A Firsthand Account of Surviving the 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special” Disaster
It is the holiday season and social media is being dominated by debates over the merits of Star Wars Episode IX and whether Cats is the worst thing to ever be put on film. So there was perhaps no time more fitting for me to finally get around to watching the legendary Star Wars Holiday Special, a television variety special from 1978 that is so mind-blowingly ill-conceived and ill-executed that it continues to astound with its awfulness 41 years later.
As a Star Wars fan and lover of camp, I have always been intrigued by the Star Wars Holiday Special. I have been determined to watch it each Christmas since I discovered that it was possible to view it in its entirety via a reasonable quality bootleg version on YouTube nearly a decade ago. Yet, I never made it happen.
Until now.
Just an hour before writing this I finished an uninterrupted and private screening of the 1978 television special that is so bad that it prompted critic Nathan Rabin to question whether it was “written and directed by a sentient bag of cocaine.”
You may be thinking to yourself, “I don’t need to see it to know it’s bad.” Yet, as I am repeatedly reminded, there is a major difference between knowing that a given product is a train wreck and actually fully immersing yourself in said train wreck. This is why I don’t trust the opinion of anyone who labels a movie as “bad” but hasn’t experienced the cinematic apocalypse that is Showgirls.
I knew that the Star Wars Holiday Special was going to make Sharknado 5: Global Swarming look like Citizen Kane. (That’s the Sharknado sequel where Fabio plays the Pope.) Nevertheless, I still found myself repeatedly grasping on to my surroundings while watching it to make sure that I had not fully decompensated and entered an alternate dimension.
Let me briefly walk you through the sequence of events of the 98 minute special.
The special starts promisingly enough, with a brief prologue that finds Star Wars favorites Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) aboard the Millennium Falcon fending off enemy ships while trying to make their way to Chewbacca’s home planet of Kashyyyk for the Wookiee holiday Life Day. Sure, the special effects look like outtakes from the original 1966 pilot of Star Trek and Ford looks like he would rather be literally any other place in the universe, but it brings back some well-liked characters and gives us something of a logical setup. Then the opening credits start and it became clear that the only moments that vaguely resembled sanity were behind me.
The opening credits sequence looks like it was made on the original Mac prototype for a public access television special. It gives us glimpses of all of the characters from the 1977 blockbuster that will appear in special (that’s everyone except for Sir Alec Guinness, who maintained his dignity by only appearing in archival footage). Then we get a look at the bona fide legends from outside the Star Wars universe that will be degraded in the special (Art Carney, Beatrice Arthur, Harvey Korman, and Diahann Carroll). Finally, we get a glimpse of Chewbacca’s family, characters with names like Itchy and Lumpy whose costumes look like what you would find on November 1st at the low-rent Halloween shop that moved into the building down the street that up until recently was inhabited by a now-bankrupt department store.
The focus now shifts to the home of Chewbacca’s family, which on the outside is a watercolor painting of a treehouse and on the inside resembles the leftover set-pieces from the pilot of an All in the Family spinoff that never made it to series. For the next several minutes, the three Wookiees — Chewbacca’s wife Malla, father Itchy, and son Lumpy — amble around awkwardly and grunt, purr, and howl at each other. Amidst the grunting, they watch a hologram circus that defies description. Special co-writer Bruce Vilanche (a gifted comedy writer whose career thankfully survived this debacle) reportedly raised concerns early on about building an entire special around characters speaking a non-Human language without subtitles, but George Lucas held steadfast in his vision. I don’t know if this is true but it is certainly plausible to anyone who saw the amount of screen time George Lucas devoted to Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
At some point in here we get a glimpse of Luke Skywalker fixing an engine with R2-D2. This is notable only for the fact that Mark Hamill has so much thick makeup on and has such a ridiculously toothy smile that he looks like a coked-up drag queen.
The action then shifts to a Wookiee trading outpost, where shop owner Trader Dann (Art Carney) is harassed by an imperial officer who looks more like a caricature of Darth Vader than Rick Moranis’s actual caricature of Darth Vader in the Mel Brooks Star Wars satire Spaceballs. The scene is profoundly pointless, but is notable for spectacularly wasting the talents of Carney, who won six Emmys for his work on television classics like The Jackie Gleason Show and The Honeymooners and just four years earlier had won the Oscar for Best Actor for Harry and Tonto. He is the first of four Hollywood legends that gets exploited in this dumpster fire and he actually makes it out relatively unscathed compared to the others.
After a very brief interlude with Darth Vader yelling something about the need to find the rebels, the action goes back to Chewbacca’s family’s home, where Malla tries to make some good old-fashioned Bantha stew. She turns on an instructional cooking show in which Chef Gormaanda, a Julia Child-type creature with four arms, explains the recipe. The chef is portrayed by Harvey Korman, the brilliant comedian who won four Emmys for his work on The Carol Burnett Show. And, because one of the only things that the special has yet to be so far is deeply offensive, Korman dons drag and what appears to be blackface to portray the chef.
