We've been posting five fun facts about our favorite festive flicks leading up to Christmas ... and here's the perfect one for Christmas Eve.
Today's featured film is Tim Burton and director Henry Selick's 1993 stop-motion classic, "The Nightmare Before Christmas!"
1. Burton originally wrote "The Nightmare Before Christmas" as a poem in 1983 -- with Jack Skellington, his trusty dog Zero and Santa Claws as the only characters specifically named. Lock, Shock and Barrel are alluded to, and Jack's holiday toys (the vampire teddy bears, monster wreaths) are mentioned. Listen to Christopher Lee read it below:
2. Chris Sarandon provided the talking voice for Jack, but apparently his singing voice was awful. Composer Danny Elfman is who you're actually listening to anytime the Pumpkin King breaks into song.
3. The movie took almost three years to finish due to the slowness of stop-motion, with the crew averaging 60-70 seconds of footage a week. Hundreds of hand-sculpted heads had to be made for Jack and 10 replaceable faces were created for Sally.
4. Fans wanting to visit Halloween Town can, as long as you're O.K. with a trip to California or Tokyo. Every year, the Disney parks there transform their Haunted Mansion into Haunted Mansion Holiday -- with Jack, Oogie Boogie, Zero and more!
5. Don't expect to see Jack going to Easterland or President's Day Town on film anytime soon. "I was always very protective ... not to do sequels," Burton said of making a followup to the movie in 2006. "I felt the movie had a purity to it and because it's not a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it. I try to respect people and keep the purity of the project as much as possible."
For more Holiday Movie Trivia, check out the links below:
Edward Scissorhands
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Home Alone
Love Actually
Die Hard
Bridget Jones's Diary
The Santa Clause
Gremlins