Wanna know how to ruin a "Star Wars" fan's day in five words? Simple: "The Star Wars Holiday Special." Here's everything you don't know about the Life Day celebration we'd all rather forget.
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00:00Want to know how to ruin a Star Wars fan's day in five words? Simple. The Star Wars Holiday
00:05Special. Here's everything you don't know about the life-day celebration we'd all rather
00:09forget.
00:10Oh, we are excited, aren't we?
00:14As you're probably well aware, the original Star Wars was a surprise smash hit that captured
00:19the hearts and imaginations of audiences everywhere.
00:21May the Force be with you.
00:25George Lucas had always planned to make a series of films, and The Empire Strikes Back
00:29went into production in 1979 for a May 21, 1980 release date. Considering there would
00:34be a gap of several years between those first two movies, Lucas was convinced that a TV
00:38special could keep fans interested in the franchise until Empire came along.
00:42CBS had also told Lucas that a special could help sell more Star Wars toys, and even attract
00:47new fans to the original movie. In hindsight, it's strange to think that the American public
00:51could ever forget about Star Wars, or that there was anyone on planet Earth who hadn't
00:55already seen it.
00:56Nevertheless, it was crucial for Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox to keep people's minds
01:00firmly on the galaxy far, far away. As Lucas himself later told Empire magazine,
01:05"...when you are starting out, you try all kinds of things. Fox said, we can promote
01:08the film by doing the TV special. So I kind of got talked into doing the special."
01:13George Lucas is no doubt a genius, but he's also a legendary control freak.
01:18I'm so sorry, George, I didn't think it would go like this.
01:21Out.
01:24Ted, I got your vouchers.
01:25Out!
01:26So, at first, he had planned to be creatively involved with the holiday special. He even
01:30came up with the special's original premise, which revolved primarily around the Wookiees.
01:34Meanwhile, the rest of the writing staff included Bruce Volange, who went on to write jokes for the
01:38Academy Awards, and Pat Proft, a screenwriter who worked on Police Academy, The Naked Gun,
01:43and a number of other movies. The story, such as it is, has Chewbacca trying to get home to
01:48his family in time to celebrate the Wookiee holiday known as Life Day. Volange knew this
01:52was going to be a tough job, because he had to write for characters who can't actually speak,
01:56and he told Lucas as much during pre-production. As it turns out, Proft and fellow writer Lenny
02:01Ripps had written for the mime-comedy team Shields and Yarnell, so they did actually
02:05have some skill in writing for non-verbal characters. Regardless, Lucas had left the
02:09team by the time the special started filming, and his name isn't mentioned anywhere on the
02:13finished project. This was perhaps the first indication that things were about to go badly
02:18wrong.
02:18"...I got a bad feeling about this."
02:21In the 1970s, variety shows thrived on network television. Sonny and Cher, Carol Burnett,
02:26and Donny and Marie all scored huge ratings back then, and so the holiday special was
02:30created in the same mold. In hindsight, though, this was a huge mistake. As Star Wars producer
02:36Gary Kurtz later told Vanity Fair,
02:38"...we should have realized that there was no way that we could fit the characters into this kind
02:41of format."
02:42But boy, does the holiday special commit to its format. In addition to appearances from
02:46Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Diane Carroll, and Harvey Korman, the special also features a
02:51musical number from Jefferson Starship. As their guitarist Craig Chikiso recalled decades later,
02:56"...it was such a strange iteration of the original big-screen movie concept in your
03:00regular variety show, Carol Burnett 5, I was like tripping on it myself, man."
03:05Boba Fett has been a popular character since Empire Strikes Back. Believe it or not, though,
03:09he made his screen debut on the holiday special.
03:11Boba Fett appears in an animated segment that was created by the Canadian cartoon company
03:16Nelvana, who had previously produced the children's specials The Devil and Daniel
03:19Mouse and A Cosmic Christmas. The segment was directed by John Celestri, who told StarWars.com
03:25that Lucas wanted the segment to look like the work of acclaimed graphic artist Mobius. Celestri
03:29said,
03:30"...so for Boba Fett specifically, we had Mobius designs, along with a black-and-white
03:34home movie of the prototype Boba Fett armor to work from."
03:37"...this time we'll get them all."
03:39"...I see why they call you the best bounty hunter in the galaxy."
03:45Just as the writers struggled to come up with engaging stories for the unintelligible
03:48Wookiees, Celestri had to create a compelling character that uses no facial expressions.
03:53Thus, his interpretation of Boba Fett is similar to Clint Eastwood in his iconic Western roles.
03:58Celestri remembered,
03:59"...he had self-confidence and macho poses. Without this influence, it would have been too stiff."
04:04The holiday special has many crazy, weird, and downright nightmarish moments,
04:08and one of the most bizarre is Carrie Fisher's musical number at the end of the show.
04:12As Bruce Vilanche told Vanity Fair, the Star Wars cast, and especially Harrison Ford,
04:16was largely reluctant to do this special. Yet Fisher was quite willing to come aboard,
04:21as long as she could belt out a song. Vilanche recalled,
04:23"...she was going through her Joni Mitchell period. She came into the office and played
04:27a couple of very lacrimose ballads on a piano. She was singing about heartbreak and all the
04:31Joni Mitchell things. She very much wanted to show this side of her talent,
04:34and there was general dismay because this was not what we wanted Princess Leia to be doing."
04:39While the Star Wars gang knew they were caught up in something pretty ridiculous in the holiday
04:42special, they sucked it up and got on with the job. Director Steve Binder has since said that
04:47they were a pleasure to work with, and to her credit, Carrie Fisher did have pretty good pipes.
