State of the Art

The first "Nightmare Before Christmas"

by Carly Carioli

The distinctive stop-motion "Animagic" technique created by the '60s-'70s team of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass has become synonymous with Christmas itself through perennial TV syndication of their classic animated holiday specials: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Tim Burton cites the Rankin/Bass specials as a major influence on his The Nightmare Before Christmas, but nowhere is Burton's debt to the team more obvious than on the rarely screened 1967 Rankin/Bass feature film Mad Monster Party, which is now available on video for the first time in a decade.

As in the Rankin/Bass team's other productions -- which used the voices of Jimmy Cagney, Burl Ives, and Vincent Price, among others -- the talent that congregated on Mad Monster Party was considerable. Produced by Hollywood mogul Joseph Levine (The Graduate) -- who hoped Rankin/Bass would deliver a kiddie fantasy in the vein of Mary Poppins -- it featured the voices of Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller (three decades before she signed on to Disney's computer-animated A Bug's Life). The three-dimensional figurines used in the animation were created by Mad magazine's Jack Davis, and Mad co-founder Harvey Kurtzman wrote the screenplay. "It's the movie Boris Karloff did right before he did The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, which he won an Oscar for," notes Dave Witting, whose Marblehead-based indie-animation distribution company, DeLuxo, has reissued the film. "And it's often said that the reason he did The Grinch is because he had so much fun doing Mad Monster Party."

Karloff voices the Baron von Frankenstein, who, having already conquered the means to create life, caps off his career by cheerily inventing an H-bomb-type weapon of mass destruction and then decides to retire from his position as the leader of the Worldwide Organization of Monsters. In order to announce his successor, he summons the organization's board of trustees to an emergency meeting at his castle. The board includes such famous monsters as Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolfman, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, as well as a couple of knockoffs whose proper titles the filmmakers were unable to license. All hell breaks loose when the Baron hands the reins over to his reluctant and hapless nephew, an aspiring pharmacist.

Renewed interest in the film, which has remained a cult classic over the past 30 years, has been sparked by Rick Goldschmidt's book The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass, the first comprehensive examination of the team's work, as well as by the use of Mad Monster Party clips in a video by the horror-punk band the Misfits. If the film is light on plot -- except for the very beginning and the very end, which display a black-comic misanthropy that's startling for children's films and animation -- Mad Monster Party's visual treats are exquisite in an Addams Family kind of way. And the movie is punctuated with risqué bits of sexual tension, courtesy of a skirt-chasing Dracula and the Baron's conniving, voluptuous secretary, Francesca, who sports a pair of animation's most outrageous knockers. By no means full of holiday cheer, this Party is required viewing for ghouls and grinches alike.

Mad Monster Party is available from DeLuxo, 25 Sewall Street, Marblehead 01945. Call (781) 639-4151 for more info.