This Is Halloween! (The Nightmare Before Christmas (DVD))

Member Name: pjs21

Product:	The Nightmare Before Christmas (DVD)
Date:	07/11/01 (700 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great features, Great Movie, Quality DVD

Disadvantages: WANT MORE

"Boys and girls of every age
Wouldn’t you like to see something strange?
Come with us and you will see
this our town of Halloween..."

And so we are pointed in the right direction by a grizzly looking scarecrow towards the town of Halloween, where this years procession is taking place. The mayor is pleased, the citizens are pleased, but the Pumpkin King isn't. To him it is the same as last years, and the one before that. And the one before that. He wants something new. Something different. Though he is by far the best at scaring people and raising screams he walks off with his ghost dog, Zero, and he sings to himself.

"Yet year after year it's the same routine
and I grow so weary of the sounds of the screams.
And I, Jack. The Pumpkin King,
Have grown so tired of the same old things.

Oh, somewhere deep inside of these bones
An emptiness began to grow.
There's something out there far from my home,
A longing that I've never known."

He's a melancholy rack of ribs right now!

It is on this walk that he comes across a group of trees, a cluster one might say, each with a door that has been painted with a picture to depict a certain holiday time, and it is the one with the Christmas tree on the door that takes his interest.

Before he can say BOO to ghost, he is whirling and twirling through snow flakes and into the town of, yep, you guessed it.

Christmas.

And that's where I'll leave the film and head off to the new, all sparkly, all posh, all that's horrid, Special Edition Dvd!

So, why is this a special edition you may ask?

<pjs waits for it...>

A good question, and one to which I wish I knew the answer to. I can only presume that they decided to update it a bit in time for this Christmas in the hope of selling a few more copies.

Well, first of all it comes in
great looking box (not like the cheap attempt on the Goodfellas DVD!) First of all is the outside case, a simple silhouetted image of some rooftops and the title of the film.

Inside is the best bit. A framed image of Jack Skellington, Sally, and Lock, Shock and Barrel on the front standing in the gateway of the town. On the back we have the back of the gateway with the sign above (in reverse) and scene from the film.

"This is Halloween, this is Halloween
Pumpkins scream in the dead of night..."

The case then opens out revealing the DVD in the centre with another scene from the film pictured behind it. It's one of the best DVD cases I think I've seen, and that alone for me is a good reason to buy it.

You want more for your money? Blimey.

Okay, okay – well lets take a look.

Special features are accessed via a beautifully animated front screen with a music over the top. A moon rises, the title of the film sweeps forward with the options.

Under bonus material we have.

The Making of...

Being a lover of stop-motion, I really enjoyed watching this. It's not over long, probably about 20 minutes or so. There are interviews with the director himself and most of animators, set builders, puppet makers and painters etc. Fascinating stuff.

Story Board to Film comparison.

Again quite interesting. At the top of the screen is a clip from the film itself, one of Jacks songs. Below we are shown the storyboard pictures they worked from for each of the main shots. Very short, the length of the song and that’s it.

Deleted Scenes.

A few snippets of bits that were cut from the final product. All very short.

The Worlds of...

A section split into three – Halloween Town, Christmas Town, and The Real World.
Each section has a detailed designs for the characters used in each of the three "wo
rlds" created by Burton. There's quite a lot of drawings in there and I haven't yet finished looking. They do show you in here how they make Zero the ghost dog though!

Posters and Trailers

I guess this bit speaks for itself!

Tim Burtons Early Movies

Two early films by Mr Burton.

The first, Vincent, is a wonderful animation about a young boy who wishes to be like Vincent Price. It is narrated nicely by Vincent Price himself and lasts just over 5 minutes.

The second is Frankenweenie. A live action this time about a boy, Victor, whose dog is hit by a car. It's a very silly retelling of Frankenstein, in which the boy brings his dog back to life (including the bolts on the neck). It runs at about 25 minutes.

Then there’s the film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, itself.

Look away now – here's the technical stuff.

Dolby Digital 5:1
Subtitles: English, English for the hearing impaired/Italian/Spanish/Portugese
Colour: PAL
Running Time: 73 Minutes
Widescreen Format: 1:66:1

This is one of my top films and I just couldn't wait until Christmas in the hope that someone may buy it for me, so I got it myself.

This is top DVD.

"This is Halloween, Everybody make a scene.
Trick or Treat till the neighbour’s gonna die of fright!"

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