacial pace you know i can just hyper focus on this one tiny thing for 1 24th of a second yeah and i know a couple um i do know a couple like stop motion animators who that is like they sort of call it their therapy they just like smoke a bunch of weed in the morning get blazed and like slowly happily move a puppet for 12 and a half hours and it's like they it's like the their best thing in their life and it's so and the results are so wonderful i'm like this how nice for the world that this gets to happen that is nice but i griff what stop motion have we covered before because we definitely well we covered like corpse on patreon yeah did we cover something else obviously we've done animators on the show before i don't think so i guess not but like i think i've talked about it

it just i do love how it looks i love watching these movies but i do especially when it's a shot that's like someone closes a door like some very boring shot yeah i get a little stressed out thinking like fuck that was like a week yeah and it is that sucks it is yeah right yeah there's no getting around it you can't someone like puts their jacket on or whatever you're like oh god it took forever although there are some shots in nightmare before christmas that i'd imagine were very satisfying where you could tell it just oh somebody held up a cup and water fell through it and then they just filmed that and then they were done the one i always think of is the close-up shot of sally's spoon with the holes in it yes that's the one and

the poison goes through it and you're like that's 100 live action shot no stop motion required that must have been the best day ever yeah no they're like hey we got two seconds for free boom done two seconds in real time all right so henry selleck here we go uh obviously he worked at disney after graduating from cal arts some of his movies that he loves um and cites his inspiration uh the adventures of prince ahmed and the seventh voyage of simbad i think those are both stop motion classics right it's uh simbad is the um what's your name bloody redinger it's like shadow puppet sort of stop motion or prince akhmed i'm sorry is that yeah prince akhmed is yeah yeah that often gets credit for being the first harryhausen feature length animated film i feel cool yeah

uh i don't i've never seen it. Have you seen it, Michael? I have not seen it, unfortunately. It's like from like the 20s or whatever. Yeah. It's very old. Yeah.

It's pretty astounding. Okay, so it's credited as, it's the oldest surviving animated feature film. That's cool. There are two earlier films that were made in Argentina

that are lost, but, is it dope or what? Fuck them. It rules. Yeah, it looks pretty cool. Yeah cool yeah it's like she uses sort of like shadow puppet ask flat models so the whole thing looks like it's done in

silhouette yeah oh that's funny well that is like a recurring thing through sellex movies yeah where he's constantly using shadows and the whole plot of his sort of cinderb cinder biter or, or shadow King or whatever was all about shadow puppets, um, top to bottom.

And it sounded like a wild kind of, this is his, his unmade film. Yeah. His half made film that will never see the light of day. Yeah. The five clips exist online that you could watch. Yeah.

It looks wild. All right. In 1979, he worked at disney works under eric larson and glenn keen big uh legends of the field uh he takes leave from disney in 79 and he makes a few shorts uh funded by the afi uh so there's seepage uh which is a we i think you mentioned michael uh rules is And also Phases and Tube Tales, which were nominated for Student Academy Awards.

But yeah, why does seepage rule? I guess I need to watch seepage. I mean, there are parts of it that are a little problematic, which maybe don't rule. But it's just like, it's shot in live action with enormous puppet cutout figures that are life-sized and are sort of like manipulated through you know i don't know like this long laborious process but it also has this like dazzling horse animation in the middle of it that's like one of the coolest things i've ever

seen um and it's it's look it's very disjointed you know it's not i wouldn't say it makes a lot of sense but um but it's really interesting and you kind of can't look away from it um and it it goes between this like really kind of bizarre tense conversation between these paper cut out people in live action and this really expressive wild horse animation and it's like and it just reminds you of all the great things about henry selick in one like little instant that he's like this master image maker and he sort of just chases whatever is new and that he hasn't seen before um and it's like and you can kind of see echoes of that in like his all of the movies coming up

so another thing he oh he goes back to does he work on fox and the hound that feels like the last one for all these guys. Yeah. Right. Everyone's kind of bummed out. He takes permanent leave after that. He funded forms his own production company called Selleck Projects in 1986. He's doing ads for like Pillsbury, you know, doing some dough boy stuff. Yeah.

And of course, she did a lot of exactly Emma, you know, Drop King and all those guys. Yeah. And and he does a lot of like MTV Idents, right? Like those really cool early 90s stop motion MTV things where it's like the logo. Right. I've seen some of those. Those are cool. Fox and the Hound is 81. Black Cauldron is 85. So that's like obviously the biggest flop that almost kills Disney and it comes four years later like there's a gap

when the films are much closer up until that point so it does feel like Fox and the Hound was sort of like a clearinghouse moment but the MTV stuff Burton quits after that too right or does Burton work on Black Cauldron as well now he started working on it and they fired him from it.

And I think, like, Lasseter and all those guys, you know, Joe Ranft and all those guys, I think, I do, it's so interesting seeing all the different ways that they rebelled against Disney in their own way. Like, they all went in different camps, but all were sort of almost a reaction to Disney, and, like, Tim Burton being the most, like, violently different. But it still is kind of a reaction to disney it's like oh disney's sweet and i'll be dark absolutely yeah and i i think all those guys viewed it as like this is a pale imitation of what disney used to do yeah like i

like fox and the hound but it feels like an idea for all these guys where they're like our entire lives have been working towards trying to work at this magic factory yeah and it feels like it's a shadow of itself and we have to figure out something new now well and animators like at their core are are sort of like these artists that want to work and then are put in this like studio system like stop down yeah and it's like it those conversations those guys had about like fox and the hound and stuff remind me of conversations that i hear you know at the when i go at lunch at any studio of like we're we keep making the same bullshit over and over again it's time to change things up you know like animators have this like they're really sweet and and love drawing and are happy to be

there but like in inwardly they're all little artists, you know, including me. Um, and, and it's like, it's, it, I find, I find a real like kinship with those guys just sort of like being pissed off

because the thing is they all love Disney. Like when you hear Tim Burton talk about Disney, he's kind of like soaring about it and, and really like love those cartoons. Like all of them, the Pixar guys sell, like they all really love Disney, but they

just wanted something more right fox and the hound was the moment where they're like disney isn't what it used to be yeah totally and i have not seen that movie since i was a kid but i remember just being okay fucking sucks no i'm kidding i haven't seen it a long time the don bluth revolt happens mid fox and the hound that movie really is the center point for everything he in the middle that goes this is bullshit i'm starting my own company and takes like 30 guys with him yeah um so yeah that movie is is the real fulcrum point of american animation in its own weird way but the mtv stuff as you were saying david before i interrupted you is huge because mtv starts investing a lot

in experimental animators student people right out of art school uh to both do shorts to try to do pilots to do indents like suddenly there's actually an economy for experimental animation and then we get beavis and butthead yes yes groundbreaking work and it does feel like those like i dance and stuff like kind of were like shaping the 90s or something like it's it's very much feel so much like i don't know going to urban outfitters in 1994 or something it's like you could feel the echoes yeah there's no purer distillation of that era than like watching mtv you know like animation and stuff like that absolutely um he also created a pilot for an mtv series called slow bob in the lower dimensions which

i have watched at least some of it's on youtube yeah uh and does rule um yeah and was obviously just like far too weird even for mtv in the early 90s well that's what's funny where he where he's like i left slow bob to make nightmare before christmas and i'm always you know i always think of this as his fulcrum point i don't think slow bob was gonna get made it was too insane it's quite insane but i hope it but it is cool it would be nice if it did it is very cool um and tim burton brings him on and quote says he's truly the best. Henry's a real artist. He's done a lot of great stuff for MTV.

He was doing a lot of great stuff for stop motion. There was just a really a group of really great talented artists up there in San Francisco. It's hard to find people who are talented at it because it's a much more rarefied form. rarefied form um and uh burton did worry that working with such a talented and idiosyncratic director might spark some creative conflict griff do you know the phrase tired and emotional uh no i mean outside of just feeling that way all the time well sure in in the british press and you can roast me all you want for bringing this up, tired and emotional is a famous euphemism for drunk. So they'll say, you know, they used to say like,

oh, you know, X and X had to leave a party yesterday because he became very tired and emotional or whatever. So talented and idiosyncratic is one way of putting like, you know, a certain, you know, strong personality, right? There's a lot of euphemisms here one could use. But in the press, Burton is like he was a great collaborator, right? In the press, I feel like Burton lavished praise on him. There was no mention of any tension. No, I think the tension, I mean, the other thing is, you know, when Selick sort of defends how much the tension i mean the other thing is you know when selleck sort of

defends how much the movie is his which it is he's like burton came to visit set five times over two years he maybe spent a total of eight to ten hours on set he was like it's his movie in the sense that it started with him but it was like me adapting a book that was never actually written. You know, it's like, it's his original source material, but it is this fascinating film because you're like, Thompson, Joe Ranft, Elfman, Selick, Burton, all can be given a fair amount of credit for the shaping of this film in every sense. I mean, even just on a basic story sense, it's kind of put together by these five people. And Burton's the one who's really the Genesis.

He's the first seed. Selick has that quote. That's all over the dossier. That's like, it was Tim's egg, but I was the one who hatched it. Oh yeah. But, but yes, it was, you egg, but I was the one who hatched it. Oh, yeah. But yes, it was, you know,

Burton was both the genesis point and also the 800-pound gorilla that allowed the thing to get made and also to some degree insulated them and protected them and was able to say, just back off and let them do whatever the fuck they want. That is the credit that Selleck gives him. He's like, the guy had total faith in what we were doing.

I would send him the shots and he would give us the thumbs up, but he's working on Batman or whatever. And he would completely insulate us from like Jeffrey Katzenberg studio notes. You know, it's not just studio notes. This is 90s Jeffrey Katzenberg, like one of the most famous sort of controlling off, you know, not like Jeffrey Katzenberg was like one of the most famous sort of controlling, not like Jeffrey Katzenberg was never right about anything or anything, but he's notoriously like a busy buddy.

He's coming in, he's micromanaging. And you feel the lack of interference on this movie. A hundred percent. You know, especially how much the Disney Renaissance formula is so refined at this point. The character of Jack and how he behaves is so bizarre and so outside of what's in Disney movies where it's like, here's this like self-obsessed, arrogant, self-pitying weirdo who just ruins everything. And refuses to apologize for it like the jack's lament song is him being like what well fuck you i did look what i did it was good why should i feel bad about

myself i love this movie but i watched it with my wife who had never seen it before and she was like this motherfucker gets everything he wants and all of a sudden he's feeling ennui about it now he's ruining christmas but then he gets defensive about like fuck me why should i feel bad about myself i'm jack motherfucking skellington and crack me up it's very funny he's a funny character yeah but i mean you you just think about all the stories you hear like the black friday screening of toy story and Katzenberg wanting to cut part of their world and all this shit. And you're just like, this is a movie that has gotten none of those notes. Yeah, 100%. Yes, yes.

And I think the thing is so much watching it this time really clicked for me how much Jack is an analog for these guys trying to figure out how to make commercial art. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had the exact same thought. Right? Like, how do I make a mainstream thing that audiences like? And they just do not know how to change their own nature. And they're looking curiously at the Christmas land like it's a Disney movie. Like, how do I do that?

This makes people happy. And then when they try, they give kids monsters and they start crying and they're like, well, that didn't work. Shit. But eventually someone's happy. The kid with no eyes is happy. But Jack's end point he lands on is like, well, fuck them. The audience is stupid. I made a great Christmas.

