On Friday, November 17th, 1978, The Star Wars Holiday Special aired once on CBS, and then never again. Not officially, anyway—if you look hard enough you can find the infamous special that Lucasfilm has worked decades to erase. The Star Wars Holiday Special, which was one of several Star Wars tie-ins that CBS proposed to Star Wars Corporation (a subsidiary of Lucasfilm) has earned its reputation as a mortifyingly unfunny variety show featuring Star Wars characters. The program has a cocktail-napkin-sized plot: Chewbacca’s family is harassed by Imperial troops while they wait for Chewie (Peter Mayhew) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) to return home for Life Day celebrations.
According to Nielsen Media Research, The Star Wars Holiday Special attracted about 13 million viewers nation-wide, which might sound impressive, but means it didn’t even crack Nielsen’s Top 10 for the evening—when it was out-viewed by Pearl and The Love Boat. In a characteristically scathing review, the Milwaukee Sentinel’s Greg Moody wrote that “Suddenly, the entire mystique of ‘Star Wars’ is gone”; The Detroit Free Press’s Bettelou Peterson was only relatively kind when she said “The Force, it is sad to report, is not quite with them.” Now, The Star Wars Holiday Special’s the subject of a Rifftrax special and is alluded to in Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” music video. This by-now infamous TV special’s almost-total failure is partly due to a lack of hands-on interest and supervision from Star Wars creator George Lucas and his Lucasfilm collaborators (who were then focused on preparing The Empire Strikes Back).
George Brich/AP/Shutterstock
So it’s not really surprising that LucasFilm has never released The Star Wars Holiday Special, in any format, since 1978, except for a personal copy that Lucas gave to star Carrie Fisher, who used the misconceived TV special to horrify and entertain her party guests. So you’ll probably never see The Star Wars Holiday Special on Disney+, among the many forgettable old content in their company’s cavernous vault (which is really where Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace should stay). But—as bad as it is—fans should be able to legally revisit this infamous classic.
Lucas seems to be the main reason why that may never happen. Fisher claimed that “George won't let anyone have [The Holiday Special]. Lucas also supposedly once said: “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of [The Star Wars Holiday Special] and smash it.” It seems that if George, or Lucasfilm doesn’t want fans to own something—we won’t.
And this scrubbing of the special from history is interesting, considering The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau has coincidentally said that The Star Wars Holiday Special is an influence on his new Disney+ Star Wars series (specifically the TV special’s animated Boba Fett segment). Favreau also said that he’s eager to remake The Star Wars Holiday Special: “It’s ready, the ideas are ready. I think it could be really fun.” There’s even a Life Day reference in The Mandalorian’s pilot. Apparently, all roads lead back to Chewbacca’s tree-house.
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The Star Wars Holiday Special was designed originally designed to “help keep Star Wars in the [public] consciousness,” according to co-star Mark Hamill. Moreover: The Star Wars Corporation’s Charles Lippincott, who was in charge of the company’s marketing and merchandising, says that the 1978 Christmas program was partly inspired by Star Wars-themed variety show segments on The Donny & Marie Show and The Richard Pryor Show, both of which “helped revive our box office.” But even Kenner’s proposed line of Holiday-related toys were never produced. So: what’s wrong with The Star Wars Holiday Special, and why is it too bad to be officially released?
The Star Wars Holiday Special was always an unfortunate mix of unwise ideas and creative chaos, including Lucas’s own concept of setting the program on Kashyyyk, Chewbacca’s home planet (to help bridge the gap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back). Co-writer Bruce Vilanch remembers telling Lucas that focusing so much of The Star Wars Holiday Special on Chewbacca’s family members—none of whom verbally communicate beyond unintelligible growling and moaning—would be a mistake: “I said: ‘You’ve chosen to build a story around these characters who don’t speak. The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm.” But Lucas was unsurprisingly reluctant to act on Vilanch’s suggestion: “This was [Lucas’s] vision, and he could not be moved.”
Vilanch was kept on despite Lucas’s “glacial” response because of his reputation and experience working on variety shows like Bette Midler’s 1977 Ol’ Red Hair is Back TV special. Vilanch and his four co-writers helped to conceptualize what was probably always a Sargasso Sea of bad ideas, including Bea Arthur’s Kurt-Weill-meets-“Alabama Song”-inspired Cantina musical performance (in which the Golden Girls star briefly dances with Greedo). Unfunny comedy sketches, especially the ones that star The Carol Burnett Show star Harvey Korman, are understandably goony, which takes some of the sting out of otherwise traumatizing images of Korman as a four-armed, Julia Child-esque cooking show host (“Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir!").