Just when you think things cannot get weirder, Art Carney shows up again with some Life Day gifts for Chewbacca’s family. This includes a virtual reality headset that promptly gets put on Grandpa Itchy, who can only be described as what the Muppet version of the Abominable Snowman would look like after a horribly disfiguring automobile accident. Once he puts on the headset, we add deeply inappropriate sexual innuendo to the list of the special’s sins as he immerses himself in the world of a sultry hologram played by Diahann Carroll, who purrs lines like “I’m here for your pleasure” and “Come experience me.” In addition to being wildly inappropriate for the target audience and deeply disturbing for audiences of all ages, it is also a tragic misuse of a true Hollywood pioneer and legend. Diahann Carroll did not become the first black woman to win a Best Actress Tony, the fourth to be nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and the first to star in a television series featuring black people in non-domestic roles just to get dressed up like Donna Summer at Studio 54 and forced to coo a forgettable ballad like “This Moment Now” to a dime store rag doll!
(Deep breaths…)
We then get a brief glimpse of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Anthony Daniels as C3PO in an awkwardly executed scene that can only be the result of Fisher having ingested a bag of cocaine that she split with the director just before filming.
Then the action again returns to Chewbacca’s living room. Imperial troopers come storming in looking for members of the rebellion in the only scene that contains something remotely akin to dramatic tension. Naturally, Art Carney distracts them by playing Jefferson Starship’s music video for “Light the Sky on Fire,” which is … well, exactly what you would expect from a 1978 Jefferson Starship music video.
Now we are in for a major tonal and stylistic shift as the special transforms into an animated segment that marks the only part of the whole endeavor that has actually been deemed salvageable by Star Wars fans. It is a cheaply animated, shoddily edited short featuring all of the main characters that is solely notable for introducing Boba Fett the bounty hunter, who would appear in several subsequent films.
Back at Chewbacca’s house, Lumpy tries to build a transmitter so that he can carry out his scheme that will oust the imperial troopers from his home. But, of course, to do that he has to watch an instructional video in which Harvey Korman plays an inept robot who keeps falling asleep! Doesn’t that sound hilarious? It’s not.
Now comes the part that gave me a true existential crisis. This is the part where Bea Arthur shows up. I believe with every fiber of my being that nothing featuring the legendary star of Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof and Mame and television’s Maude and The Golden Girls can be bad. Yet I also believe with every fiber of my being that the Star Wars Holiday Special is among the greatest atrocities that ever made it to the airwaves. So how can I reconcile these seemingly incompatible beliefs? Well, the only way I could come up with is to decide that Bea Arthur’s segment as Mos Eisely Cantina owner Ackmena is distinguished from the rest of the endeavor by being intentional camp and as a result is the sole salvageable segment of this dismal affair. My supporting evidence for this notion comes from the fact that unlike the rest of the special it takes us to a fun and nostalgic setting (the Mos Eisely Cantina that housed the Luke Skywalker-Han Solo meeting in the 1977 film) and gives us an actually entertaining musical number (Arthur sings “Goodnight But Not Goodbye” as she forces the alien patrons out in compliance with the imperial curfew). As part of my effort to convince myself that this 13-minute segment is not truly terrible, I have to erase all existence of the memory of every part of it that involves Harvey Korman as an amorous alien who drinks through a hole on the top of his and engages in a relentless romantic pursuit of Ackmena based on a misunderstanding.
Back on Kashyyyk, Chewbacca and Han show up and kill the remaining imperial trooper, before having a warm reunion with the Wookiee family and heading off to the Life Day celebration. The purpose and customs of the Life Day holiday are never explained, but it apparently involves getting dressed up in maroon robes and marching into a star that serves as a secret doorway to a big tree where Princess Leia croons heartwarming ballads. After giving a speech about the meaning of Life Day that somehow makes the meaning of Life Day less comprehensible, she busts out into a Life Day celebration song that starts off fine but quickly crumbles as Fisher fails to hit a couple of key notes and you realize that it was half-heartedly scored to the tune of John Williams’s iconic Star Wars theme.
Then there’s a random montage of clips from the 1977 film before the final credits roll.
At this point, I stared at the screen for several minutes in silence with my jaw hanging open and my head pounding. Countless questions raced through my mind. How is it possible that something I knew would be the worst thing ever committed to film is actually far worse than I expected? How can people be yearning that Star Wars should go back to the halcyon days of the original trilogy when something this bad was a product of that era? Is it true that George Lucas signed off on the dailies he received from the shoot and, if so, who was behind the obvious blackmail scheme that must have been forcing his hand? What horrifically oppressive network and studio contracts prevented all of these big stars from jumping ship when they got a glimpse of the script (if you can call it a script)? And why, oh why, did Bea Arthur not live long enough to get the Disney Plus spinoff series about the adventures of Ackmena, the crooning Mos Eisley bartender that she (and we) so richly deserve? I cannot answer any of these questions and almost certainly will never be able to.
One of my favorite facts about the Star Wars Holiday Special is that the late, great Carrie Fisher obtained a copy of the special from Lucas in exchange for recording the audio commentary for the DVD release of the original trilogy. She quipped that she wanted to have something to play at parties when it was time to send everyone home. Although it makes for a great sound bite, Fisher’s plan most certainly wouldn’t have worked on me. As deeply scarred as I am by my viewing experience there is somehow nothing I would rather do than stay up all night watching the Star Wars Holiday Special again with Carrie Fisher.
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