More than a decade before everyone’s favorite macabre holiday film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, opened in theaters, Tim Burton wrote a poem of the same name, outlining more or less the story we’re familiar with today. At the time, Burton was working as an animator at Disney, and pitched the idea, but it took quite a while before the world was ready for the dark, hopeful, cracked world of Jack Skellington. That said, the original poem, here animated and read by Christopher Lee, that most velvet-voiced of villains (he was Dracula and Saruman, kids), is well worth a listen. ‘Tis the season, after all.
[via Open Culture]