He's not wrong. Eat my Skellington shit. miss he's not wrong eat my skellington shit so the only other thing well there's two other things that i feel like are interesting about that one obviously is that the idea of putting tim burton's name over the title came late a month before release correct they'd actually shot a title sequence with candy corn letters uh so like um that's being pressed on henry selleck late in uh production and selleck does acknowledge like i understand it as a marketing decision and tim burton sort of says the same but both both of them obviously feel a little like bad about it in retrospect i think yes in different ways i understand it and i will rue it until the day i die exactly exactly um selleck says the only big difference that

burton he had was that selleck wanted the ending to be that oogie boogie was actually dr finkelstein in disguise there was like a scoobyDoo ending that he storyboarded. And Tim Burton thought that was a bad idea. I would say I agree with Tim Burton on that. Well, and in that interview, it said that they fought so hard about it that Tim Burton ruined an editing bay, which I found baffling.

And I feel like that's such an example of animators, like getting in fistfights over like whether a dog's nose is red or not, you know, like that's, that's like, it's just balding men in their thirties choking each other, you know, wanting a character's hair to be red or blue or something. But, um, but, but it was so funny cause I understand it's like Tim Burton is like, look, I made all these hit movies. You got to listen to me.

But look, it's an amazing – the shot of him as all bugs is like one of the coolest shots in the history of the medium. Yeah, you need him to be bugs. Yeah, it's – He's got to be bugs. Which I think Selig basically says there are four big bug shots once he's sort of unstitched, and each of those shots took four months. Oh, my God. God, maybe you shouldn't be bugs.

Worth it. Like, the bug shots were just a nightmare. Because every fucking individual bug has to be, like, pulsating. And one of them said that, like, whenever anyone had a break, they would do some, like, bug work. Like, hey, squiggle some bugs around over there in the corner for a second. them said that like whenever anyone had a break they would do some like bug work yeah like a squirt squiggle some bugs around over there in the corner for a second another cell it consisted on santa claus making things right the you know he replaces all the toys and burton hated that

but then showed when they showed the movie to friends everyone loved that i love that i love that i don't love it because i need the world to be made right. I just like Santa Claus is sort of like indignant. Like, yeah, I can fucking fix Christmas. It's funny. Right. I'm fucking Santa Claus. Yeah. You got a shrunken head.

Here's a puppy. Okay. You know, like it's not even cheerful. It's just like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. We should say funny. The other thing that I think basically happens at the same time as permanently attaching Tim Burton's name to the title is bumping it from Walt Disney to Touchstone. Right.

Because it was supposed to be big Disney. Then they got scared at the last moment and went like, can we release this as more of a grown up movie? And the thing I don't think I knew that this movie opened at the New York Film Festival. That's cool. Yeah, it did. They at the last second were were just like let's make this highbrow huh the kids might be too scared of this yeah it's funny because i watched it on disney plus i don't know about you guys yeah uh and disney plus introduces it with the castle fanfare now but they did not do that back then it is if you go on the fucking blu-ray message boards it

is a thing that fans are constantly crying out for when will disney release the version with the touchstone logo at the beginning they should they should do it i i support that i'm gonna riot until they do i think it was only changed when they did the 3d re-release i think up until then the the dvds always had the touchstone logo yeah that's too bad i love the touchstone logo um you know they had 40 000 square feet of warehouse space across 20 sound stages jesus christ uh joe ranft uh who is sort of a legend he died young right he's uh he's a pixar guy though right yeah he he died in a car accident during uh the production of cars but he is a guy where if you just scan his career he pretty much touches every important important part of american animation for like 20 years yeah and he's he's significant

on this movie i feel like his name is one of the earliest names in the credits to come up. And he was the head of the storyboard artists. Yes. Well, and he has this, he has this like touch. Cause you know, he, he was one of the key sort of founding members of all those Pixar movies. He was a giant party. He was a story supervisor on toy story. And I really associate one commonality that those movies have in this movie has is that they're like those early Pixar movies like hit the the concept of the movie like a pinata until all of the joy fell out of it where

it's like we're gonna get every good joke and moment out of toys and we're gonna get every amazing moment out of monsters and I feel like this movie does that with like Halloweeny stuff where it's like there's gonna be a shrunken head there's gonna be a guy with an axe through his head there's gonna be a creature from the Black Lagoon there's vampires there it's like, there's going to be a shrunken head. There's going to be a guy with an ax through his head. There's going to be a creature from the black lagoon. There's vampires, there's werewolves, there's Frankensteins. Like it has like all of that,

like joyful invention. And I sort of like associate that with Joe ranch, I think. Yes. Yeah. No, you can watch, I mean,

there is so many videos from different behind the scenes things over the years, but you can watch his like storyboard presentations where he would act them out. And it was kind of incredible. I mean, he ended up he was one of the first Pixar guys to end up doing major voices consistently in the movie. And it was the sort of famous story of Lasseter would show his wife the storyboard reels from A Bug's Life and that they hired – I don't know if they've ever publicly said who it was, but they hired some other comedic actor to play Heimlich. Yeah. was like half that actor's recordings, which weren't finished and half the ramp leftover recordings. And he noticed that every time his wife was laughing, it was ramped. And when it

was the actor they hired, she was silent and he went to Disney and it was like semi radical at the time to be like, I think this guy should be the fifth lead of our movie. Well, that, that happens so often in movies. It's like like some you try to do a copy of a copy and it never works you know it's like it you know there's so often where it's just like just do you know just do the reduce do the scratch um because it works well you do the voice in in mitchell's oh that is the one example that i wouldn't follow because nobody likes it everyone's like why is this fucking kid sound like a 40 year old guy no that's a performance but um but i will say the um the it was the best choice for the movie we tried a million amazing actors who were all better and funnier than me but there was something

about the whatever was happening in the reels that people just liked more so we went with it um but it but it happened that happens all the time in animation selick says there's the there's the character corpse boy who's the the little pudgy boy in the striped shirt he looks like pugsley adams and he's got the together eyes yeah that was sort of he was like that was the spirit of joe ran i mean this is this is the other thing with this movie i'm gonna put this forward right now please this movie feels like while not attempting to do this more successful at the thing that everyone has tried to do since star wars of can every character be fascinating oh yes can even the tiniest non-speaking character be like oh what's what's going on with that guy? Wait a second. Best background characters of, I think you're right. I think since Star Wars,

no better background characters. You got the melting guy. Yeah. The guy with the axe through his head. They're all fucking bangers, top to bottom. How many times do we read some fucking interview with someone promoting their new blockbuster and they're like, I wanted this to feel like the Mos Eisley Cantina. And anytime someone does that scene where it's like, we've designed 80 characters in the background and we want you to be asking

who they are and we figured out their backstories and whatever, every time that scene happens in a movie post-Star Wars, you feel the movie grind to a halt. It never has the natural feeling of Star Wars

where it's just like, this actually feels like all these people exist. This is just an ecosystem and I want to know more because the movie isn't trying to tell me yeah and this film fucking opening number this is halloween you're introduced to every townsperson and every one of them makes some sort of impression it's not like they're gonna have character arcs but it's like you get each of them and you're like that's their voice that's their look they all have such specific physicality, you know.

It just immediately, every one of these characters sticks in your head. Yeah, they all feel like so loved up, you know. And I just think that it is like, it was like nobody's watching the candy store. And it's like, yeah, let's have a character that's a little sweet little little boy with stitched eyes it's also just fun that it's like every monster archetype let's put everything in here but they're not they're also not just the boring normal monster archetypes they're like little weird nosferatu creepy heads that are like 1 15th the size that they're supposed to be and you're just like watching it with a giant grin on your face and the characters almost exist in different design styles yeah is another thing like this movie's aesthetic is very patchwork you know it is like just throw everything in there because

they're all operating on different rules sure yeah yeah well we'll you know we'll talk about it sure just while we're on the voices i just want to note a few voicings. Obviously, the most famous thing is that Danny Elfman sings as Jack, but Chris Sarandon speaks, and this caused a rift between Selick and Elfman that lasted forever. It's why Elfman didn't do Ed Wood. Yeah. Between Elfman and Burton do Ed Wood. Yeah. Right. Between Elfman and Burton as well. Yeah.

Elfman wanted to do everything, right? He wanted to sing and speak and Selick felt like he just wasn't working in the speaking parts and recast him. And right. It's why I feel like Elfman and Burton have had a very up and down relationship

in general, right? They sort of come apart and go back together there's a there's a quote from selick in the dossier where he's like i don't know their friendship's really weird i don't even try he describes their friendship as very weird yes uh but yes ed wood is the only movie they don't work on together until sweeney todd because there is no no original score. And then Mrs. Peregrine out of, I'm looking here, lack of interest. By everybody. Who can be bothered. But yes, no, they have like a major falling out off of this. It does make sense when you consider, when you read about the way in which this movie is developed, Elfman is basically the main driving force in writing this film for a bulk of the development.

He is the biggest creative, writing-wise, yeah, the biggest creative voice, right? Yeah, no question. And it's his masterpiece. Yes. Like, every song rules. Yes. And it's also sort of secret sauce is like,

I think Jack as a character is in different ways, expressions of Burton, Selick and Elfman. Right. But from a writing standpoint, he's really putting himself into it. and essentially beefing up the character of the woman who cannot get the self-involved, obsessive, control freak lunatic to pay attention to her. It's like these two characters are being written from very, very personal standpoints, which is important in a movie that's going to be 75 minutes long, mostly sung. You're not going to have intense character development scenes. But yes, Elfman never gets over not being able to talk as Jack. The two voices are very similar. So it's odd.

It's successful. It is. Like, it's so interesting that he was like so hurt by that because it's like, I don't know. I mean, maybe he wanted to be an actor. I don't know. But he's doing a great job on the voices. Yeah. I mean, he did like Forbidden Zone where he's, you know, the main on-camera performer in that, which is the movie Danny Elfman did with his brother.

Where he's sort of playing more of like an oogie-boogie demon type character. Like, you know, a jazzy demon. But it sounds like I had always thought it was just that he wanted to do it and they went with a bigger star. I didn't realize that he recorded the entire thing. Yeah, Selick just did not like what he was doing speaking wise. That he wasn't delivering as strongly in the dialogue as he was in the same part. It's also just so funny at like the time we were recording this the mario trailer has just come out and there's obviously just endless hand wringing about like why does this need to be chris

pratt what do you gain by hiring a big star rather than someone who sounds like mario and it's so funny because i've been sort of like behind enemy lines in all these conversations and it's like it's just conventional wisdom because it's conventional wisdom and nobody actually checks to see if that matters or not i remember i remember the the dog in our movie um they were like losing their mind because there's like there's no celebrities in this movie abby jacobson people don't know who she is and i'm like yeah she's great she's a great voice actor it's a great performance like shut up who cares and they were like what about the dog what about the dog look um uh famous dog owners what if Jessica Alba is the voice of Monchi the dog and I was like

dude are you gonna sit in a recording booth with Jessica Alba and be like hey Jessica I need you to snort a little harder on this one yeah like just kind of really bring your a game to the snorts here jessica alba famous actress how did she do jessica your motivation here is you're a good boy you're a very good boy and like but but it's true that like they're just like look this actor has this amount of instagram followers and you need to cast them. And no one is ever like, does this work? Do kids care? Do adults care?

You know, I think there was a point with DreamWorks movies or whatever when they had the people on the couch. And when more people watched late night shows that maybe it did matter. And maybe those DreamWorks, because those DreamWorks movies were very successful or something. But I have not noticed it mattering in the past like 10 or 15 years. I would agree with that. And I also think that era of Dreamworks movies was a very bizarre, brief period where they were also like really caricaturing the characters to match the actors.

The scripts are almost reverse engineered around the basic personas of them. Yeah, like Jack Black and Kung Fu Panda. Right, Will Smith and Shark Tale and shit like that. So they were really making them fit and feel of a piece with that actor's live action films. But it is that thing when you're just like, the highest grossing domestic animated film of all time, I believe, is still Incredibles 2,

which stars Craig T. Nelson. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, it's like in the same way with the Mario movie, you're like, what actor are you going to cast who is ever going to be a bigger draw than Mario? Yeah, Mario's a big draw. I mean, but the thing I love about Incredibles 2 is it's like, OK, the original cast is coming back. But like, who can we have? Come on, let's get some new villains. It's like Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener.

