It is then and when the Nutcracker decides to tell the girl his story of how he came to be: A long time ago, there was a party at a royal castle to celebrate the prince's birthday, which was interrupted by the arrival of the three-headed mouse queen and her spoiled brat son, who both behaved very rudely and refused to leave or improve their manners.
The king and queen were devastated, and the entire hall was petrified while the mouse prince escaped, taking his mother's crown with him.
The Mouse King's magic backfires, making him vanish in a puff of green smoke which also decimates his army the moment they inhale it and start sneezing.
All that is left behind of them in the human world are the girl's wooden clogs and the crumbled remains of the Nutcracker's shell lying before the Christmas tree.
Ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who himself starred in his own classic TV edition of The Nutcracker in 1977, included the 1973 animated film as part of his PBS series Stories from my Childhood, of which he was the executive producer.
The music is taken from several of Tchaikovsky's compositions aside from The Nutcracker, including The Russian Dance, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty.