Report: Nightmare Before Christmas Haunted Evening
Page 8 of 18

Panel Discussion - Page 6
When asked about the nuance of character in stop motion animation, Mike answered, "We just sort of act it out… and you just sort of watch your own body movements and you break it down frame by frame and it is a great process that was a real treat to just do that. You’re controlling chaos, whether it’s for a day or five days or longer. And when you see it up on a screen, and it all works and no lights are getting bumped or anything like that…and then you move on to the next thing and you go to the bar and have a drink."

The genisis of the overlay began with an idea and then progressed. Steve noted he had been trying to do a Mansion overlay for more than 2 years.
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Eric added, "The bottom line is that you have to connect with the puppet. You’ve got to become that character as much as you can and … when I watch these guys in the show I can feel every animator living through that puppet. I can tell … I can tell you each and every one of their shots because I can feel the essence of that person going through that puppet. That, to me, is really the magic of what we do. Crazy and stupid though it is." Surprisingly there are few cut scenes from the film - although there are some scenes of Oogie Boogie that ended up on the cutting room floor.

Steve lends a bit of commentary to the process of re-dressing a Disneyland favorite with the imary of a cult classic.
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Steve was then asked how Jack came to the mansion - and most who had seen Steve’s appearances at the NFFC conventions or the ODC were taking bets that he couldn’t speak and remain seated - answered, "The cool thing is that when you have a character like Jack and you can unleash him on the mansion. What will happen? A great tag line that we came up with for the attraction was ‘See what happens when holiday’s collide’. And we basically jumped off where Tim Burton started, he basically started with the story… we took two different pieces, we took a mansion that has a 30-year equity here at Disneyland, that people love, and we took a fabulous classic created by these gentlemen of the Nightmare Before Christmas and we collided them together."

Steve explained, "The story for the Mansion is very simple. In the movie Jack decides that he’s going to become Sandy Claws and fly into the world and show his vision of Christmas. All we said was "Hey. What if the first place he stopped at was the Haunted Mansion?’ And to prove to himself that he could do it, what would he do? So, he decked the place from head to toe and, you know, guess what, the inhabitants, all 999 ghosts loved it."

As to the music in the attraction, "The music is so specific to the film, it’s basically a narration for the film. What we did is we took classic carols and tweaked them, very much so. They’re in minor keys, they fly all over the place and a lot of them are performed by the characters of the Mansion. They kind of get into the spirit of the holidays, as they say, so you’re basically going to hear Jolly Dear Old Sandy Claws in the finale, but it’s all done by the opera singers and all those famous characters here at Disneyland, performing an homage to Sandy Claws who happened to land here. And he’s there tonight."