One element of the Christmas season that I've always enjoyed is the glut of holiday specials that television studios crank out in that span between Thanksgiving and New Year's. A lot of these specials — the classic Rankin/Bass stuff and A Charlie Brown Christmas, for example — have achieved legendary status among Christmas lovers like me. But one special has gone beyond "legendary" and has become one of the most infamous television broadcasts of all time.
I'm speaking, of course, of the catastrophe known as The Star Wars Holiday Special.
If you haven't heard of it, then you've missed out on what many consider to be one of the biggest disasters in television history. Broadcast on CBS on November 17, 1978, just a year and a half after the hugely successful release of the original Star Wars movie, the special has done absolutely nothing but be a continuing embarrassment for everyone involved. The cast and crew either become angry or feign ignorance when asked about its existence. The story goes that even George Lucas himself once said that if he had the time and proper resources, he'd track down every bootleg copy he could and smash them with a hammer. But enough lollygagging; let's jump right into The Star Wars Holiday Special.
Keep in mind that this is a "holiday special," not a "Christmas special." That's important to know, because the holiday being celebrated in this glorious piece of trash is not Christmas, but "Life Day." And as the special begins, we're quickly dropped aboard the Millennium Falcon as Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) travel to the Wookie home planet of Kashyyyk to get Chewbacca home in time for his family's Life Day celebration. Their voyage is unfortunately impeded, however, when they discover that the Galactic Empire has initiated a security crackdown and their forces have established a blockade around the planet.
Down on Kashyyyk, Chewbacca's family prepares for his return. His wife Malla (Mickey Morton) struggles to prepare a big feast, while his son Lumpy (Patty Maloney) and father Itchy (Paul Gale) just try to stave off boredom through whatever entertainment they can find. But things get shaken up when their home is invaded by a squadron of Stormtroopers as the Imperial Army searches for members of the Rebel Alliance.
That's pretty much the entire plot. There's no way it could fill out an entire feature-length movie, so the special is pretty much presented in the form of a variety show. And as such, we're periodically presented with comedy sketches and musical numbers from such '70s pop culture luminaries as Jefferson Starship, Diahann Carroll, Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman. And the whole thing is pretty much torture.
Of all the things to have had the Star Wars name slapped on it over the last thirty-four years, The Star Wars Holiday Special is perhaps the most bizarre. For starters, it's absolutely nothing like any of the six movies in the franchise. Sure, it's got some of the famous faces from the saga, but the production design and the overall tone and feel of the special come nowhere near matching the grand spectacle of the movies. And so awful was the reception to the special that it was broadcast only once, and has never seen any sort of official home video release. It exists today only in the form of bootlegs sold at fan conventions and digital copies uploaded to the Internet. If it hadn't been for that handful of people who owned VCRs in 1978 and had the forethought to press the "record" button, the special might have just vanished into obscurity forever. And that would have been a shame, because I'm sure Star Wars fans enjoy having something that makes those dreadful prequels look better by comparison.
This debacle was helmed by Steve Binder, whose entire directorial résumé consists of practically nothing but variety shows. I haven't seen anything else that Binder has worked on, since I'm not a fan of variety shows, but after seeing this piece of crap, I think I'll be staying far, far away from anything with his name on it. For starters, Binder must have had absolutely no budget at all to work with, because everything looks abysmally cheap. The sets and props look like they were slapped together with whatever they could find on the studio's backlots, and with the exception of Chewbacca, the Wookie costumes look like ten-dollar Halloween costumes. I know this was being made for TV in the '70s, but you'd think they could have given Binder and the crew more than 50 bucks and stock footage from Episode IV.
And then there are the different variety sequences, which range from not funny at all, to so saccharinely cute that they'll make you want to vomit, to just plain bizarre. The sequence where Harvey Korman appears in drag as a four-armed chef on a cooking show is so insanely manic that it'll probably have you screaming in hysterics at the screen. That's the tip of the iceberg, as it's definitely out-weirded by Diahann Carroll's segment. I honestly don't know where to begin describing this segment, but by God, I'm gonna try. The setup for the segment sees Itchy watching a performance by Carroll through a virtual reality helmet. The whole thing looks like it should be a bad LSD trip to begin with, but seeing Carroll in a hideous pink wig flirting with Itchy and making sexual innuendos while Itchy reacts like he's having the best sex of his life is all kinds of wrong. It's an incredibly creepy segment that goes on far past its welcome, and it's risqué enough that I'm surprised that they managed to get away with it in what I imagine was supposed to be a family show.
The only thing that comes close to rivaling the utter bizarreness of that segment is a portion near the beginning of the special where we see Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy going about their daily routine. What's so bad about that, you may ask? Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy are Wookies, and the Wookie language is basically roars and growls. It wouldn't be so bad if the segment was subtitled, but there's not a single intelligible word at all for nearly ten minutes. We have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and maybe it's me, but if the actors were trying to communicate through body language, they did a really piss-poor job of it.
And when upon reflection, the special doesn't really feel like it has anything to do with Star Wars. Yeah, all of the big-name characters from the first movie are there (albeit they're mostly relegated to cameos) and the name is there. But in no way does it match the same sense of adventure or excitement that the original trilogy has going for it. If this was my first exposure to the Star Wars universe, there's no way in hell I'd want to watch any of the movies. It's like the producers just created a sci-fi variety show and slapped the Star Wars name on it. The truth is I blame the whole "variety show" garbage for making things that way, because if it hadn't been for that, they could have focused on silly things like a plot or making the special fun to watch. But no, we couldn't have that, could we?
The only part of the whole special that stands out as a positive is the animated sequence, which is really only notable for marking the debut of Boba Fett. Animated by Canadian entertainment company Nelvana, the segment is the closest the entire special comes to matching the feel of the movies. The animation isn't perfect and the characters look more like they belong in the opening credits of Grease rather than a Star Wars special, but it's still a fun little segment and I wish the entire special had followed its lead.
I understand why The Star Wars Holiday Special is the cult phenomenon that it has become. But having sat through it, I'm kinda sad that it even exists at all. I've never been a big Star Wars fan, but no franchise deserves to have something as bad as this be a part of it. The special is so horribly flawed that I can't say I blame George Lucas for trying to wish it out of existence. But then again, Lucas had no problem attaching his name to Howard the Duck, creating Jar Jar Binks, or making unnecessary edits to the original Star Wars trilogy, so what do I know? In any event, The Star Wars Holiday Special is an absolutely horrible mess, a train wreck of epic proportions. And though I may enjoy collecting bad movies, I actually feel kinda guilty for having spent ten bucks on a bootleg DVD-R of this piece of crap. So you'd better believe I'm going to give this awful thing one star. But I'll still totally recommend it to all the diehard Star Wars fans out there that have yet to see it. If you think Greedo shooting first and Jar Jar Binks are the worst parts of Star Wars, you haven't seen anything.
Final Rating: *
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