A Look at LEGO "The Nightmare Before Christmas"

You'd think LEGO would be kind of a poor medium with which to adapt The Nightmare Before Christmas. You'd be...kinda right. Nevertheless!

As I've discussed before in 2023, I'm quite fond of The Nightmare Before Christmas but never considered myself a "Nightmare Before Christmas kid" in my level of engagement with the film. I've heard those silly songs so many times; I know the story and I know the rhymes. I've committed Danny Elfman's score to heart, but the movie's never torn me quite apart. The atmosphere and character design for Halloween Town is impeccable, though, and "This is Halloween" is a bold, even arrogant title for a song to live up to, but damn if it doesn't do so for every second of its runtime. To resolve the debate on which holiday the movie is really for, I typically watch it (when I watch it) on Halloween night, the moment the film begins as it segues its timeline into the Christmas season. This year, I thought I'd do LEGO about the film in this liminal time of year instead. I'm publishing in November still! I made it work!

LEGO's done relatively little with the IP. Their first collaboration was perhaps the better of the two--the Jack Skellington and Sally minifigures in the second Disney Minifigures series. 

Jack here debuts a sculpt for his bowtie, and Sally debuts a hair sculpt. Jack also has an exclusive cloth cut to depict his jagged jacket. I think the translation to minifigure form shows how starkly different LEGO is from Tim Burton artwork and stop-motion puppetry, and the decision to give Sally a standard minifigure face design is also jarring when her big round white eyes and small black pupils are so central to her appearance. Still, these figures are fabulously detailed. Jack has pinstriping on his limbs and torso, plus that fabric piece, and Sally's stitches and patchwork are really well-done. 

Being a LEGO minifigure, Sally can also come apart to reenact scenes where her stitches break or she deliberately undoes them to let some body parts act independently, though you're not supposed to take minifigures apart to quite the same degree Sally gets pieced in the film. Her limbs are meant to stay on with the minifig. 

Jack features a gift box with a great print, and inside are two clear 1x1 round tiles depicting snowflakes. Sally has a two-piece flower and stalk depicting a thistle upon which she plays "he loves me..." before having a vision of the thistle turning into a burning Christmas tree, foretelling that Jack's Christmas will be a disaster.

I loved these two figures, but I was disappointed the novelty long-limbed minifigure parts which debuted in the Toy Story theme for Woody and Jessie weren't around anymore to make Jack as tall and spindly as a minifigure could be. I hoped, for years, that we'd get another go with Jack to give him a taller version. 

I got my wish with the LEGO Ideas theme, where a fan-submitted model for the film entered official review and won. The model depicts scenery of Halloween Town as its primary setting. Ideas sets undergo redesigns to suit official LEGO standards, and typically aren't afforded many new sculpts...and that's kind of the downfall of the set. Had this been a directly in-house licensed set under the Disney theme, I think we'd have a better product, but the license being under the Ideas theme imposed painful limitations on the figure designs. Then again, the Sesame Street set required a new sculpt for every character and that got made through Ideas. The Hocus Pocus set gave the witches new hair. Is there an excuse, really? This is very stylized material that should have earned a high standard of bespoke accuracy. The adaptation can't fully thrive without that expenditure.

Here's the box. The top has the film's French title: Mr. Jack's Strange Christmas.

I'm surprised his name wasn't changed to Jacques.

The front of the box shows Halloween Town as normal, but the back showcases the interiors and storage and Christmas decorations in the set that can redecorate the area for winter festivities. There's no way provided to cover the scenery in its first snow as seen at the end of the film, but this is fair enough.

Despite the box showing no moon behind the Spiral Hill on the back image, the moon is a practical effect in the physical model, not a graphic added in the box art. It was just removed for the rear-box image.

The minifigures, as mentioned, are largely insufficient, but not unenjoyable.

The set first gives us Lock, Shock, and Barrel, the little trick-or-treaters who kidnap Santa for Jack and then send him to their boss Oogie Boogie (Oogie is one of two major characters not present here). 

The kids in their masks.

The kids unmasked.

These characters are far from suited for LEGO proportions and existing sculpts, with skeleton-themed Barrel faring the best and witch-themed Shock arguably faring the worst. 

Shock's head is far taller than a minifigure's, and tapers, and her hair is far stringier while her hat is similarly exaggerated. Lock, meanwhile, has no devil tail despite the appropriate piece being created years ago. 