I love both of them. Isabella Rossellini. Isabella Rossellini. I can see exactly. You're not really throwing to like, you know, whatever, Shawn Mendes or whoever Lala Crocodile is voiced by. Shawn Mendes or whoever Lala Cockadile is voiced by. I mean, I just, 93 when this comes out, you're almost dead center

between Aladdin and Toy Story, right? And this idea that Disney's like, Danny Elfman cannot play the lead character. We need to get a bigger star. Chris Sarandon. Like, that's the level. We need the cop who shot Chucky. Right. That's who Chris Sarandon is. Right. Here's a guy who got an Oscar nomination

20 years ago, right? You look at the rest. He's a good actor, yeah. Oh, he's a wonderful actor and an oscar nomination 20 years ago right you look at the rest oh he's a wonderful actor and he's really good in this but it's like that's their idea of like let's get a proven actor in this role and even through the rest of the decade it's like db sweeney is the lead voice in dinosaurs tony goldwyn and tar Tarzan, Tate Donovan in Hercules. Like they'll often get – they'll follow the Aladdin model where it's like let's get one or two bigger names in the supporting parts, the funny parts, the villain, whatever it is. Toy Story does kind of fuck it up in certain ways where they like cast two actors very well and in the time that they're making the movie, those two guys become superstars. And Pixar remains pretty stubborn for a while about like we're going to cast the right people. well and in the time that they're making the movie those two guys become superstars and pixar remains pretty stubborn for a while about like we're gonna cast the right people we will cast

dave foley we will cast albert brooks we will cast craig t nelson we don't need the biggest names and no no studio ever takes that lesson they're never like oh cool you mean a a cool character actor that would do a really good job in the role? Let's get them. Like, they're like, no, no, no, no, no. How can I make the most cynical, horrible decision possible? I just love that even when they bumped Elfman, it felt like they actually thought very carefully about casting this and cast the right person. Yeah. Well, on that note, Santa Claus, who is also the narrator of the film briefly was intended to be voiced by Vincent price,

uh, a hero of Tim Burton's, uh, as we all know. Um, and he was brought in and they recorded him says Selleck, but he said he just lost his wife and he was despondent and it just didn't work.

It's just sort of like weird and sad yeah it is weird and price just couldn't get in like a santa claus mood i guess then he says we met with don amici uh who was insanely grouchy quote i couldn't believe how grouchy he was i would love to know what that means like they just sat down with Don Amici. Don Amici was like like, well, how grouchy was he like? What are we talking about? Then they went to James Earl Jones and apparently Danny Elfman told James Earl Jones. I wrote this part, especially for you and James Earl Jones got very angry and yelled. You don't know me hearing that voice say that would be terrifying. You don't know me. Hearing that voice say that would be terrifying.

You don't know me. And so they end up with a local actor called Ed Ivory, who's like a San Francisco guy. Who's great. He's great. It's such a secret weapon in this movie is just how fucking grumpy Santa Claus is. He's grumpy in like a relatable way like yeah he's like exasperated he's exasperated in the way that you would be if like your flight got diverted to atlanta you know he's not like bringing fury like of a thousand sons he's just

like yeah you idiots don't kidnap me next time and i'll do christmas better okay and he never softens he's just like yeah f you yeah i love that he's not like you know what jack we both learned a lot from each other he's like i gotta go there there are no lessons in this movie that's that's like the big thing that makes it feel so on disney it's it's that there's no lessons and that the entire character arc is that a guy just feels kind of weird and depressed about his job. And then after a while is like, you know what? I was good at my job. And actually, I'll just keep doing my job.

I'm good at it. I'm fun. I get myself again. It's fine. I'm back in my own skin. This is great. It's a movie about like stubborn artists trying to work within a studio system. Very much so.

And just coming out of it with complete resolve that they were in the right, even in the face of failure. I think that's a perfect take, by the way. Right. We should dig into the movie proper, but this is the thing I want to talk about. And Michael, I'm hoping not to put you on the spot that you can speak to with some sense of greater knowledge than I have. A thing that was very revolutionary in this movie is that Selick was adamant that he wanted the camera to move as if it were a live action film. Oh, yeah. The camera movement in this film is fucking bananas. And as if stop motion was not already hard to begin with, you're adding this other level, this other type of movement into the situation.

And basically, there were not a lot of feature length stop motion films before this. There's like Will Vinton's Mark Twain film and things like that. But stop motion was pretty clamped down because it's much like Richard Williams being like, I'll fucking hand draw the camera movement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one else wants to bother with this. It's too difficult, but I'm willing to do it. This was like Selick's biggest sticking point was it has to move

like a live action film. And he's like moving the camera like fucking Vincent Minnelli in this. Like I truly think there are less than 10% of the shots in this movie that are totally locked down. Well, and you can feel it you feel like this is a huge movie from the opening moments you that spiral down into the trees

then you go into the tree and then the this is halloween number never stops moving and it's and it's like and yeah it's you know because the the thing is it's like they amazingly make these spaces feel huge, whereas they're just like a curtained off piece of a warehouse. And all of a sudden you feel like you're like this Halloween land is infinite. And I did talk to some of the animators about that. And I think they all were like, I think this is the first time anyone's done this in a stop motion, certainly in a stop motion movie. And it wasn't used that much and they they have this like you know motion control camera that moves one frame per you know one one like millimeter per frame and they have and they and but the one of the animators were

saying that like it kind of it wasn't super reliable so sometimes you would do a shot and like you would have to redo it because the camera move was like fucked up um but but it was like it added this extra layer of difficulty but it also makes the movie feel like feel huge and it's a huge technological breakthrough and it was also the first stop motion animated movie where this where the artists could kind of check their shots which is interesting like like in in the past like when they're making the california raisins they worked you know a week and a half on a shot and if it looks terrible they just have to start over right they just get it when it fucking is processed a week later yeah yeah exactly they had to wait yeah wait a week watch it in dailies and just cross their fingers and hope it doesn't

look like shit right they basically had like a computer capture system so they could basically see what they were getting even if it wasn't playing back 35 millimeter, right? Yeah. No, they were saying that they could see the two frames before. Okay. So it wasn't perfect because now, because when I went to visit Wendell and Wild,

like they just right next to their little workstation, they have monitor they hit play and it just the animation up until that point yeah and then you could try it redo it try it redo it or whatever but in in these guys only had three frames to work with um so it was like they could see the two and and one of the animators was telling me this guy anthony scott who's like animated all these amazing shots on it um that they had this little green it was like also this green digitized shitty screen that they had to look at like so they were like just squinting through and it's like that arm motion looks okay right god i hope this looks good in four and a half weeks but it's and it's a magic trick that they pulled it off and it's a magic trick that it feels like this huge infinite world and it feels like a busby berkeley musical that's why that's one of the reasons why those music sequence feel so alive is the cameras swirling around and yes and and

and the characters never stop moving like there's very complicated choreography in this movie very little of it is traditional dancing but like you look at the making christmas sequence and every bit of their construction you know the characters overlapping each other and the camera moving around them is like so tightly uh choreographed it's it's just it's it's insane how complicated they made this movie yes but it doesn't feel complicated it doesn't feel like it like it feels like you're in a world like the only thing about this movie yes but it doesn't feel complicated it doesn't feel like it like it feels like you're in a world like the only thing about this movie that suggests that where you maybe feel like oh they're being pushed to their limits is that there's not a lot of people around right like that like there's only the the town is not heavily populated it's not crowds and crowds well you say that

david but it's like there are 25 developed that's the thing no right that's the thing it's still amazing um but you know it just but like you really feel like oh my god right it took so much to make every one of these interesting characters it's so cool but everything else like the camera moving around you're just like well of course it's moving around we're in halloween town they took the and moved it around there. Yeah, easy. The trick, which is what Selick wanted. Like he wanted to sell this as a real viable world, which the more, you know, it's been,

I feel like one of the big revolutions of CGI that's under discussed is like, now there is this freedom to move the camera more like a live action camera to, you know, simulate lenses and lighting effects and things like that, that I think you can get to this really interesting mid space where you embrace the things that only animation can do, but you do it with the language of how a live action film would be shot and it lends it a certain veracity. Like this, also this particular space is so interesting for stop motion too, because like now stop motion uses a lot of CG.

I was going to say, yeah, please talk on this. They will like literally and there is a studio that I won't name or whatever, and they make great movies. But I don't understand this process where they will literally animate the scene in CG like you would animate a scene in Toy Story or, you know, Maya or something. And then they'll 3D print every frame of that CG and put it on the characters' faces. And I'm like, at that point, what are we doing? You know, like it's this movie has that perfect balance of like the technology is advanced enough so where you can move the camera around. You could have characters with different faces and the magnetized little face plates on the characters. But you also get to see thumbprints on Dr. Finkel's lip flap.

And you really feel like it's this tactical thing which makes it feel like even more of a magic trick. There are certain close-up shots of some of the puppets where you actually feel like you can see them decomposing and it's a thing that the movie can own because they're all creepy halloween town people but also yes what you're saying so often now like face replacement for stop motion which for people who don't know is is making different heads with different faces so you can replace them smiley face sad face grumpy face eating face and then you have to do all the in-between faces to transition from one expression to another and all the different mouth shapes for uh dialogue and all that but like something like corpse bride it's maybe the biggest problem with corpse bride was they attempted this thing where they built

incredibly complicated mechanics inside the puppet heads and rather than have replacement faces they tried to build faces that were more expressive that feel pretty frozen like all the characters in that movie feel kind of botox and now when you have face replacement like this as you're saying michael it's done with a lot of cgi pre-planning and it's very clean and precise and there's something about like yeah that Jack's face isn't perfect. Yeah. You see the thumbprints and you see that it's like someone did that. Yeah.

A human did this. And they're all like actually hand sculpted. So they're not all perfectly – he's not always a perfect orb. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He gets lumpy at times. But yeah, you open with this incredible number, introducing every character, setting up the tone, the music, introducing like 8 million visual ideas. Yes. But you have to set up the stakes of this thing incredibly quickly.

Like, not in the stakes, but the world of this is so complicated where you're like, there's a forest where there are eight trees and each of them is one of the major american holidays yes in this what are the eight we've got i said we're thanksgiving and easter and christmas and halloween what are the other ones let me look back here it's a good question truly don't i because i remember i saw this film in theaters i would have been seven day st patrick's day yeah of course yeah what what what of our very sensitive town that must be yeah i bet you there's nothing offensive going on in st patrick's day town okay i'm looking there's a river of beer and you know uh drunk irish little leprechauns roaming about and sectarian violence wait what's going on here relax i'm looking here at the shot okay the four trees you see at the beginning are jack-o'-lantern christmas tree turkey easter egg

right and egg right those are the four i remember yes then there's this one i truly i've never taken the time to actually study here that is like a box with stars on it and a feather coming out of the top. And then there's Valentine's Day. There's a heart in St. Patrick's Day. Last one I do not know. Wait, I'm going to look at this to see if there's a, yeah, like, huh, what could that be? Right? It's a very odd shape.

I mean, I'm wondering if it's supposed to represent New Year's Eve in some way, but it looks like nothing. Is it birthday town? Oh, is it a birthday cake? That sounds right. That might be right. Could that be a thing? Just it's for birthdays? Or it's a firecracker.

