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Adam Savage’s Tested
What Happened to The Nightmare Before Christmas' Puppets
⏱ 13 min video · 2 min read4 Jun 2026Worth watching
TL;DR
Adam Savage visits collector Dan Lanigan's private display of original stop-motion puppets, sets, and props from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The conversation covers how these pieces were acquired, the craft of stop-motion armatures and replacement animation, and the restoration challenges caused by degrading polyurethane materials.
Key points
1
Dan Lanigan acquired original Nightmare Before Christmas puppets, sets, and props over decades from crew members, fellow collectors, and Christie's auction when Disney sold assets — including the town hall, Jack's house, the fountain, and multiple character puppets.
2
Many polyurethane puppet hands (including Jack Skellington and Sally) liquefied over time; Bonita D. Carlo, head of original puppet fabrication, restored them using original wire armatures and new silicone casts from original molds.
3
The film used replacement animation for main characters: Jack, Sally, and the Mayor each had thousands of individually sculpted and painted interchangeable faces stored in a locked library room, all numbered for precise registration.
4
Stop-motion armatures are tuned individually to each animator's preferred resistance — tighter higher up the limb so animators can grip an endpoint and move only the intended joint; Tom St. Amand's team built the Nightmare armatures, with crew member Merrick Cheney credited with Santa's armature.
5
Henry Selick directed Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Coraline, and personally retained some background set pieces that Lanigan later acquired directly from him.
Key takeaways
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Polyurethane foam used in 1990s stop-motion puppets is chemically unstable and will eventually liquefy, making silicone a superior long-term material for preservation and restoration.
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Replacement animation (used for faces, water, and even poured beer in James and the Giant Peach) requires meticulous numbering and registration systems to maintain continuity across thousands of individually sculpted pieces.
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3D printing has made replacement-face animation significantly more accessible (as demonstrated in Coraline) without compromising the aesthetic quality of the technique.
Notable quotes
“Anything worth doing is worth doing obsessively.”
“It speaks to that film being so beloved deservedly so — it is even more remarkable the more you know about how it was made.”
“These armatures are almost functionally identical to Willis O Brien's original King Kong stop-motion armature — it was like he solved that problem in one fell swoop and we are still doing the same thing.”
Worth watching?
✅
Worth watching the full video?
Watch if you are a fan of stop-motion filmmaking or The Nightmare Before Christmas — the close-up B-roll of original puppets and armatures, combined with insider craft detail, makes the visual experience significantly richer than reading alone.
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