Minifigures Series 16's Cute Little Devil debuted the ideal element for Lock.

Neither Lock nor Barrel have bespoke hairpieces, so their hair is also slightly inaccurate. 

The kids are very simple and mostly unprinted, but that works fine for the source material. The trio have alternate faces which work pretty well.

Their trick-or-treat masks, which resemble and may be tamer than their real faces, are not represented. I can see that being hard to achieve. A double-sided head print would make the most sense, but would make a very poor masked likeness. Maybe alternate swap-out molds of the hair and mask together could be created, but that's a limitation the Ideas format ran up against, and could be deemed excessive, seeing as each character would realistically demand two new molds to give each masked and unmasked accurate headgear. The One Piece theme introduced a sword with an open neck clip on the hilt so the piece could clip to the neck and be displayed as if held in a minifigure's teeth. Maybe masks could be constructed as clip-ons that way, but it could be hard to make them look fitted and elegant.

The other minifigures are Jack and Sally, of course, and Jack makes quite an impression.

New Jack on the right.

Jack here is my first tall-style minifigure. I never had one before. The legs are longer and form a 2x3 footprint when in seated pose, as opposed to a 2x2 footprint, and the arms are longer too. 

Articulated minifigure legs come in 1.5-stud seated footprint, 2-stud seated footprint, and 3-stud seated footprint. The shortest legs, like Lock, Shock, and Barrel have, have no stud connections on the back and are unarticulated.

It's remarkable how this long body build changes the proportions and makes the head look smaller. It feels more human-shaped, honestly, but it definitely gives Jack the stature he needed. The longer limbs were retired for a long time, having only been used for the Toy Story cowpokes they were designed for, but they returned for the Na'vi in the LEGO Avatar theme, whereupon they could be used for Jack too. They've also featured on Madame Maxime in Harry Potter. Unfortunately, LEGO hasn't rigged the printing machines to do side printing on the long arms yet, so the sleeves lose the pinstriping detail on Jack v2. As such, Jack v2 can't be considered a full replacement for his first minifigure, as opinions about the face print and detail level and proportions can be weighed so one person may find the first minifigure better and someone else may prefer the latter.

But because he is dead, I can take off his head/for to change around the minifigures' faces! It's such a smooth switch, you would think it bewitched/and you'd never know the two had traded places!

I like the first head print more than the second, though both are good. 

Sally is an inexcusable downgrade. 

While she has all the fixings for her drugged nightshade soup to serve Dr. Finkelstein (...also not in this set), the production of the minifigure is worse. Her first hair sculpt is still produced and was literally made for her, but they changed it for this figure into an objectively inaccurate hairstyle. I can't understand that at all. Her print is also changed a bit, and it's fine, but I do think the original worked better in depicting her costume, too. The colors and losses of detail are bad, and the face prints don't appeal to me as much. 

Sally v2 looks a bit better with the correct hair, but it's not better than just using the original minifigure.

This facial expression doesn't work. It's too heavy-lidded and vacant.

These days, LEGO doesn't rerelease Minifigures designs in sets, so a reappearance of a licensed character who was first in Minifigures must necessarily have some distinguishing changes...but why must they be so insulting? This Sally could have been an improvement with a fabric skirt and maybe some other print tweaks or a notably different expression to add to the character, but they just made her worse in every way.

My favored renditions are v2 Jack with the v1 skull and v1 Sally.

Sandy Claws is the last traditional minifigure. His proportions are all off, but I do like the result okay.

The very bell-shaped character model of the film Santa.

This is actually LEGO's first minifigure of a distinct Santa Claus as depicted by an established intellectual property rather than being a generic Santa of LEGO's own creation. He's the first Santa minifigure in a flesh tone as such. (LEGO Santa figures in flesh tones have appeared in DUPLO and as a minidoll, but not as a classic minifigure before.) His hat and beard and body aren't shaped like the film character's, but the rosy cheeks give him some flair and the robed legs are good. 

Santa has a lollipop in his belt on the back, and hidden under his beard are pieces of candy corn from his kidnapping. His face has a more stern and a more worried expression. This version of Santa is quite no-nonsense, so I'm glad he's not made too cheery.

The candy cane debuted with the Minifigures line's Sugar Fairy and has since become a staple. It's a great piece.

The set also includes the Mayor...and I almost wish it hadn't. 