It might be fourth of July. It's a firecracker. Okay, so it's fourth of July, Valentine'sine's day patrick's easter thanksgiving halloween christmas you know i'd love to go to fourth of july town sounds like a great place definitely not going to be weirdly aggro no i just remember when my dad was taking me to the amc well back then it was the lows 84th street griffin uh and he was i remember him having the trepidations because he was like so i just need to prep you for like the story of this it's like you know halloween and you know christmas well they have towns in this movie

and so each town is like for that holiday and when you say it out loud it's like yeah sure okay that sounds simple but i do get that my dad was like you know this isn't just like there's a guy and a princess and a bad guy you know like it is a little more theoretic it's a little more heady for like a little yeah and it's also the internal logic of it is like in this town it's basically that holiday every day but also they're prepping all year for the one day super hallow of it is like in this town, it's basically that holiday every day. But also they're prepping all year for the one day. For like the super Halloween. It is that holiday in the real world, even though they don't ever seem to leave the tree.

No. But also their worldview is based around the holiday. So kind of like everything is shaped through that lens. They don't know that other holidays exist. They don't know that the outside world exists they're just like fuck it's this one day we gotta make it count i mean that this is where the 68 minutes really helps them you just keep moving you gotta go you're like jack lights himself on fire everybody loves him keep going keep going and you don't have a chance to really examine it is he like the king of this town? No, there's a mayor. My favorite thing is that he is the pumpkin king, of course.

But it's like Christmas town, they, one assumes, make presents and deliver them. There's a thing to do. Halloween town. Right. They seem to just sort of have like a horror bacchanal. And then at the end, they're like, great Halloween, everybody.

Like best Halloween yet. So were they just kind of like putting out spooky vibes have like a horror bacchanal and then at the end they're like great halloween everybody like best halloween yet so were they just kind of like putting out spooky vibes to the universe like that's what they were doing well they also imply that they scare people but they don't scare each other no um no these are all questions that are whizzed by gleefully and i'm happy to not answer yeah but it's it it is true i mean at this point in time basically all animated films were 75 minutes long that was the length that was the amount of budget they would allot you uh they didn't think it was worth the time and energy to make a film longer than that and i think there was this assumption that audiences would not be uh tolerant of an animated film longer than that like it's when cars came out

it was the longest animated film of all time oh interesting i didn't know that like cars and incredibles were like incredibles was two hours i think right they're like the first two to like get within striking zone of two i mean and it is i mean it's truly because as they told us on our film all the time it's like a million dollars a minute right so it's like exponentially more expensive like to oh you want an extra half hour that's a lot more money yeah and sometimes that I don't know if that math really works because it didn't end up being that on our movie or whatever but but it is like that's sort of the producers like you can't make it longer it's so expensive you know they're just shouting from the rooftops at you but it is it it is this thing where stories have to just sort of like carry you along with confidence and vibes and just like you need to understand we're not going to have the the time to really go deep on all of this like i've been watching a lot of uh universal horror films uh recently for for spooky season a lot of them have gone back up on streaming services and such and like all of those movies are pretty much 70 to 75

minutes and get a lot of them you feel fat on them like you watched even the ones i love there's often a lot of shoe leather right yeah yeah around a couple big sequences a lot of wind up to get to the point and this is a movie that is just like we're gonna zoom so just hold on yeah because it's not simplifying its narrative at all to fit into this length well it's it is a simple story all things things told. You know, it's like Jack's, you know, like there's a complicated backstory and stuff, but it's just like he sees Halloween. He tries to tell the people about Halloween. They go to, they take over Christmas. It doesn't work at the end.

Right. I mean, and so many, you know, the Disney princess movies of this time have the big I want song, right? There's a thing I want. I know I want it. There's a thing I want. I know I want it. There's a larger role out there I want. This has this triumphant opening number. Jack comes out as the pumpkin king, sets himself on fire, dips himself

in some green goo, comes out of the fountain. This is all good. Five stars. Five stars. Incredible. The best intro. I wish I could enter every room by lighting myself on fire. That moment where they're all chanting and he slowly rises out of the goo with like his arms crossed

across his chest and his fucking like bat bow tie fans out and like everyone's just cheering him and you're like this guy rules and it's immediately followed up by him being like I'm so fucking depressed I want to kill myself he has an I don't want song.

Right. He's just like, I feel no joy from anything anymore. There's nothing he knows he wants. There's no aspiration. There's no explanation either. He doesn't explain why he's sad. No, he's just like, I'm so tired of this shit. Right.

It's just true, like, existential depression. Yeah. Kids love ennui. Right. Sally just watching him cross the gate and just being like why won't this complicated

artist boy notice me? You know that thing where it's like Sally is Jack with emotional intelligence but also not given the room to be this self-indulgent.

Yeah. Yeah. And she's just like I see that we would get along why can't i get you to notice that i exist well and and i you can sort of see it's it i could i don't know if this is right or not but it's like to me i could kind of see the contours of the version of sally before carolyn thompson came in where she's just kind of mooning over Jack, you know? And,

and it's like, it's sort of, it's a little annoying and it's nice every time that she does get a little bit of, um, agency and stuff like that. But it, but it does seem like I could totally see how this is like cookie cuttered

around. Cause you know, Tim Burton is not, you know, the greatest, you know, fullest render of female characters in the history of cinema um you know like and it feels a little bit like that where it's like oh this beautiful tragic

figure um loves this uh you know sad ghost boy for some reason um and then and then it's like it's nice when she's given like a surprising amount of dimension for one of these films and and it was it was nice hearing carolyn thompson even say like i i would have gone further um but i did what i could uh you know i'm considering how short this movie is it is surprising how many scenes sally has on her own yeah from her perspective and it is the thing they set up well where it's like her identity isn't just being in love with jack it's almost more defined by this like horrible relationship she has with her stat's father needing to get out needing to find this sort of freedom and jack represents like i wish i was given the room to just let my freak flag fly like that yeah people let me do whatever the fuck i want

jack is liberated yes and she's obviously imprisoned right so he's a little bit of an aspirational figure like that and then it's also just like i feel like we get along why won't he talk to me yeah this guy is so caught up on his dumb bullshit um but jack does his lament i mean this is two songs in under 10 minutes yeah you get to jack's lament which david is your background when he does the uh the hamlet with his own head he does and obviously that is where we introduce the weird uh how do you describe it looped mountain thing what is that it rules to be clear yeah it's a curly it's like what it's like one of the most iconic images from this movie from the 90s and yet i don't even know how to put it into words which i guess is why

it's so cool it is also just one of those transcendent visual moments of like you have this thing that's like very much a tim burton illustration that you feel like would be impossible to render in three dimensions right yeah this idea of like what if a mountain looks like this why why would it look like that? What are you talking about? Why would a cliff be curled like that? It's like, I don't know, build it. And then he's standing on top of it.

You can't keep on thinking about, you can't stop thinking about how like knurled and curled it is. And then when he takes the first step forward and the thing starts to unfurl in front of him, you're just like, oh, that's the kind of reality we're operating in this movie, where anything could happen. It's so cool. front of him you're just like oh that's the kind of reality we're operating in in this movie where anything could happen it's so cool and and i guess like i in the commentary or whatever henry

selleck was like he had to sell that to tim burton because tim burton was like i want the i want this world to feel real don't have any magic in it yeah henry selleck was like i don't know it's a mechanical mountain dude look at it right you're gonna you're gonna cut this out of the movie it's the best part right right the mountain itself is a monster i don't fucking know who gives a shit it should happen exactly like this is this movie is like an opera like you want the most ecstatic emotional things to happen yes yes totally and that's and that's like one of the things that's sort of magical about it is that every opportunity for something surprising and wonderful to happen they take they don't pull any punches even even like you know a movie like um edward scissorhands or something the the the real world and the sort of you know like the cookie cutter

burbank and the the you know ghostly place that uh edward scissorhands come from the contrast is so high and he really keeps those borders you know really firm and like henry selleck is like so inventive that he can't help himself that like halloween land is a little spooky and crazy and it's like it's like ceaselessly inventive and it's and even the world that the humans live in at the end like looks like this weird gothic painting like there's never any like totally real reality it's all invented um and that's one of the reasons why it's like so you can't look away from the screen yeah and christmas town is as insane as halloween town yeah it's it's the same level of like you have these weird wind-up polar bears the wind-up polar bears are the best yeah but i like

the the spinning christmas tree that's fun why don't they spin more often what else yeah they should always spin yeah uh what other cool stuff is going i mean i love jack putting me the uh lights in his eyes that really that really sticks with me that's another thing they talked about as sort of like a challenge to themselves is so much of animation is about expression through the eyes. And they were like, let's make a character who doesn't have eyeballs.

Yeah, and Disney was like, he must have eyes. What are you doing? He's the main character of the movie. And it's like, and it was, it is this cool, I mean, it makes him iconic. Like that's why he's on, if he had eyes, he wouldn't be on the Hot Topics sweatshirt. No, he wouldn't. I mean, his face design is so simple.

And they just decide like, well, what if we make him the most expressive character ever? What if he has the biggest facial expressions possible at every moment? He just emotes thoroughly. There's a thing in the dossier, David, I think it was from Burton on Burton, where Burton talks about like the genesis of this idea for him was speaking to what you brought up, Michael, about like the style of the town in Edward Scissorhands. Scissorhands and how much he's talked about that like that movie is what he felt like growing up in his hometown and CalArts was the inventor's mountain at the top of the hill where you get to make your weird art um right that Burton said he was obsessed with holidays as a child and like Halloween obviously makes a lot of sense for him but it was Christmas as well because growing up in the suburbs of California you don't have seasons so he was like yes the whole year felt unmoored and the only time you really felt a sense of place

and time was the corridor between thanksgiving or christmas and halloween where the decorations would go up where there would be activities themed to those things it really like right that's the thing like you could you could walk into the supermarket and even though it's whatever summer all the time you can see some fall leaves and some halloween decorations and you can be like right it's this time of year right uh it's it's true it's very interesting like uh and obviously again we we did burton on the show and we talked about the sort of you know his weird geny, I'm in a suburban environment. I like that he calls it, he says it feels very floaty. Yeah.

I do like that word of his. I guess it's just kind of like unmoored from everything. But I do like that both of these towns are like decorations come to life. Yeah. I like that. Look, I enjoy hotel transylvania it's a hotel all the monsters go there even monsters enjoy these films yes we love that's right and you and then sometimes they need a break from the hotel and they have to go on a cruise

yes um but i like that the the the people in ha in Halloween Town are not really... It's not like it's like a Dracula and a Frankenstein. I know Sally is sort of a Frankenstein monster, but she's also like a rag doll. Jack Skellington is sort of a skeleton, but he's also the pumpkin king. What is he? He is a skeleton.

The mayor of Halloween Town, that's not a... I mean, he's sort of a Jekyll Hyde thing, but he's a skellington you know the mayor of halloween town like that's not a i mean he's sort of a jekyll hyde thing but he's a fucking freak nothing looks like that it's so special like there's no archetypes that are lazy yeah right he's just like weird german expressions no and it's like you have the wolfman as one of the background characters who's the only one who feels like more specifically in the classic monster archetypes but as you said like they they like distort there's no dracula there's four vampires of odd shapes who look like edward gory drawings you have two witches you have like the creature from the black lagoon is the undersea gal you have satan

right yeah you do have satan the lord of darkness himself and you have the boogeyman right like the the impression of the boogeyman is very specific he's like a pillowcase right bugs and he's also a like new orleans voodoo guy like i don't know how else to describe it yeah you're hitting well he's like cap calloway i mean we'll talk about this but he's got we can mention this yes yes you're hitting on all these different types of monsters. Like, you can tell the brainstorm session must have been so fun, deciding, like, what are the 25 types we need in here? But they also feel totally liberated to create their own types.

