The voice that sets up the 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas belongs to Ed Ivory, the actor who plays Santa Claus, and he gets only a few lines. A longer version had been recorded by Patrick Stewart, Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and while it didn’t make the movie, it didn’t disappear either: it ended up on the soundtrack.
Walt Disney Records released the movie’s soundtrack on October 12, 1993, and Stewart is credited on two of its 20 tracks: “Opening,” which comes right after the overture, and “Closing,” the 19th track, just ahead of the end titles. They bookend the record the way the narration was meant to bookend the film.
Patrick Stewart’s Unused Narration
He never had an on-screen role or a character, and no account of the production has him voicing Santa in the story itself: what went unused was his narration.
Director Henry Selick explained the job Stewart was recording for in a 2013 interview with The Daily Beast, and it was tied to one character from the start: “It’s supposed to be Santa Claus’s voice at the beginning/end.” Filling it was harder than it sounds.
Vincent Price was the first choice and was actually recorded, but Selick said Price “had just lost his wife, and he was despondent, and it just didn’t work.” Production then met with Don Ameche, who Selick said “was insanely grouchy,” and with James Earl Jones, which apparently went worse: when Danny Elfman told Jones he’d written the part especially for him, “James Earl Jones got very angry and yelled, ‘You don’t know me!’”
In the end, Selick said, “It was a very tough voice to cast, and we just went with a local actor from San Francisco,” and that was Ivory.
Stewart doesn’t come up anywhere in Selick’s account, and no first-hand account explains why his recording went unused or when he made it. The closest thing to an explanation is what Selick said about the ending: “Then, later in the film, it was supposed to go to Santa Claus finishing the poem at the film’s end, but that didn’t work either, so we scrapped it.” It isn’t clear whether “that” means a performance or the closing poem itself, but it’s the only first-hand account of the epilogue being cut.
If you’ve read that Stewart can be heard reading Tim Burton’s original poem on the movie’s DVD, that one has the wrong actor. The 2008 Collector’s Edition, the film’s first Blu-ray release, did add a reading of Burton’s poem as a bonus feature, but it was read by Christopher Lee.
Every account of where Stewart’s recording survives points to the soundtrack album, so the only way to hear Captain Picard narrate The Nightmare Before Christmas is to put on the record.