He's a clumsy brick-built figure and doesn't look good. I'd have wanted a Minions-style conical body mold with the Minion minifigure arm pieces and maybe a piece for his hat. The two-sided cone head had to be molded in one color without the ability to evenly split the coloring all the way down, which does spoil the figure to its own degree, but I can't see LEGO ever finding a solution for that issue. 

At the least, the head should have been cast in the flesh tone since that's the Mayor's "primary" face and the color of his hands in the movie. The head having to disconnect to turn it is annoying, though, since the whole thing of it is that it spins while attached to his torso. A single-stud or pin connection would be better. 

Connected by four studs--the head has to come off to switch his head rotation.

The Mayor's accessories are his huge agenda planning scroll and a megaphone.

While Oogie Boogie, as mentioned, feels like a big omission from the set, the result with the Mayor tells me that perhaps I should be thankful for his absence, as a brick-built Oogie would likely be a disappointment. Oogie is less essential to this set anyhow, since he never joins the other characters in the heart of Halloween Town, instead spending the whole film in his death-trap casino lair as a town exile, rejected for being genuinely evil. (He, or at least his shadow, also joins in on "This is Halloween", but Oogie implicitly remains physically in his lair.) 

As for Dr. Finkelstein's absence, the set's lack of the laboratory where he and Sally reside is a fair excuse. His duck-shaped head and hinged brain dome would also make him a challenge to adapt as a satisfying minifigure. It would still be nice to get him and his building someday, given that there are accessories here alluding to Sally's trickery in evading her creator and leaving the lab.

The last figure is the set's only new mold, and if there had to be one, this was the right place--it's Zero, Jack's ghost dog. 

This character could not be adequately represented as anything but a new sculpt, and leaving him out altogether would be the worse choice. Zero is more opaque in merchandising and promotional art than in the film, where he's notably translucent. This figure follows the majority of depictions by making Zero solid white. Zero is cast from a softer plastic so his ribbony ears could be molded and not be fragile. He's dual-molded with red for the collar's sake.

Zero fits on a studded grid even though it looks like he shouldn't without a raised stud to elevate him.

No black cat is included in the set despite there being at least one around Halloween Town, which we most prominently see when Sally briefly holds and pets the cat during her song. A LEGO black cat is sourced easily enough, but it would have been nice to have one officially included.

The model is a display of Halloween Town highlights--the defining image of the film known as Spiral Hill, Jack's house, and the town hall and the fountain. 

These are built in three modules which clip together flush or can be taken aside, and are built in right-to-left order, starting with the town hall. It's a good selection of locations, as much of the story takes place here. This is a mostly-sung film, and the songs "This Is Halloween", "Jack's Lament", "Town Meeting Song", "Jack's Obsession", "Making Christmas", "Sally's Song", and "Jack and Sally's Song" all take place within the areas reflected by this model. (Songs outside the bounds of this model are "What's This?", "Kidnap the Sandy Claws", "Oogie Boogie's Song", and "Poor Jack".) I think the set feels substantial in person, and I understand its $200 price. Each module feels finished and significant enough in size even if the model is unable to be fully practical as a playset at the scale we got. This is primarily a display piece, so I'm okay with that, and the set doesn't feel so undersized that it feels like LEGO's price scaling is off and that it should be far cheaper. It's a pretty fairly-priced model that feels substantial but happens to be compact.

The original fan designer whose project was transformed into the official model is named Simon Scott. His model was submitted and reached review twice, first without the town hall, where it was not selected for production, and then with it, with that latter project being the one that was selected for production. The fan model was larger on all counts, save the kids' bathtub, which was not sized to fit them all. 

The fountain is particularly oversized, and Jack's house is really off-model, but the rest looks okay.

I think the LEGO model has made things look more polished and on-model and added appealing contrast to the set so it looks good on display. Drabness is the name of the game in the film, but it doesn't translate so easily to LEGO. The official model adds more texture and appeal without betraying the movie's aesthetic. 

Scott proposed Dr. Finkelstein and even Santa Jack and his sleigh, but I'm not too surprised to see all of them absent. The skeleton horse mold is retired and the coffin sleigh could be too much to add.

I think Santa Jack would be ideal for whenever we get the next Disney Minifigures series, though--tall limbs and all. Maybe give him the vampire teddy as a toy, or rerelease Zero with him as a cheaper source. The Mayor is the most significant element added to the model which was not in the submission...but I understand why the fan designer left him out, iconic as he is. He just didn't translate so well to LEGO.

