Hot Topic and The Nightmare Before Christmas needed each other to thrive

polygon.com:

It’s hard to think of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas or edgy retail chain Hot Topic without thinking of the other.

For the past 30 years, Jack Skellington’s face has graced T-shirts, backpacks, shoes, and more at Hot Topic — and thus filled high school hallways across America. Together, the stop-motion cult classic and the alt-friendly clothing and accessory store have been hallmarks of counterculture teenagers for a solid 20 years, even as both have made their way from the fringes of culture to the mainstream. The stories of how each reached the center of teen culture are inexorably intertwined, and they have been since the early 1990s.

It’s been 30 Halloweens and 30 Christmasses since The Nightmare Before Christmas hit theaters, and its influence is only growing. Polygon is paying tribute to Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s masterpiece of stop-motion animation with a trick-or-treat bag of stories on the goth kid touchstone. Open the rest of your Nightmare Before Christmas presents here.

But was it Hot Topic’s strong alternative brand that made it the perfect place for Nightmare to flourish into a cultural landmark, or was it Nightmare’s darker-than-usual-Disney fare that primed it for Hot Topic? As it turns out, it was a little bit of both.

“Merchandising has arguably been as crucial to the success of The Nightmare Before Christmas as it has been to Star Wars,” says author Lisa Morton to Emily Zemler in Beyond Halloween Town: The Story, the Characters, and the Legacy. And as it turns out, the timing was a perfect storm. “The film’s original release in 1993 also coincided with the rise of Halloween collectibles, so it provided a new tsunami of delightful collectibles that were more affordable than many of the