Still, some things can’t be apologized away, like the nightmarishly bad Wookiee costumes or the doofy, pseudo-spacey musical score. This includes the bizarre and very-long Jefferson Starship performance of "Light the Sky on Fire." In fact, director David Acomba, who went to USC with Lucas and was brought on partly because of his enthusiasm for filming musical acts like Jefferson Starship, supposedly quit after he found himself at a creative impasse with the show’s producers; he was later replaced with Steve Binder (Vanity Fair’s Frank DiGiacomo has the most detailed account of the show’s production).
But there’s no good excuse for awful-to-the-core concepts like the Mind Evaporator, a hair-dryer-shaped virtual reality machine that presents an ostensibly pornographic vision of singer/Julia star Diahann Carroll to Itchy (Paul Gale), Chewbacca’s scowling, overbite-afflicted Wookiee dad. Carroll’s performance is accompanied by some charming psychedelic effects. But most fans probably only remember being traumatized by Carroll’s seduction of Itchy (“I am your pleasure[…]experience me”), as well as the relief they felt when they first saw the animated Boba Fett segment.
Now, you might think that the Boba Fett cartoon provides some redeeming value to The Star Wars Holiday Special, perhaps after having seen it as an Easter Egg in a blu-ray box set of “Star Wars: The Complete Saga.” You’d be wrong: the animation quality is rather bad—what exactly is going on with Han Solo’s jawline?—and the plot is kinda dumb (Oh, cool, Luke and Boba are uneasy allies now, that makes total sense). It’s also not even historically essential since Boba Fett was technically introduced at the 1978 San Anselmo County Fair (right before The Star Wars Holiday Special), where Boba Fett was presented as Darth Vader’s “right-hand man.”
There is no sane way to re-imagine The Star Wars Holiday Special as an underrated curio, not even for fans of Art “Saun Dann” Carney’s prominent chest-hair and bad jokes (Did Dann’s vest feature any buttons? A zipper? Some velcro?). But that doesn’t mean that this million-dollar flop—the most expensive TV special at the time—deserves to be hidden, not even in plain sight (it’s just a quick Google away, promise). Because it’s still 2019, a time when access to even atrocious old media is important now that monopolistic companies, like Disney, are using streaming services, like Disney+, to consolidate and (ugh) curate their back catalogues. The process of deciding what’s available to consumers is one that we don’t really get to participate in, not beyond voting with our wallets. There’s still nothing to be gained by leaving The Star Wars Holiday Special in a memory hole where it’s weird enough to be influential, but too bad to be (legally) available.
The program’s lack of above-board availability is also unfortunate given that Star Wars is still seen as a sacred text by some fans—fans who will consume in mass every piece of Star Wars-related content, good or bad. And, as long as we’re living in a Star Wars-rich environment, The Star Wars Holiday Special should be made legally available. Fans should be reminded of how weird this now-inescapable franchise once was. If Star Wars nerds like Mike Nelson, Jon Favreau, and Weird Al Yankovic could be influenced by this infamous special—couldn't other fans out there be inspired as well? The worst thing you can do to a cult movie is try to hide it. Disney and Lucasfilm should just embrace the weird Star Wars past like its fans happily do. This special marks an embarrassing—although harmless—moment in history of a beloved franchise. If historic Disney missteps like Gus (1976) or The Black Cauldron (1985) are available on Disney+, then why not the Holiday Special? Hey, maybe if fans could actually watch this thing, it would become a perennial so-bad-it's-good seasonal favorite that Hallmark, Lifetime, and now Netflix have made so popular.
But Mark Hamill had the right idea when he, during a Reddit AMA pegged to The Force Awakens’ release, said that “I think we shouldn't be ashamed of it. They should put on the extra of the DVDs - it shows how incredibly fallible we are!” Giving fans access to The Star Wars Holiday special would be an act of humility, or, at the very least, recognition from Disney and Lucasfilm about fan's lasting fascination with a hilarious relic of the past. Who knows? Maybe if we could actually stream The Star Wars Holiday Special, Bea Arthur dancing with Greedo become Disney's next Baby Yoda phenomenon.
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