The first build of the set is actually the trick-or-treaters' walking bathtub. 

There was an infamous mandate that Halloween Town was not to be portrayed as "magic", thus we have justifications for outlandish things that fall in the realm of science or mechanics, like this bathtub being a mechanical walker. The tub is increased in size from the fan model so all three kids can stand in it if the middle is turned sideways. One passenger can stand on studs while the others must be loose. Santa can also be put in the tub to depict his kidnapping transport, though he's not stuck in a bag here. 

It's possible the requirement to fit the kids in the bathtub model was a reason for Lock not having the devil tail, though I'm certain the mold was retired as well. If LEGO remade the mold, though, the tail would  get in the way of putting the trio together in their transport.

I'm not impressed with the build. The assembly feels fiddly and fragile, the skeleton legs don't feel proper despite objectively resembling a tub's claw feet, and the mechanical steerage in the back with the faucet and crank are missing. The 2x2 plates cast in pastel yellow also have zero justification. They should have been white, especially because nowhere else in the set uses pastel yellow 2x2 plates.

I rebuilt the tub later on to remove the yellow and modify the back, adding the crank-shaped extension and swapping the skeleton legs out for chunky robot arms with "stamp" elements (the same pieces the legs clip onto) for the feet. I think this captures the film design a little better. Tapered walls and lower leg mounts would also help 

I later rebuilt it again to capture its tapered shape more and have the legs recessed and placed more on the bottom. With my last draft, all three kids stand on studs.

After the tub, which LEGO kind of flopped, comes the town hall module.

We don't have proper full-location shots of the stop-motion film sets, so reference for the buildings comes best from adaptations which may have their own discrepancies. Nonetheless, here's a collectible model of the town hall to compare.

LEGO captured the trim and crooked pillars and door well, and the shape of the banner is achieved with a spot-on custom fabric element pinned down with claws through two holes--the same claws are what the bone is clipped in with. The pumpkin graphic on LEGO's banner uses their own jack-o'-lantern mold as a visual. The actual piece appears in the set, too.

The LEGO copyright is hidden behind the bone.

The countdown to Christmas, repurposing the town's typical countdown to Halloween, is present where it should be, placing the moment of this LEGO set at 35 days to go before the holiday.

In front of the town hall is the gargoyle fountain which spews green liquid. The fountain is a prominent setpiece, as Jack emerges from the waters at the end of his entrance act in "This is Halloween", and Sally uses the fountain to disperse fog juice in an attempt to render Jack's reindeer crew unable to navigate and fly in the role of Santa's team.

Model for the fountain as seen in the original design.

A green crystal piece is used to evoke the water spilling from the creature's mouth, but it's not perfect. Raising it by a few studs would help. The set provides loose 1x1 translucent bright green studs to throw into the basin to imitate loose water, but I left only the secured studs in because the loose ones would be a pain to keep tidy.

The town hall module also has a bare black tree on its side, and this set features uncarved pumpkin pieces in dark orange.

While the doorway of the town hall is crooked, the door itself, in this rendition, is a rectangle. The building is open from the back, featuring the back view of Jack's speaking podium and the curtains behind him. Items under the floor are visible in an arch.

The town hall is very cramped, but features sconces on the door wall, benches on the side walls, and the podium, as well as devil carvings (stickers) on the rafters. The podium is designed as a removable element.

It's very hard to stage the "Town Meeting Song" scene, since the door gets in the way of the podium and benches, the benches are hard to fill, and you can't get a good camera view of Jack through the exterior side of the door--it's easier to view the scene through the back.

The roof comes off for marginally better access to the inside, but not much.

All of the angled tapering walls in this set are achieved with tbe same technique of building walls onto hinge-topped bricks and clipping them into the top at the same angle as the upward slope pieces at the ends. 

The town hall has two storage sections--one underneath, and one in the roof. 

Under the hall is one of four identical Christmas wreaths in the set. The set has its Christmas decorations tucked away for optional display. The basement also has a pitchfork (for the Pumpkin King scarecrow Jack costume, I assume) a generic skeleton (the only copy; the one in the tree earlier was this guy) and Sally's nightshade brewing fixings seen earlier--a bowl, a spoon, a cauldron, and a jar. One of several spiders also appears here.