And the types they have that are riffing, it's what you're saying, David, of just so often everyone's starting from the point of the six iconic yeah universal monsters universal and just changing them enough that they don't break copyright law and this is really coming at it from a different angle yeah well and that that feels like i don't know like maybe and and i don't know who's really responsible for this but it does sort of feel like that selick relentlessly innovative sort of thing you could see in all of his movies where he's like if someone showed him a picture of a dracula that looked like dracula he'd be like i don't know that doesn't that's

that's boring and if someone had these little edward gory freaks he's like yeah more of this you know and and i think that that sort of decision making it was like that's what's cool about this movie is it was like it's like a jailbreak they all like escaped from disney and we're like let's go insane um and and and all of the and all of the animators talked about it too because it like they were both having a lot of fun but they were also like we're making pillsbury doughboy commercials commercials and now we're making a real movie with the king of Hollywood Tim Burton holy shit and they were like working 12 hour days and

like killing themselves because also like stop motion animation as an art form was like on the line they were like if this goes well there could be more movies and I'll be employed more and also this art form I love will flourish. And God damn, if it didn't work, you know, it took seven or eight years or something. But like the success of this movie, I really do think makes it okay for Laika to come out with their, you know, movie a year and all of these like stop motion animated movies.

Laika doesn't happen if this movie doesn't have as long a tail. movies like it doesn't happen if this movie doesn't have as long a tail and james and the giant peach is almost made like right back to back with this movie because disney was just like we're gonna invest in this as an idea to see if this is viable then they tap out uh will vinton studios goes under uh phil knight buys it and they finally are able to come around and go like is there nostalgia for this idea now yeah 10 years later uh but but yeah no it's it's a really like it's rare you know snow white is another example where everyone's just hoping like does this actually prove this as a medium yeah and if it doesn't we all might be out of work or back to doing, you know, there's I feel like I've talked about this in other episodes, but I do find it fascinating that it feels like whatever the first breakthrough film is in any form of animation almost becomes the genre that everyone's trying to replicate. trying to replicate.

Oh yeah. So, so much of hand-drawn animation was still chasing the princess fairy tale musical. Yeah. And then the CGI becomes so defined by toy story and the majority of stop motion films are still creepy. Yeah, no,

it's true. That's a really, that's a super good point. Cause like they, they, they're never like, Oh, this was successful because it was great and it was filled with love and, and, and it was made by people that really cared. It's, it's always like, oh, this was successful because it was great and it was filled with love and it was made by people that really cared.

It's always like, oh, this was – what? They like toys? I don't know. Toys come to like small soldiers? I don't know. Stop asking me fucking questions. Right, right. But like Artiman is the only studio that's been able to work consistently at a high level in stop motion and do something totally different tonally.

Because Laika, it feels very tied to this, you know? And they started their company on we're getting Selig back. Yes, they did, and they did it successfully, and yeah, they've never really... What was the last Laika movie? Missing Link.

Oh, Missing Link. And they're working on one now that looks right i know they are which i'm all you know thumbs up like i'm all for it there was a bit of a gap but they have like three things coming now right good because missing i know missing link didn't do well but you know come on yeah but it's it's it's the one by the um the guy from the decemberis oh right and it's cool i've seen like sets of it it's very rad and it's like so observed because it's like a bunch of people in portland making a movie about portland and like every detail is like perfect it's called wildwood yes and then they have something else called the

night gardener which is different from master gardener paul schrader has yet to make are you sure adorable also starring jo Joel Edgerton. I will say this, though, from the creator of Ozark. Oh, wait, really? Yeah. Is that what it is? Oh, okay. Never seen Ozark.

It sounds like it's maybe a little more adult dramatic, but there's not a lot known about it. Yeah. All right. So anyway, I mean, the plot of Night before christmas is fairly simple uh but still jack it does a good halloween great job jack uh but then he then he feels ennui yes so he wanders over to christmas town we talked about christmas town uh and he my favorite maybe my favorite thing jack does uh decides to study christmas scientifically he like well hey hooks hooks a bunch of stuff up to christmas things and is like what's going on here i want to slow down for half a second i did have to pull but the whole christmas what's the sequence

but uh oh well sure i thought we mentioned christmastown yeah but what's this obviously amazing i did have to pull next to my, maybe quietly my favorite character in the whole movie. And I realized he was right here next to where I'm recording. Oh, wait, get him closer. There he is. The trumpet player who calls him Bone Daddy. Hell yeah. Oh, yeah.

That guy's awesome. That guy rules. Wait, do they have just characters of like toys of all the background characters? Basically. I mean, it makes sense. Oh, yeah. That guy's awesome. That guy rules. Wait, do they have just characters of, like, toys of all the background characters? Basically, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Oh, my God. I want the melting guy. Yeah, oh, you can get him.

No, that's the other reason I say, like, the Star Wars thing is, like, I mean, we're recording this in early October. If you go into any fucking Walgreens, the amount of Nightmare Before Christmas stuff they have is insane. Huh. Like, Nightmare Before Christmas has just become 30% of all Halloween decorations. Yeah. Well, there's no other, there's, like, almost no other Halloween movie. I mean, there

are, but there's none that connected, I guess. This is the other thing. It clearly was not a commercial calculation for them, but the fact that this movie basically gets to run the table from halloween to christmas yeah that it's seasonal for the last three months of the year disney just makes bank off of this fucking thing well and the the the the haunted mansion ride yes is like so amazing like every year they make it better and it's like so amazing

and it really does feel like watching the whole movie and it's like that Oogie Boogie one at the end is like stunning piece of animatronics like you know because it's because the iconography it's like that's one of the things about this movie it's like every character's iconography is like

perfect like Oogie Boogie is this like perfect personification of, I don't know, fear or something, you know? And like Jack Skellington is this mascot for Halloween. They're all like perfect. Yeah, I mean, Burton said the whole idea for Oogie Boogie is that like no one in this town is bad. Right.

You know, except for Oogie Boogie. But even then, it's just because that's his nature but they should kill Oogie Boogie yeah he sucks well I mean like cause obviously when Jack hires the little children who are quasi bad

no they're fun they are fun they're very fun and they sing a very fun song Lock, Shock and and barrel, baby. A young Ben Hosley playing Lock. They sing possibly my favorite song in the score. I mean, I love their song so much. And their bathtub is another one of those things of just like,

it's like the moment of the mountain unfurling. Of just like, yeah, the bathtub should have actual legs that move, and it's their vehicle. And it moves so satisfyingly. It, like, bounces on the ground with each step. It's so good. The three of them are Elfman, Catherine O'Hara, and Paul Rubens.

Paul Rubens is Locke, right, and Catherine O'Hara is Stock or whatever, and Elfman is Beryl. It's shock, David. david yeah please show some respect put some respect on that name one of my favorite mayor tim burton uh stock company players yeah he's got such a great voice yeah um he's the mayor frank welker is the dog of course zero uh great name for a dog it's also cool that the mayor has two faces and one isn't evil one's like they're both smiling like what one is one is like smiling and like your best friend and the other one's like just terrified all the time he's panicked which i feel

like more accurately sums up people in power yes yes yeah he's i mean that's we assume the way it works is jack is the king so the buck stops with him and the mayor has to actually deal with all of the bureaucracy right he has to do all this stuff is it like the british royals like is he the king of the town and sort of ceremonial senses and then the mayor's the prime minister how wait how would you know about yeah how would you know about that griffin my podcast co-host grew up in england um oh boy by the way carolyn thompson uh in her one of her interviews talked about um growing up and in i think i'm checking my notes a town called dislington and i like lost my mind i was like i have to bring this up in, I think I'm checking my notes, a town called Dizzlington. And I like lost my mind.

I was like, I have to bring this up in the podcast. Hence this very sweaty transition. Wow. Wait, what? She didn't grow up in Dizzlington. What are you talking about? She spent a summer where she fell in love with reading in I think a town called Dizzlington.

Wow. Good for her. She mentioned it like eight times in this interview and i was losing my mind but yeah no way you know when he hires little kids he's like keep oogie boogie away from this and i'm like why don't you keep oogie boogie away from your town he sounds bad you know he's bad right david's in favor of martial law right instead oogie boogie is like just building like a deck of card themed torture chamber down there no one's checking in on him oogie boogie seems to have like diplomatic immunity like he's just got his side of town but yes jack falls through the falls in love with christmas comes

back i i don't remember if it's after before him in the lab trying to synthesize Christmas, which I love. But the scene of him doing the town meeting is so great because there's this shift of Jack loving this fucking thing, assuming everyone else is going to be as excited as him about what he's discovered. And they don't get it. It's not spooky. He's trying to sell for them, like like the loveliness of christmas and it totally flies over their heads so he has to adjust the pitch on the fly and start to like skew it into scary directions ending with the sandy claws thing and then there's that brief moment backstage where he's just like i guess that's what i had to do to sell it to them like

he knows it's like he gave a disingenuous pitch to the studio head in order to get the green light. Yes, exactly. And he's like, I'm hoping I can still get my thing made my way. But that's just what I had to do to sell it. But so, yeah, this is my question to you guys. Does Jack want to replace Santa Claus whole hog? Like literally just do everything that guy's doing.

Or does he want to do his version of Christmas, which is what he ends up doing? You know what I mean? I kind of think he does. I think for a moment he does. It's like Griffin's saying. He's trying. He's Tim Burton trying painfully to make it.

Is this a normal movie? I don't know. He's trying to draw the Fox lady. Yeah. That's what it is. I think it's a movie about the fact that you cannot fundamentally change your nature. Your basic core being.

He's like, give me a reindeer. And Dr. Finkelstein is like, yeah, sure. I'll give you a reindeer. Gives him a skeleton. But it's not like Jack responds to that with like, no, I wanted a reindeer. He's like, great, perfect, just what I wanted. I love this. And that's true of everything.

It's not like his standard's lower, but I think he is starting trying to perfectly replicate Christmas as he sought. And he just wants the glory of being the guy at the center of that. And then some combination of like the concessions he has to make in order to get them excited to work on it. And his just basic instincts coming out of him. Yeah, he just makes a terrifying Christmas

with a skeleton, reindeers, and a coffin slut. Ben, do you think this is the best Christmas? Like, is this what you would like Christmas to be as a kid? You know, just because it's a weird Christmas. Just throwing it to Ben. Well, I like video games. Like, I liked getting video games. If I got a video game system and then it bit me,

I don't know if I'd be into it. So I love chaos. I love bugs. I love bones. But the presence in this movie movie the way they're presented they're they're attacking everyone basically they are yeah yes i can't sign off on that but what if it's delivered by a bone man does that help absolutely yeah absolutely ben you're saying this but if if for this Christmas I gave you a wooden duck with bullet holes and sharp teeth on wheels, you would be thrilled. I would.

That would be a really sweet present to give me. Shrunken head in a box? Something I really like. Right. Yeah, shrunken head too is actually kind of a sick gift. This is what I'm saying. You would be happy getting any of these presents. I know you don't want the thing to attack you.

Yeah. But assuming it didn't then bite your hand, you would be happy receiving any one of these presents. Totally. You'd be thrilled. I would be thrilled. Cool striped snake? Come on.

Well, striped snake. Striped snake. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of work. That's a big snake. A toothy wreath? A toothy wreath. Yeah. Toothy wreath is fun.

Toothy wreath I like. They're all so fun. I love how the making Christmas number is so ominous. It does sound almost like some like military march, the way it builds. Yeah. Well, and it's like these,

I mean, am I crazy? Cause you guys might know more about trailers than me. It just feels like these songs are used in like every trailer. Like at least like, what's this I've heard in like a thousand trailers. Absolutely. No.

