Burton's final work during his tenure as a Disney employee was Frankenweenie, a 1984 love letter to Universal horror classics filtered through the prism of the suburban California childhood of Victor Frankenstein (The NeverEnding Story's [1984] Barret Oliver) and his mission to revive his dog, Sparky, from the dead. Cast as his parents were Daniel Stern and Shelley Duvall, with the latter giving Burton a directing assignment in 1986 for the "Aladdin" episode of her cable series, Faerie Tale Theatre.
Budgeted at $1.2 million, the film was intended to be shown as a short subject accompanying the studio's Christmas rerelease of Pinocchio, a strategy similar to Mickey's Christmas Carol, but plans were scrapped when it received a PG rating from the MPAA due to its mildly morbid subject matter. The studio was branching out further into live action with its Touchstone line and contemplated attaching the short to its releases of Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend or My Science Project, though it only wound up showing with the former in the United Kingdom. Ultimately studio president Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to delay any plans for the film, deeming it "a little bit too tough, too scary for little kids" in trade interviews and noting, "It's a terrific short, but it's not correct programming for the Pinocchio audience."
The legend of Frankenweenie began to grow once Burton established himself as a live action director, first singled out by Paul Reubens to bring his most famous character to the big screen in Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) and then retained by Warner Bros. for the Oscar-winning hit supernatural comedy, Beetlejuice (1988). By the following decade, Burton had become a brand name unto himself with Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Batman Returns (1992), which gave Disney enough impetus to revisit the shelved Frankenweenie for a commercial release.
Plans were announced in the summer of 1991 to bring Burton's film, along with Vincent, to VHS for the home video market, with Disney spokespeople announcing that the delay "had to do with the maturation of the marketplace for sales of all different types of product and the awareness among the general audience for Tim's work." The short film finally saw the light of day for American viewers in March of 1992 as the opening short in larger markets for Blame It on the Bellboy, a critically-derided comedy. The Los Angeles Times called the short "such an inspired, deft pleasure that it is almost worth the price of admission - almost because of today's steep ticket prices and because Bellboy is not that good."
One month later, Frankenweenie debuted on VHS along with Vincent, with promotion including an insert in 12 million videotapes of 101 Dalmatians released the same day, April 10. At the same time, Burton was returning to the Disney fold with director Henry Selick to make The Nightmare Before Christmas, a 1993 stop motion animated release based on a story Burton originally envisioned as a rhyming children's book.
Thanks to its thematic kinship to Burton's early Disney work, the home video releases of A Nightmare Before Christmas on both DVD and Blu-ray have included Vincent and Frankenweenie as bonus features, but that wasn't the end of the line for Burton's unusual tale of a boy and his dog. In 2012, he mounted an elaborate, Oscar-nominated feature film version (his fourth stop motion animated project), an idea he'd been entertaining since 2005 with many of the animators from that year's Corpse Bride kept on to work on the film. However, whether that's the last we hear from Burton's beloved reanimated canine remains to be seen.
By Nathaniel Thompson