I like these accessories as references to the film, but it's annoying that they reference material the set does not provide. Sally can't drug the soup of a scientist who isn't here, and Jack's scarecrow getup isn't one of the minifigures.

I put the worse Sally minifigure in the skeleton's place in storage.

While a monstrous man-eating wreath was one of Halloween's memorable botchings of Christmas, the wreaths in this set appear to be innocent greenery trimmed with bows. It's a shame the set didn't give us any of the identifiable Halloween corruptions of Christmas icons that we saw in the film.

The town hall attic is accessed by removing the roof in two panels which rest neatly but loosely in place. I added spare orange flowers to decorate the roof, but the instructions leave it bare.

The panels have orange bricks underneath which catch against the back of orange panels in the attic floor to hold them at the right position.

Inside the attic is another wreath, another spider, a dollhouse, a present, and a stocking. The instructions also place a skull with a bow on top here.

The dollhouse build.

The items have to be placed well so the roof will fit. I can put the Jack minifigure I'm not using into the attic storage, and he can even clip onto the dollhouse chimney for a secured solution.

I like the town hall, but I wish its interior was more usable. 

Jack's house is next.

The house's shape has been captured about as well as it could be, and is far more accurate to the film model than the fan design submission. This section includes the gate and the walls the other modules clip to, as well as a different tree which still has foliage. Both trees in the set are built the same way, save for the ends of the branches. I've pinned the set's skeleton to one leaf piece using a brown sprig through the hollow studs of the leaves and the skeleton head. It's not quite the hanging-tree monster we see in the film, but that's the idea I went for.

Jack's door has an eye sticker on the pane in the middle, and the steps below are very uneven and caricatured, though not as tall as the film's. The back of the house's foundation is arched as it should be.

I'm not sure why, but the whole house can be removed from the top of the stairs. There's no storage here, though.

The house is open at the back, but is also cramped. The lower portions of the house aren't well elaborated on, with the most prominent house scene, "Jack's Obsession", actually being set in the tower extending from the roof. At this scale, that tower is a tiny section that looks more like a chimney rather than being a room any figure could fit into, so the workshop has been moved down to the main house and the entryway has gained some pieces too. In fairness, I'm pretty sure the exterior set of Jack's house probably wasn't full-size in filming and that the tower interior was its own setpiece at a larger scale.

The entryway has a dinky holiday tree and a Santa sack behind it which take the whole space.

Up a floor is the workshop where Jack tries to puzzle out how Christmas functions. We see a chalkboard of bogus calculations, a telescope, a shelf of Christmas books he's read so many times, his drawing of himself in a Santa costume that he gives to Sally as reference for her commission (this tile is stickered with the design, not printed), and a magnifying glass. Sheets of wrapping paper are under one table while holly sits upon the other, and there's a crate with a fish and a wine bottle--the gifts Sally sends up a line in a basket while Jack is consumed by his work.

The instructions also suggest the bottle could be used for Sally's fog juice to fill the fountain.

The workshop floor of Jack's house comes off, but it doesn't meaningfully improve access to the entry floor. And there's not much to access, anyhow.

The roof of Jack's house has some nice texture and the teeth at the front interlock loosely. The roof comes off with a similar system to the town hall's.

The rafters contain more Christmas decorations--the last two wreaths, hung on green brackets which can allow them to hang from the overhang of Jack's house, some gifts, another spider, some viney greens, a pumpkin, and some skulls, one topped with a bow.

Spiral Hill is probably my favorite module of the set because it's such a famous image and the scenery looks brilliant even taken as its own small model. This would sell like hotcakes released as its own set. 

Since LEGO has recently been accused of taking integral models out of its collector sets to offer as temporary gifts with purchase, the cynic in me might think LEGO would be capable of making Spiral Hill a gift-with-purchase model that would render the set incomplete if you didn't get it immediately, but that's a bit ludicrous of an accusation--for now. It does make a lovely solo model, though!

The graves and pumpkins in front, including two carved ones, look great. The sticker for Zero's doghouse grave didn't come off the sheet properly, though, so mine is held on with wall tack. In the back is the deadly nightshade Sally gathers to drug Dr. Finkelstein with, depicted with lavender flowers.

There's a stud placed ideally for Zero to be positioned emerging from his grave, but it might as well be used for Sally, too, as she shyly observes Jack during "Jack's Lament". 