What's this became a real go-to like family comedy. Yeah. Like I get a man that Santa Claus or three or something. Yes. And then and then I also I watch so many trailers when I can't sleep for no clear reason. I even will find myself watching trailers where they clearly are using a sound alike of what's this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where they cut it to what's this couldn't get the rights and have a song that has basically the exact same meter yeah but yes no that one in particular is used a ton and it's so i mean it's so good i was listening to it in the car like like after i watched the movie i was like singing along to it it's great i once witnessed my friend with his son who was maybe three at the time. His son was just saying, I want to listen to Jack Skellington.

And my friend was like, oh, that's not the name of a song. Which song do you want? And he was like, Jack Skellington. And so my friend was just sort of like, my friend was like, do you want this is Halloween? Do you want Jack's lament? And he was like, Jack, where's Jack Skellington?

And finally, what's this? I believe was the answer. That's what that was. You pulled out a gun, put it to your friend's head. I said. It was just one of those classic moments where I was basically watching a toddler

live entirely rent free in a grown-up's mind like my friend was just about to melt all the way down there's the moment in making christmas i love when he comes in with his like elfman enunciation like the song's been like and then it slows down and he does the like, I don't believe. Like it sort of slows down to his appreciation. I don't believe. Yes, it's so good. And then he ends that bit by laughing maniacally like a monster.

Like he's trying to show appreciation of like, look at this magic around me. It's like he cannot stop being scary. guess yes i guess again that is what i'm asking it's like is it that it's just so different so that's exciting for him yes yes he's stuck in a rut right he's stuck in a rut yeah but it's not like he sees christmas and he's like this is what's gonna make me likable because that's what i like about jake scunt and he's not trying to turn halloween town into something more palatable or whatever no and i i don't think he's trying to be more likable i don't think he's trying to change christmas but it's almost like trying to do christmas reminds him what he liked about halloween in the first place yeah the more he butts up against it i mean

even that moment when lock, track, and barrel finally come back with santa claus and he's just doing like i'm so excited to meet you and santa claus is like you've kidnapped me right and he's like i'm gonna do christmas great i'll make you proud and he's like who the fuck are you what are you talking about well and it's and it's like you know uh carolyn thompson or whatever says in the thing that it's like, and Danny Elfman says in the commentary too, that he's like, he felt, it was like him at the height of Oingo Boingo,

like he became a rock star. And for some reason he was bummed out. And this other thing, which isn't better or worse, made him re-excited about art again, which is like film composing. And he's like, oh, I want to do this. And I do think you're right, Griffin. It's just sort of like a,

it feels exciting again. Like I got bored doing the same thing over and over again. And this feels new and different and exciting. And like, you know, by the end of the movie, he has no attachment to any of the core values of Christmas. He just wanted to do something new and like get everyone excited about it.

And then, yeah, when it's over, he's like, ah, who cares? I didn't I'd like to do my thing anyway. I'm also realizing how much the relationship between Jack and Santa Claus, excuse me, is just Rupert Pumpkin and Jerry Lanford. Yeah, totally. It's like I will force this man to respect me he is my idol and i will at gunpoint make him respect me as an artist that's a really good it's it's it's danny elfin going to james earl jones and james earl jones saying i don't know who you are you don't know me. So, yeah, everyone at the town gets a Christmas job. Sally, of course, is locked in the tower by Dr. Finkelstein,

who is fun. I like Dr. Finkelstein. What a great character. Yes. And Santa is abducted. And I guess they're turning this all around, Griff, in two months. That's the implication, right? Yes.

Yes. They're swerving right from Halloween to Christmas. Like, this is a tight schedule for them. Absolutely. Then what happens next before they actually do Christmas? I guess it's mostly, like, Sally escaping and trying to turn Jack around. Yeah. Sally's trying to stop it from happening.

She's the one person who sees that this is going to go wrong. Yeah. Yes. She sort of has like prophetic powers. Right. Right. This whole midsection is them prepping Christmas while trying to get Santa Claus. And then pretty quickly, like once Santa Claus is in Halloween Town,

he's handed back to Lock, Shock, and Barrel. Jack is on his way. He's got his Santa suit. He's got his sled. Fog, no worry. I got Zero. He can light my way. Yeah, Zero is just so great. He's a good boy. Awesome. He's a good boy. So cool.

Then the next thing is the Oogie Boogie sequence which is like to me one of the coolest and most inventive things in the whole movie like the black light stuff and all the weird casino stuff like it it's it's it's such a different palette and they found a way to make this character feel dark and dangerous when everything is dark and dangerous by by doing that black light technique and also just like um it is it is one of Henry Stollick's weird things. Dude loves, bro loves casinos. In every one of his movies,

there's a weird casino zone. He's like Sonic. Look, I also love casinos, and I am also like Sonic, so I support that. We should discuss the Cab Calloway thing. Obviously. That feels like something that Danny Elfman and Henry Selleck and Tim Burton all are like, you know, weird old cartoon junkies who loved when like in a Betty Boop number.

Someone would do like a Cab Calloway thing. Right. There's a Cab Calloway short a betty boop short with cab calloway that i think is called minnie the moocher i know he sings minnie the moocher in it but it's one of those early shorts where you have live action animation coexisting and burton was like as a kid that would come in the rotation of like cartoon packages on tv and always jumped out to me as like who is this guy what is he doing in a cartoon with Betty Boop? And when you're a kid, especially like Cab Calloway has a very bizarre presence.

He doesn't sound like anyone else existing with cartoon characters. So he had this sort of archetype in his head, which like the origins of most of American animation comes directly out of minstrel shows. There is this thing that we never want to discuss but like Mickey Mouse and Bosco and Bugs Bunny and all these characters really are like the evolution

away from Al Jolson into anthropomorphic animals but they all start out in that vernacular so a lot of early animation has this sort of jazzy tone to it and these sort of racial caricatures i remember yeah griff your fit your favorite game cuphead yes there's a lot of pushback a lot of people were like right right can you even do this style anymore because it's so

rooted you know in these sort of even if you're not thinking of it you're you're doing a pastiche of serotyping so oogie boogie was like burton's big thing uh forbidden zone plays with a lot of this as well as i said like elfman's performance in that movie he plays like the devil but he plays him in this very 30s 40s band leader style he's not doing blackface but it is in that kind of vernacular certainly in the songs and everything and then he brought it the two of them brought it to thompson and selick and they were the two who seemingly had pause about it in that uh movies that made us show caroline thompson talks about being like you can't do this tim i know you think this is charming but you were not thinking of the semiotics of this this makes you look incredibly ignorant and tim burton apparently

punched a wall in protest was like i want a jazzy burlap sack man made of bugs they hired ken page yeah ken page who is black uh you know and it's an incredible actor right he's wonderful and he's played oogie boogie many times, I feel like. Yes. He was old Deuteronomy. He was the original old Deuteronomy. Yes. I think he was the second guy to play the lion on Broadway in The Wiz.

Sure. After Ted Russell went to do the movie. And he has an incredible resume and performs the shit out of this character. I mean, I'm sure that this is a common uh feeling and maybe you guys felt this way well michael you saw this later in life but when i saw this as a kid i was very scared of oogie boogie yes and i didn't like when he was bugs i loved when it was bugs i have to say I had completely an opposite reaction. Same.

Big Bugs fan. Seven-year-old David just did not like it. I didn't love him before he was Bugs, but when he was Bugs, I was like, I can never unsee that. That's so, that really unsettled me. It's a bridge too far. I will say this. I remember, because my mom wouldn't let me see this in theaters when it came out despite me wanting to so desperately. There were toy commercials for this movie playing in regular rotation, and I had a bunch of the toys before I had seen the movie. Because I was like, if you're not going to let me see this fucking thing, at least you got to pay me out at Christmastime.

You got to make this good in some way. There was a store near my elementary school that sold lighting fixtures like it literally just sold lamps and for whatever reason the only thing they sold aside from lamps was nightmare before christmas toys was it on the bowery that's like the classic lamp district down there no i want to say it was like on like 13th between 6th and 7th or something like that okay sure um it was like a the lamp sub-district. It was like a small lighting fixture store and it felt, in retrospect,

the owners must have just liked this movie. They sold all the action figures and I'd walk by it every day of school and I'd be like, Mom, you're getting me these fucking toys. I'm telling you. But the commercial for the action figures revealed the bug thing. Oh, interesting. Because the Oogie thing was like oh the oogie

action figure splits open and the bugs are inside so i remember knowing the bug thing going in when i finally ended up seeing the movie on vhs a year later i did not know the bug thing and at that point i thought it was cool because i thought the toy was cool but it is upsetting i mean it is it's upsetting in so many ways i think there's a two-pronged thing. First of all. I think it's three prongs, but I want to hear your two prongs. Okay. I think part of why Oogie is effective, right, in a town where, as you said, everyone is scary, is, like, one, he's the only one who seems genuinely malicious.

Yeah. Like, everyone's spooky. Yes, of course. But this is not a town where people are, like, playing tricks on each other. No, they seem to love each other. Right. Yes. Right.

It's not an Addams Family thing where it's like, oh, they're perpetuating violence against each other. These people all coexist, and they just do their monster things on their own. Oogie Boogie is the only person who seems to get pleasure out of torturing other people. Two, the person we see him torturing is the one person who doesn't belong in this town, is here against his will. True, yeah. Yeah, you really feel, you feel bad for Santa Claus, right?

Because he's not in on the bit. Right. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And then third prong, he bugs. So for me, it's, prong one is, I don't like that it's all bugs under there sure then prong two is i really don't like that it's then bugs everywhere you know if you take him out of the pillowcase then first it's a body made of bugs don't like

that second it's just bugs all over the place. Just a billion bugs. Hate that. Right. Don't remember what the third prong was. I will say I was talking about Oogie Boogie with Emma Stefanski, and at one point, I just have to say this because it's canonical for our podcast. Emma Stefanski said, I wish I was bugs. Yes.

Very good. Very good Emma thought. But I do not wish I was bugs, and I don't want anyone to be Bugs. No. And look, when I saw like Prince of Darkness later in life, and there was a man made of Bugs, I was like, cool. I love this. What a cool looking.

But at seven years old, I didn't like that it was Bugs. I think it's because I saw it later. I loved it. In defense, he does have some fucking cool contraptions and gadgets. I mean, you got the playing cards with the folded out arms and the spinning knives. You got the fucking jackpot, like, what am I saying? The fucking slot machine cowboys. His lair being built around a roulette wheel of death yep why why does he care

about rolling the dice he does a classic uh two-faced batman forever thing where he's like yeah snake eyes no i need 11 it's like you do you need an 11 to kill someone i think it's sort of you have rules all of a sudden yeah i think know, what's the fun if there are no limitations, you know? Yeah, I think that's just to sort of allow Jack the time to get there. Yeah. And the problem is when this guy rolls snake eyes, snakes actually come out of the eyes. That's one of the best things in the movie. And the movie is just all stuff like that, where it's like you could have just had a static shot of dice,

but instead you have snakes coming out of the one you know out of the pieces like it's so it's so fun in every place where it could be boring it says like no what's the craziest most fun thing we could do you know what is the most Halloweeny thing we could do guess what frogs breath it's not

just spice it's an actual frog and a canister who breathes out that is cool and that stuff will get you it seems to be uh frog's breath will really knock you out stink the montage of jack delivering the presents i like that they play by like fucking peanuts rules where you're never gonna see grown-up faces right i love that that's so cool and they look kind of photorealistic in their silhouettes yes it's so fun but like the the cop answering the phone his head's obscured by the lamp the parents are always seeing from behind or like a low angle or whatever it is but this great series of basically like

one panel comic strips of the presence going wrong they're so good i like that the shrunken head kid doesn't quite seem upset about it he's confused he's just like he's not crying uh you know the only kids who are upset are where the toys are actually like hunting them in the house which i understand right not being into that right there's the kid right being chased by the the duck yeah and the duck and the and the weird floating mickey mouse right analog right i think that's called the nightmare teddy or something like that and then the snake eating the tree is so good all of it's good all of it's good all of it is great i remember the trailers leaning really hard on this stuff i remember the kid turning around with the shrunken

head being like the big trailer moment that they were leading with there's the quote from selick in the dossier from premiere magazine uh when this movie was coming out talking about um the stuff burton was developing when they were at disney together and i think all the other animators were like this guy's got such a unique fully developed voice and aesthetic why isn't disney letting him do whatever he wants why aren't they green lighting his holiday special and selick said i thought that people especially kids would love his work in the way they love charles adams but nobody recognized that at Disney. They thought this is just too weird.

