The Nightmare Before Christmas Recap

Jack is busy fucking up Christmas, though, and has no time for doll lovin’. He proceeds to ruin the lives of children across the land, scarring young minds and destroying psyches with his living wreaths, demonic toys, and severed heads.

Oh, and a giant, Christmas tree-eating snake. It’s awesome.

And Jack thinks so too, as everything is going according to plan, but the people on the other end of his gift deliveries are calling the cops and locking their doors. Poor Jack traipses cluelessly about, even mistaking gunfire for celebratory welcome fireworks, and the moronic residents of Halloween Town cheer. Sally, however, knows it’s a bust, and she takes off to rescue Santa Claus and put a stop to these shenanigans. Oogie Boogie catches her, though, and now they’re both in his clutches.

OK, so my plan didn’t work. Any ideas?

Jack finally gets a clue when his sleigh is firebombed out of the sky, and the townspeople, watching him from their scrying pool, see him fall. The mayor announces his death, and the whole place goes into mourning.

Jack isn’t dead, though–well, he is, but no more than he was before. The remains of his sleigh landed in a graveyard, which is the perfect setting for yet another lament. His soul is devastated—only now does he recognize what a disaster he’s made of Christmas, and that all his dreams and efforts were for nothing. As he croons a sad song in the lonely graveyard, he has an epiphany: he realizes that he actually did his best with what he had to work with, and his version of Christmas fucking rocked–it was exactly what he, The Pumpkin King, would want Christmas to be, and if it happened to resemble Halloween a little too closely, then so what? He’s going to bounce back, and next Halloween will kick amazing amounts of ass. But first, he has to make up for ruining Christmas, and that means rescuing Santa!

Best of luck!

Oogie Boogie is preparing to dump Santa and Sally into molten lava, but who should appear in the nick of time? Jack Skellington, clad in his Halloween best! He and Oogie Boogie have a showdown amidst guns and knives and whirring blades, and Jack wins the day when he pulls a thread from the seam of Oogie’s burlap body, unraveling him into bugs. The bugs fall shrieking into the lava, and I guess we can assume that’s the end of Oogie Boogie.

Jack apologizes to Santa, who essentially tells him to fuck off before rushing off to fix Christmas. Lock, Shock, and Barrel show up with a rescue party, and everyone celebrates the return of The Pumpkin King. Santa even does a fly-over, giving Halloween Town a little taste of Christmas, I guess to show there were no hard feelings. Everyone seems happy–even Wheelchair Perv, who has built himself a new lady friend, one who seems perfectly content to wheel him around. In the midst of the celebration, Sally slips away…but this time Jack sees her go, realizes what she means to him, and follows to proclaim his love.

It’s the least he can do after she spent all that time working on the Santa suit.