The shaping of the hill is ingenious and the black color is a success. Granted, it is undersized and it lacks the ability to unroll to meet the ground as it does at the end of "Jack's Lament", while the original fan model, though cruder and lacking the tapering effect, would have been able to do so. There are only four studs to stand upon at the top, which can cramp Jack and Sally together a tad, and they can't be positioned walking up its slope. While LEGO has long been used as a stop-motion medium, this set design ironically isn't ideal for recreating the film's stop-motion scenes thanks to limitations in the placement of minifigures. Studs up the hill would make it look worse, but would make it easier to stage figures on for animation.

The moon behind the hill is a non-brick element. It's a plastic card disk that's pinned to the back of the hill as a backdrop for the scenery. 

It's a fair solution and it's a sturdy material that isn't too flimsy and isn't translucent. I'd much rather have the moon than not, and LEGO System dish or disk elements don't come large enough for the right effect. 

The back of the hill has a couple of hollows trimmed by details, though I don't know why brown-cast pieces are used here. Were these not being produced in black at the time the set was being made?

With the set all together, I had fun taking photos with it.

Burning tree made from spare parts in the set's leftovers.

Here's the set trimmed with some holiday decorations.

LEGO as a medium is inherently limited when it comes to the very stylized imagery that defines the Tim Burton look, and a lot of compromises and disappointments are visible in the way they've adapted the look, particularly with the minifigure designs. That said, with the proper budget and advancements in printing technology, their work with the Nightmare characters is eminently respectable, so it may be said that this set represents a lack of expenditure and designer freedom rather than an impossible task that was predictably failed. Were this not from the Ideas theme, we might have gotten better character translations than we did. It's fairly likely we would have gotten this set even if it wasn't a winner through ideas, and while I'm very happy for Simon Scott to have contributed to the LEGO canon in this way, I do kind of wish we'd gotten this product through the regular direct licensing venue. Even then, LEGO margins and mandates might have limited the designers to an unfair degree. The minifigure designer couldn't even get full detail into the minifigures in a $1K set thanks to stupid arbitrary limitations. It's possible LEGO isn't done with this film. It's a juggernaut, after all, and opportunities to improve the figures with later Disney Minifigures releases would be wonderful. I'd also fall over myself for a licensed Nightmare Before Christmas-only Minifigures series.  Just to draft one now...

• Santa Jack with a new beard and a bag, maybe Zero too (use same Santa hat)
• Pajama Jack
• Pumpkin King scarecrow Jack with the jack-o'-lantern mask molded with a brown stem
• Lock with devil tail and new hair, maybe a mask if that works?
• Shock with a scorpion
• Barrel with better hair
• The Mayor assembled with a bespoke figure system
• Santa, if he could share the Mayor's body sculpts below the head
• Oogie Boogie with a bespoke figure system
• Dr. Finkelstein
• Sally with the correct hair, a fabric skirt, and a printed jar of deadly nightshade and a brown spoon
• The Harlequin Demon with the vampire teddy bear

And if we're not limited to twelve, might as well add:

• The Clown with the Tearaway Face (face not actually removable, but maybe double-sided to show the hollow head), maybe include the vampire teddy
• The Melting Man
• The Undersea Gal
• The Wolfman

Behemoth would be fun too, but the axe in his head and his proportions might be too beyond LEGO's capabilities. 

Any or all of these could be disappointing minifigures thanks to the design compromises necessary, but I'd still like to see an attempt!

In terms of the physical model's design, I'm satisfied. The interiors of the buildings are tiny, but they're also not the focus here, and they're used as well as they can be. I appreciate the storage for Christmas trimmings and optional accessories, and Spiral Hill in particular looks fantastic. The only part of the build which disappointed me was the bathtub. There aren't any ideal parts for shaping the tub in brick form, but I think there was a better way to do it than LEGO put out.

Overall, this license is a weird one for LEGO to pursue, but I think they can get it right if they really try. It was easy to find the flair and magic of Tim Burton's art and Henry Selick's vision with the set as completed. 

Jack and Sally are "simply meant to be", while The Nightmare Before Christmas and LEGO probably aren't. But not all successful relationships are effortless or fated. Sometimes you just need to work on it.

ADDENDUM: Of course LEGO announces a third release under this license the very day after I post the comprehensive discussion of everything they've done with it-