It is the funny thing of like, he was pitching these things and their response was, this is too spooky. And Selick's looking around going like, there's a lot of spooky shit that kids like. There's a lot of stuff with this design sort of sense. There's a lot of stuff with this morbid sense of humor that has been popular with kids for decades yeah and you're just operating from this space of caution and then the trailer

is like leading with all of that shit and it worked because i bet kids liked it the most i bet they had a screening and the kids went nuts when this shrunken head came out because that that's that is sort of a thing about the studios and stuff where they really, they assume the worst of children. Right. They're like, kids are little dumb, dumb babies that don't understand this stuff. But if you test it and you actually see, like, what a kid's like, they love this shit. They love death and destruction. And these are the scenes where human children are in peril.

Yeah. And it's pretty clear that this was the shit that like went through the roof no totally well and and and it's like that's that's always the problem is like assuming an audience will not like something versus just showing them and that that's why like every animated movie has like you know the edges sanded sanded off and it's and it's hard to make anything that has any kick to it which is why this movie is so kind of still so like surprising where you're like, oh man, they're just kidnapping Santa Claus and trying to murder him. And it's still fun and funny because you don't see stuff like that that often.

Right. Like here's another thing that would never, ever happen today or with any conventional notes sort of rounds, even in this period of time, is the cops start getting all these calls about children being terrorized. They put police police searchlights out in the sky. Jack goes like, oh, spotlights. They love us. And then they start firing guns at him. Jack gets shot down. It's really funny.

I like the idea that in a world where America was a little more upfront about the fact that Santa Claus existed, someone stealing Christmas would require a military response. Absolutely. That America's like, bombard the false sled. Yes. Until he's out of the sky.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, he is invading homes and essentially like, you know, putting like monsters in them. Like there is a reason they're going after him. Right. And then you get Jack, right.

You get Jack in the arms of an angel in a cemetery. His like Santa Claus suit, like sort of shot through and singed and everything. Singing what is Jack's lament, right? This song about, this self-pitying song about how no one got what he was trying to do. And how he failed. That just has this immediate, like, incredibly severe whip turn over to, What the heck? I did my best.

Those fucking idiots. I made this for the fans, not the critics. Well, and it's so funny to seeing him whip himself into a frenzy from, like, in, like, this frenzy of self-justification, which any artist, I think, is familiar with. Yeah. You know, he's right to be mad, but at the same time, Christmas is also, sorry, Santa Claus is also right to be mad. Yeah.

He saved Santa Claus. One could argue these guys have been talking past each other a little bit because it's only like late in the movie that he's like, by the way, you don't have Sandy Claus and Santa Claus is like, uh-huh. Okay. Like maybe Jack could have spent more than an afternoon in christmas yeah it's it's real uh what well jason concepcion

called uh page 10 knowledge right yes he's like snow lights look i get it i'll hook some stuff up to everything i need to know um and christmas is saved and uh jack is also saved yeah um and santa does give jack a nice thing which is he makes it snow he does the moment where oogie boogie like thinks he's dropping santa claus and he turns the platform back up and jack's sitting there with a smug look on his face. And then the music goes like. This was one of the like first four or five DVDs my family owned after not being a big VHS household. I remember a period of time where I would wake up at six o'clock in the morning and just watch certain moments from this movie over and over again before I went to school. And that was one of these moments that just feel like transcendent where just the music and the movement and the behavior all lines up.

And I just thought it was the coolest shit in the world. Yeah. Jack coming back and fucking taking Santa santa claus but yes he makes it snow it's over yeah he's a big kiss right yeah sally see he finally notices that sally is um a person yes oh that he should talk to her that maybe that's like the better way to handle his midlife crisis is find another person to relate to yeah Yeah, totally. Yeah. And he's right. Yeah, and then Dr. Finkelstein, of course, has now made his bride,

so he can kind of lessen his grip. And it's just him, which I think is very funny. Yes, it's just him with a blonde wig. 10 out of 10 masterpiece. Yeah, it's perfect. It's a perfect movie. And it is a movie that is so good that it triumphs over the cultural ubiquity

that now exists around it. Yes, totally. It is 0% diminished in my eyes when you were actually watching the thing. Yeah. Because every frame is just spewing with love and invention and you can't deny it. Yeah.

There have been multiple times in the last 20 years, because it's basically, like, it comes out, it does okay. It went from being like, could this be a blockbuster to this movie is maybe a little too outro to then overperforming relative to their lowered expectations. Right. It made $50 million dollars which was seen as like basically sleeper hit you know like oh interesting i thought it was more of a flop uh no it did it did well like a flop relative to how insane the disney numbers were at this time yeah but i think they were like aladdin or whatever but yeah i think they were happy with how this ended up the thing, it did a lot better

than Disney's big release of that year, which was non-animated. Oh, Three Musketeers. The Three Musketeers, which Disney had spent a fortune on.

Right. Yes. And I think Three Musketeers ended up around 50 and cost like twice as much. Right. So they were sort of like, look, all right, you know.

And then I think just very quickly this movie starts doing incredibly well on video starts doing incredibly well every time they replayed on tv three years later they're still making merchandise there was this period i mean i'd go to the local comic book store near my house and they had all the expensive japanese name before christmas toys because the movie had clearly stuck there more at first oh interesting and had stayed in the conversation and then this stuff was getting imported to the u.s at jacked up prices so then they started making american stuff then in 2000 they re-released it

in theaters and it does like three hundred thousand dollars they release it on like a couple screens and then post chicken little they convert this to 3d they actually take the time to do it properly and i know we're gonna do the box office game proper but the 3d re-releases are like the first re-release does nine then the second one does like 20 oh wow 15 but yes it grows it's crazy to think about right this movie basically gets to like $100 million through multiple re-releases. They at a certain point dropped it. It was like growing and then it dipped down. But then even in 2020 when theaters weren't really reopened, they re-released it and it made another $2 million.

In like October 2020 when it's just drive-ins. You know, it's a good movie. So that's why. It is. You know, it's a good movie. So that's why. It is. Multiple times they floated, as the legacy of the movie grew,

to Burton, the idea of trying to make a sequel. And it's a thing he's always been very protective of, like, I think we hit on something here. There's a purity to it. Clearly the thing has stayed in people's hearts on its own without needing another thing. There's a video game that's not particularly good that's like a continuation of the story. And I think they might have written a sequel book

at some point from Sally's perspective that's like partially the events of the first movie retold and then a continuation after that. Those are like the only two official sort of narrative continuations. But it seems like... The thing I'm curious about, there were a couple of times it would get floated that Disney wanted to do something new. And then Burton would do an

interview and he'd be like, I just, I beg them not to do it. I beg them not to do it. And it was unclear if Burton actually had kill rights or if they were still deferring to Burton because they want to be in Burton business and they know they can't do it without his name attached to it. They can't do it without his approval. Or if he was out there decrying it, that's going to kneecap the movie. Now, the last 10 years, Burton has done so much Disney. But now it feels like their relationship has maybe finally ended. much Disney. Yes. But now it feels like their relationship has maybe

finally ended. Like it doesn't seem like after Dumbo they're that eager to get back into work with him. And the last couple of years it started getting floated again and who knows if there's any validity to this that they've been exploring the notion of trying to do a live action remake which

is the world's worst idea. Oh boy. Well but I'm hearing I'm hearing, I'm seeing here that Chris Pratt will be playing Jack Skellington, so. He's working really hard in the voice. He's working really hard in the voice and it's going to be something

unlike anything you've ever heard from Jack Skellington before. This is Halloween. Hey guys, it's Halloween. In the 2000s, when they were trying to push him to make a sequel, they kept on being like,

obviously we'll do it in CGI. And Burton would be like, what the fuck are you talking about? Even he knows that's unforgivable. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I also think that's why it's so such an indelible classic is because there's nothing ruining it. It's this perfect gem and it's not encumbered by any like any like oh and we all know the sequels are terrible and right uh made us hate those characters the only thing i'm surprised by is that they've never done it on broadway that feels like the one thing you could do you well the thing is that you would

need to make more songs because obviously it's too short yes but. But it is surprising to me that Elfman has never been tempted to do that because it does make the most sense. If you found a Tamor-esque person, right? If you had the right person existing outside of the mainstream of theater, giving them a bigger canvas to not just do very literal-minded adaptations of the look of this movie,

but find a way to convert it for the stage. Because they had like a Disney theme park live stage show at some point, which you can look up photos of, and looks horrendous. Like, unsurprisingly, when you put a guy in a bald cap and paint his face white

and put the long mouth on him and black out his eyes, it looks monstrous. It is not fun. But I think you could do something more representational. Like a mask yeah yeah yeah yeah all right look box office here's some i will play the box office because also on a game i also

want to note this film was nominated for an academy award for visual effects believe it was the first animated film to ever get such a nomination yeah kubo gets one as well i know yeah it's happened a few times since but i believe this was the first. It lost to Jurassic Park. Heard of it? Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, fair enough. Both good. I mean, especially since Jurassic Park, the winners for that Oscar are Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett, and Stan Winston.

Yeah. You know what? I mean, it's a real murderer's row. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, but, you know, obviously, there's no animated Oscar back then. It opens, we're going to do its first wide weekend. Right. It did the classic Disney limited release on like five screens, and it at the time had the second highest per screen gross in history.

I guess so. It did well, I guess, in that little way. But then it expands to just 563 theaters. So it's, you know, it's taking its time and opens number three. Okay. Number one at the box office is a comedy that had been new the week before and has actually jumped up to number one. It's an adaptation

of a sitcom. It's not Adam's Family. No, that's 91. No. It's way worse. Which Caroline Thompson also wrote. Which she did. I mean, she was the hot goth movie writer back then. Okay. It's not Beverly Hillbillies?

It is the Beverly Hillbillies it is the beverly hillbillies a penelope spheras film uh dabney coleman diedrich bader jim varney uh chloris leachman jim varney tomlin leah thompson yeah actually kind of a great cast uh i haven't seen the Beverly Hillbillies. I haven't seen it. Ben? Haven't seen it. Wow. You would have been my closest bet for someone having seen that movie. I saw it in theaters. Wow.

It was incredible. No, I don't remember it at all. Yeah, it's probably fine. Apparently Dolly Parton plays herself. Sure. As we said, it was directed by Penelope Spheeris. It's just interesting that it jumped to number one. So, you know.

Yeah. That's something. How do they end up there again? They strike oil? Correct. Excuse me. It's very, very obvious what happens. Okay.

Jim Varney's character becomes a billionaire after inadvertently finding crude oil on his property while firing his gun. Because he's shooting a jackrabbit. And then they decide Beverly Hills, that's the place to be now that we have money. Yes. Now that they have $1 billion. Number two at the box office is a action film. Action science fiction film. Two big stars going head to head action science fiction 1993 is demolition man it's demolition man i love it we were supposed to introduce it together at

night hawk and then i died and you had to do it alone that's correct uh i introduced it myself uh i hope everyone enjoyed that i believe I flailed my arms around a lot. I mean, you love that movie. I apologize to Christina afterwards. I do love that movie. I think it's great. And I stuck around to watch at least some of it at Nighthawk. And I do love how it opens.

