A long time ago in a boardroom far, far away … director George Lucas is riding high on the unexpected success of Star Wars, the 1977 movie that goes on to launch the blockbuster era. Star Wars isn’t just a box-office hit: it’s a pop culture sensation. At cinemas across the world, queues snake around the block. Star Wars mania is born. Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill are turned from jobbing actors into movie stars overnight, and its creator becomes a very rich man. Oh, how he laughed himself to sleep every evening, realising the studio’s error in granting him sole ownership of merchandise rights. Suckers!
A concept is pitched and green-lit. Star Wars will go to the small screen, as a Thanksgiving variety show special. The result is without doubt one of the most peculiar episodes in the history of Star Wars and US television.
It’s easy enough to imagine the sense of excitement when, on Friday 17 November 1978, CBS broadcast the Star Wars Holiday Special, featuring the main cast and providing Lucas and brand Star Wars with a massive opportunity to dominate pop culture all over again. It was intended as watercooler television before that phrase had even entered the cultural lexicon. Replacing a double-bill of comic-book characters (The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman), the Star Wars Holiday Special screened from 8-10pm Eastern Standard Time.
If the maligned prequels to the original Star Wars trilogy are a cautionary tale about what happens when a director returns to a beloved franchise and royally screws it up, what does that make the Holiday Special? Lucas has never been shy about using the brand to peddle any old tat – the Star Wars Christmas album, the Star Wars cookbook, the Death Star waffle maker and C-3PO tape dispenser – but he’s deeply ashamed of the Holiday Special. Yes, it’s a piece of Star Wars merchandise so godawful, even George Lucas doesn’t want to profit from the bloody thing.
To be fair, there are points of interest. Kids must have felt smug and ultra-nerdy, telling their pals in the playground that wookiees celebrate Life Day – intriguing solely because it represented a theological tradition other than the Force. It’s also noteworthy for the introduction of bounty hunter Boba Fett. And imagine finding out the name of Chewie’s home planet – Kashyyyk – way before its appearance in the 1991 Timothy Zahn novel, Heir to the Empire, or the 2005 movie The Revenge of the Sith. There’s also the Holiday Special’s plot, which features a trade blockade in space – a bit of dour realpolitik Lucas wasn’t too shamefaced to use again in 1999’s The Phantom Menace. These things, for better or worse, added scope to the Star Wars universe.
Sponsored by General Motors and directed by Steve Binder, the man behind 1968’s Elvis Comeback Special, the central thread sees Han Solo and his walking carpet Chewie careening about in the Millennium Falcon, trying to make it home in time for Life Day, the celebration invented to tie in with the real life Thanksgiving. Interspersed with these corny segments, shot on cheap-looking sets (every expense was spared) are unfunny skits featuring Harvey Korman and Art Carney, whose line “I love to make a wookiee happy,” would be legendary if only more people knew of it; and mindnumbingly bizarre dance scenes and lifeless songs provided by Jefferson Starship, Bea Arthur and Diahann Carroll.
The latter’s appearance is startlingly transgressive, as she features as the sexual fantasy of Chewie’s father, Itchy. Wookiee nookie is the last thing you’d expect to see in a show aimed at a family audience, right? Itchy is seated in his favourite armchair with a virtual-reality headset – the Mind Evaporator – on his head. Carroll magically appears and starts to make suggestive comments – “I’m getting your message. Oh, we are excited, aren’t we” – as the camera cuts to the hairy biped gurning and groaning with pleasure. It’s a deeply disturbing moment.
Lucas, who is no fool, recognised without delay he had commissioned a clanger. The show was broadcast in America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand and aired only once. Since then, he’s forbidden any release by Lucasfilm on any home-viewing format. The only segment ever officially distributed, as an extra feature on the 2011 Blu-ray, is an animated short introducing Boba Fett. The general feeling is the show is persona non grata. It is reluctantly mentioned on the official Star Wars website, where the variety format is described charitably as “more than awkward”.
Lucas has rarely spoken about the Holiday Special, but he once opened up at a fan convention and famously said: “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.” Unlike the controversial digital tinkering with the original trilogy in the 1990s, some things time and money cannot alter or erase.
We can only view it today because of those inspired souls with early VCRs, who taped it and then circulated it as a bootleg. The Holiday Special grew during those years into an unholy relic of Star Wars esoterica. The chances of seeing it in the days before the internet were very slim. Now, old fans and new can watch it in all its insane glory, and get to experience the same crushing disappointment and bemusement that kids and men-children across the US did in 1978.
To see the Holiday Special, we need not venture to the dark side of the web: it’s readily accessible from a variety of popular streaming portals. Interestingly, Lucasfilm has never really gone after those circulating first the tapes, then digital uploads. Lucas has possibly hedged a bet that the fog of memory and time has obscured the Holiday Special just enough to not get too irritated by its continued availability via illegal channels. There are still many Star Wars fans out there completely unaware of the show’s existence.
The Holiday Special, now but a Google search away, is often horrific viewing, so don’t be expecting any revisionist articles. It was made for Thanksgiving but is perhaps more suited to Halloween. Carrie Fisher asked her old boss for a copy and, in exchange, recorded commentaries for the Star Wars box set. She said she liked to put it on at house parties – when she wanted guests to leave.
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