Disney commissioned a 30-minute Halloween special. Tim Burton delivered a live-action fairy tale with an all Asian-American cast, kung fu fights, nunchucks, a gingerbread house with a face, and a candy-cane-nosed witch. Disney aired it twice at Halloween in 1983 and then dropped it right in the bin.
Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Tim Burton's Hansel and Gretel (1983), piece of formerly lost media that is exactly as strange as it sounds.
Shot on 16mm for just over $100,000 during Burton's time as a conceptual artist at Disney, Hansel and Gretel is a loose adaptation of the Brothers Grimm story with a distinctly Japanese aesthetic throughout. The toys in the father's workshop prefigure the design sensibility of every Burton film that followed, the forest is an abstract stage set, and the gingerbread house is a practical construction that melts into oozing candy at the end, and the climax involves nunchucks.
Burton has described the Japanese design obsession as central to why the film looks like it does, and the film is legible as early-Burton in almost every frame even when it doesn't quite cohere. Disney executives were alarmed enough by the finished product to ensure it never aired again after its two Halloween night screenings.
We get into why this is worth tracking down, what it tells us about where Burton was before Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and question why there are nunchucks.
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