You know, it's like LA is on fire. The Hollywood sign is on fire. It's like a helicopter shot. And then the title just says Los Angeles 1996. It's really fun. We wipe our butts with three shells. They sure do. Number three is Nightmare Before Christmas.

Number four is a live-action Disney film that was a big hit. Hmm. In 1993. And it's not Three Musketeers. No. It's a comedy. It's a live-action Disney comedy. Huh. Does it have... action Disney comedy. Huh.

Does it have... It'll warm your heart. It'll warm my heart? Yes. It's a heartwarming comedy. Does it have a big comedy star in it? No. Well, it has a comedy star in it,

although he is a supporting character. Okay. Is it like a family comedy? Yes. I will say i saw this movie in theaters i saw the three musketeers in theaters and i saw nightmare before christmas i was really i think seeing any pg or below movie no i'm like i must have seen this movie right uh yes in theaters it was like big culturally ubiquitous thing uh yeah and how it's what yeah culturally ubiquitous is strong but it's certainly it was kind of a word of mouth hit that lingered in the

culture uh it made 68 million dollars okay so it was but it was more that it was a surprise hit because it didn't really have a big star. It was more... Do you want more clues? Yeah, give me another clue. It's a sports film. Oh, it's not... Sports. It's not a Mighty Ducks.

No. And it's not Big Green. No. And you said it is Disney, right? It is Disney. It's from Walt Disney Pictures. It's in 1990s. Little Giants? Not Little Giants. it is disney right it is disney it's from walt disney pictures it's a little giants

not little giants you guys are missing the fucking forest from the trees right now it's staring you in the face what uh it's um it's based on a true story okay can you tell us which sport does that give it away I'm gonna tell you which sport but it's gonna give it away oh oh oh I know the answer it's cool runnings it's cool running there we go it would have been funny if I was like oh yeah no I can tell you the sport

bobsled do you know what it is now yeah we're just buffaloed uh haven't seen it since theaters maybe I've seen it once on tv yeah yeah that I mean I haven't seen it since theaters maybe i've seen it once on tv yeah yeah that i mean i i haven't seen it probably in 20 years if not more but i remember finding it fun yeah i liked it uh yeah a fun cute movie number five at the box office is another inspirational sports movie based on a true story okay is it one of the Prefontaine movies?

No. Those are later and depressing. Okay. This is inspirational. Truly inspirational. It'll make you cheer. What studio? Sony.

I mean, TriStar. And is it based on a true story, you said? It sure is. Okay. It's a Sony TriStar based on a true story. Is it Rudy? It's Rudy. One of my's a Sony TriStar based on... Is it Rudy? It's Rudy. One of my favorites. He was so short.

I mean, can you imagine why I like Rudy so much? Because I believe he was five foot six. Five foot nothing is I believe what Charles S. Dutton says. Five foot nothing, a hundred nothing. I am really dazzled by this, by the way. I listen to the podcast all the time. And it's like, I always thought that thought that I'd get at least a couple. I'm nowhere near any of these.

Griffin is just like shooting three-pointers from the half-court line. To be fair, I own the soundtrack to Rudy on vinyl. I'm always ready to talk Rudy. I bet you that's a good soundtrack. Incredible score, yeah. Isn't the best part is that at the end when they carry him off the screen, there's like an epilogue that's like no player

was carried off the field since Rudy and I'm like, wait, the milestone is that he was the only one to be put on shoulder. It's because he was so goddamn small. What are you going to carry a linebacker off? They're big. That's the milestone. he didn't play that

well he played like he was on the field for like five minutes he just kind of runs around for five minutes right he doesn't do a lot it's one of those incredible movies where you're like what do you how do you build a two-hour movie out of that the entire movie is he sits on the bench for three years he plays for five minutes at the end of a game and it's like they built a pretty compelling narrative around it i cried yeah yeah i fucking love it of course um rudy's pretty good this movie does i'm just looking here i wasn't looking at this weekend sure but it it jumps to number one and weekend three and stays there for weekend four so it like did kind of you know that is correct it's two screens then 563 screens then they then they add another thousand screens.

It goes up 31% in the third weekend. And it finally gets knocked off, ironically enough, by The Three Musketeers in mid-November. Yeah. And then Adam's Family Values comes out, and then in comes the most quotable protagonist in film history, Mrs. Doubtfire. Mrs. Doubtfire, where the run is, Griff, and this is just for your amusement because you're a box office nerd, okay?

She swings in in Thanksgiving, number one. What's she pulling down weekend one? Weekend one, she opened $20 million. Very good. Healthy, yeah. Weekend two, she opened $20 million. Very good. Healthy. Yeah. Weekend 2, barely drops, $15 million. Weekend 3, she's down to $10 million.

Wayne's World 2 knocks her off, number one. Yeah. Weekend 4, the Pelican Brief comes in. Yeah. Okay, but Doubtfire's making another 10, basically. So Doubtfire's just holding steady. It's a quiet 10 off to the side. Yeah.

The week after that, Doubtfire is just holding steady. It's a quiet 10 off to the side. Yeah. The week after that, Doubtfire climbs three percent, but Pelican Brief is still number one. Okay. That's Christmas. And then New Year's weekend, Mrs. Doubtfire surges, climbs 74 percent.

Oh, yes. Knocks the Pelican Brief down. Just a fucking haymaker. Then the next weekend, Mrs. There's a fucking haymaker. Then the next weekend, this is down. Fire remains number one. She's finally stopped by Philadelphia and for two weeks,

Philadelphia is number one. January 28th. Mrs. Duff. Fire is number one again. I'm not kidding. It's fucking crazy. The fire and David and girls is like shining right now.

They're ecstatic. It's so wild. Secondhand getting chills about Mrs. Doubtfire's box office run. Anyway, she's not even in the box office for this weekend. No, but we had to talk about it. We had to talk about it.

Yeah. Some other movies in the top 10. Malice with the famous Aaron Sorkin. I am God monologue. The Joy Luck Club, which was sort of like another Disney release that was sort of a quiet hit. Wayne Wang's movie. Something called Judgment Night with Emilio Estevez and Cuba Gooding Jr. I've never heard of this movie.

Yeah, nothing. So Stephen Hopkins, sort of gangster movie. Dennis Leary's in it. Yeah, I don't know. The Good Son, the Macaulay Culkin is evil movie. Yes.

Which I remember as a kid being so scandalized that that existed. I agree. He's not allowed to be in a movie like that scandalized that that existed. I was like, he's not allowed to be in a movie like that. I was so mad. I was like, it was like, it was like, it was like Hollywood Hogan or something. It was like the heel turn from Macaulay Culkin. It was also one of those things where it was like, oh, Macaulay dropped his quote from 8 million to 5 million in order to take on more challenging material because his dad

manager thought he needed to expand. Like it was like cushioned in between Macaulay vehicles. He was like, we need to start showing different sides of Mac. And then number 10 at the box office is The Age of Innocence. And I'm just assuming, just off the top of my head, that film was directed by James Ivory or something. Let me just check here, see who directed this. Martin Scorsese!

Oh, my monocle fell out. David, you're wrong. He only makes gangster films. He just keeps on making the same self-indulgent gangster films over and over again. But do you know who the real gangsters are, Griffin? Who? It's New York High Society in the 19th century. All that too.

Yeah. I thought you were going to say the critics giving Scorsese an easy pass as he keeps on making pablum. And that's it for this episode. Unless there's anything else we need to discuss, but I don't think there is. Michael, any final points? I love this movie. I love all these movies. Watch them all in a row. It's a blast. And yeah, I'm, I'm, hey hey it was an honor and privilege to be here seeing you guys excited about the miss doubtfire thing was maybe the highlight of my month and uh it was it was real it was real treat uh so thank you very much uh that's very sweet of you to say thank you for coming on what do you mean you're you're the best what are you talking about long overdue uh excited to have you on again sometime

and very excited to see what you do next i re-watched mitchell's last night uh to be fresh it's such a it's such an excellent film and uh among the many things that are impressive about it, you tweeted, I think, right before the Oscars last year, your manifesto that was part of your pitch. Which I stole from the Pixar guys who made a manifesto before they made Toy Story. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. We should do that. The sort of defining thing, I mean,

but it's what we're talking about with the Pixar guys trying to start a new wave with computer animation and this movie with stop motion where it's just like like can we expand the idea of what an animated film is what are we not gonna do that everyone else is doing and what are we gonna do and i read that thing i read it when you posted i read it again last night it is truly like inspiring it is exciting it is so nice to read someone in the position that you're in who gets to make movies uh really trying to use that to push boundaries and it's uh a lot of what you said there i'm trying to find this when and it came it came purely out of insecurity because i was like oh god oh god

it's too scary to think about making a movie shit. And I was like, maybe if I could hype myself up and really kind of blow smoke up me and Jeff, who made the movie, we could blow smoke up each other's asses. We could really make it seem like we're doing something great. But it was, it was really, it actually really helped like writing that stuff out

because it forced us to, it forced the crew too to be like, you said you were going to do this thing, remember? And remember and it's like oh shit we have to do it you know um we have to do a new because at one point like the studio was like just make it look like the incredibles just make who cares the incredibles looks good and i was like yeah yeah maybe i guess it'll be more money and you know and then the crew was like what are you doing you said it was supposed to look different what what are you you're gonna cave and i'm like no shit okay you guys are right right right right and and and it's hard to fight those battles and in in the studio but um but it is it that's why i

love and respect a movie like this and and all the movies from those pixar guys it's like it just you know it it you have to treat it like a jailbreak and like you're stealing the keys to your dad's car and driving off a mountain or whatever. Look, we'll spend the next month talking about Henry Selick's battles to continue getting these things made within studios. There's a really good quote here we didn't read in the episode that I just want to get to to close this out. It's a sight and sound interview that Selick did in December of 94. So I guess this is a year after the movie. And he says, I'm definitely working in commercial films. The budgets are high enough to mean that I have to respect the fact that we want the films to pay for themselves so we can make more. But the audience is more open than Hollywood imagines.

So I'm always trying to put in more than an audience can handle. New imagery, new techniques, even pushing novel storylines. The commercial rule for me is the stranger the imagery, the straighter the story. You can't bend it too much. In my own films, I've often used very realistic images and very disjointed storylines because I'm more interested in tone poems than tight little stories. But in the films I'm doing now, I like to have understandable stories so I can go a little further on the visual side. That's rad. That's why he's the king, man.

Yeah. No, he figured it out. For as much of a difficult time he has getting movies off the ground, there's a reason his films linger. Yeah, totally. Thank you for being here. People should watch Missiles vs. Machines again. Check it out. We need those clicks, guys out we need those clicks guys we

need those clicks on netflix forever on the flicks excited to have you on again uh sooner rather than later and excited to see what you do next everything i'll see you do thank you thank you all for listening please remember to rate review and subscribe thank you to to Marie Barty for our social media and helping to produce the show. Thank you to Alex Barron and AJ McKeon for our editing. Joe Bowen, Pat Reynolds

for our artwork. JJ Birch for our research who is very relieved that he doesn't have to read 87 books about Kubrick anymore for each episode. The most written about filmmaker in history.

Thank you to Lynn Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song. Go to blankcheckpod.com for links to some real nerdy shit, including Blank Check special features, our Patreon feed, where we are doing the

Roger Moore Bond movies, and very soon coming up next, the two National Treasure films. The National Treasure diptych due to overwhelming demand. Next week, James and the Giant Peach with the aforementioned

queen of bugs and books herself, Emma Stefanski. Right. That's right. One of those guest bookings that just felt like, well, obviously we should have her in the movie based on a book about bugs it has to happen has to happen james peach james peach and as always jack skeleton is a dang ass freak. Oh, he's so hot.