'The Nightmare Before Christmas' writer says she thinks the movie's villain Oogie Boogie is racist and 'looks like a Klu Klux Klansman' (original) (raw)
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- "The Nightmare Before Christmas" screenwriter Caroline Thompson said that she thinks the character Ooge Boogie is racist and "insensitive."
- Thompson told Insider that the character, who wears a pointed hood, "looks like a Klu Klux Klansman," while "'Oogie Boogie' is an old, southern, derogatory phrase for an African-American."
- The writer said that she begged Tim Burton and director Henry Selick to change the character, but the filmmaker told her she was being "oversensitive."
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The character of Oogie Boogie in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was "a big controversy" and "insensitive," said the the movie's screenwriter Caroline Thompson.
Voiced by Ken Page, Oogie Boogie is a villainous boogeyman made up of bugs, who's constantly trying to scare Halloween Town. The character loves gambling and sings a Cab Calloway-inspired blues number.
Still, Thompson disliked the character from the start.
"First of all, he looks like a Klu Klux Klansman. Secondly, 'Oogie Boogie' is an old, southern, derogatory phrase for an African-American and I'm from Maryland, which is just on the cusp of the south, so I'm hyper-aware of that and sensitive to it," Thompson said.
The screenwriter admitted that she "just flipped out about" the character and even confronted filmmaker and producer Tim Burton about it.
"I went to Tim. I went to [director] Henry [Selick] and I said we got to change this," Thompson recalled to Insider. "Tim Burton said, 'Oh, stop it, you're being oversensitive.'"
"I'm still really embarrassed by it. It's all kind of ergh and I thought it was incredibly insensitive," she added.
Thompson has previously spoken about her dislike for the character on the Script Apart podcast, saying that the fact that Page, a Black actor, voiced the character made it a"trifecta of wrongness."
"I think it's a fun segment of the story as it was executed, but it's a troubling one," Thompson said back in October.
However, Selick defended the character in an interview with The Daily Beast in 2013.
"Ken Page, the Broadway star who happens to be Black, was hired to do the voice, and after seeing some of the old Betty Boop cartoons where they'd use Cab Calloway to voice it, I just thought it was more of a New Orleans thing," Selick said. "It didn't occur to me that it was racist. People are desperate to look for things to attack."
Although Burton didn't direct this movie, he did produce it and was heavily involved in the making of "Nightmare."
Burton has often been accused of a lack of diversity in his movies, although he defended himself from that criticism in a 2016 interview with Bustle.
"I remember back when I was a child watching 'The Brady Bunch' and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let's have an Asian child and a Black. I used to get more offended by that...," he said then. "I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that's great. I didn't go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies."
Read more:
20 details you probably missed in 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'