04:52After the incredible success of Star Wars, anything related to the film sold like hotcakes,
04:56from toys to posters to bedsheets. So a Star Wars TV special hot on the heels of the movie
05:01should have been a ratings bonanza, right? Well, no.
05:05"'Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir. Stir, whip, stir, whip, whip, whip, stir."
05:12Not only was the holiday special a creative disaster, but it wasn't a big ratings winner,
05:16either. While Star Wars had dominated the box office charts for most of 1977,
05:20the holiday special didn't even come in at number one in its time slot.
05:24The Star Wars holiday special has never aired on television since,
05:27but despite its abject failure, bootleg copies have circulated for years on VHS and DVD,
05:32and the internet has made it even easier to find. VCRs were expensive back in the day,
05:37but the versions that flowed online were clearly taped off TV, and some versions
05:41include all the commercials, too. Thus, the special survived in the shadows of fandom.
05:46When celebrities go on talk shows, they often have to endure embarrassing clips from old movies and
05:50TV shows that are dug up for laughs. When Harrison Ford appeared on Late Night with
05:54Conan O'Brien in 2006, the host mentioned the holiday special, which clearly caught Ford off
05:59guard.
06:00"'They made this Star Wars Christmas special, and the tape's been passed around for years.'"
06:04Once the subject was brought up, Ford grew quiet and began squirming in his seat.
06:08Conan continued to tell the story of the special, pointing out something that anyone
06:12who's seen it will also be able to tell you — that none of the cast looks happy.
06:16Ford shook his head when asked if he remembered making the special,
06:19prompting Conan to suggest they play a clip of it. And Ford reacted — well,
06:23he reacted about as well as you'd expect.
06:26"'What if I were to tell you that I had a little piece of tape right now?'
06:33The Star Wars holiday special clearly has a place in the history of the saga.
06:36Nevertheless, George Lucas famously hated the special and once spoke about it at a convention,
06:41saying,
06:42"'If I had the time and a sledgehammer,
06:43I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.'
06:46If the creator of the franchise isn't on board with keeping at least one copy of the special
06:49for posterity, it's clear there aren't going to be a ton of fans out there. Despite this,
06:54the holiday special did find a purpose in the hands of one of its stars. According to Carrie
06:58Fisher, she asked for a copy of the Star Wars holiday special from George Lucas, despite having
07:02hated it just as much as the director and the fans. In an interview with The New York Times,
07:07Fisher later claimed that she would use the holiday special as a means of getting people
07:10to leave her house after parties. Now, this could obviously have been little more than a joke.
07:14The thing about Carrie Fisher, though, is that you can never quite tell.
07:18Just as the Force will be with us always, so too will the holiday special.
07:22Fans have made their peace with the special in the years since it was broadcast,
07:26and surprisingly enough, so has George Lucas. As he told Mental Floss,
07:30"'I'm sort of amused by it because it's so bizarre. It's definitely avant-garde
07:34television. It's definitely bad enough to be a classic.'"
07:37For his part, Anthony Daniels, who played C-3PO, is all for an official release. He told Empire
07:46Magazine,
07:46"'Most things are buried six feet under. A holiday special is buried 20 miles under.'
07:51If Lucasfilm had deep-down wit, they would go,
07:53"'Okay, here's this special edition of the holiday special.' Instead of making it a skeleton in the
07:57cupboard everyone's ashamed of, why not go, "'Okay, we blew it this time. Why don't we see
08:01just how badly we blew it?'' When Disney purchased the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas in
08:062012, fans had high hopes that they'd get to see an official release of the holiday special.
08:11After all, what did Disney have to lose by putting a digital copy on Disney Plus?
08:15They could skip all the steps and costs of distribution and simply make the infamous
08:19special available for the benefit of completionist fans and curious onlookers.
08:23And Disney followed through, but not in the way fans might have hoped.
08:26Instead of officially releasing a copy of the Star Wars holiday special,
08:29House of Mouse dropped something entirely new.
08:32Lego Star Wars Holiday Special hit the streaming platform in 2020,
08:36although despite its name being an allusion to the original special, they aren't the same thing.
08:40That said, they are narratively related to one another via one of the few elements to
08:44make it into canon — Life Day. Of course, while this Lego holiday special revolves around the
08:49Life Day celebration, it's also animated via CGI and features other elements from the franchise,
08:54including many from the sequel trilogy. While it's not the holiday special hardcore fans have
08:59warned people about for decades, it's at least somewhat related. It's also well-made
09:03and considered to be an excellent special. So while you won't find 1978's special on Disney
09:08Plus today, you can still dive into a different Star Wars holiday adventure,
09:12one that's arguably much, much better.
09:15Since the Star Wars holiday special has been largely forgotten by Lucasfilm and Disney over
09:19the years, few fans have watched the whole thing start to finish. Still,
09:22enough people have seen it to recognize an Easter egg when they see one.
09:26For everyone else, the brief reference in the first episode of the Disney Plus
09:29series' skeleton crew would likely go by unnoticed, as it's about as deep as deep cuts get.
09:34After the children return to their homes, Wim goes to Neil's house,
09:38where he sees his family gathered around a holo-table watching a program. And as it happens,
09:42his hologram is more or less identical to one that first graced television screens in 1978.
09:48Again, it's like poetry. It's sort of, they rhyme.
09:50In the holiday special, there's a scene where Chewbacca's son,
09:52Lumpy, is watching the exact same holo. The characters and setting in the holo appear to
09:57be the same ones shown in the special, though it looks as if the scene was either re-shot
10:00or cleaned up with modern technology, making it a bit cleaner for its reimagining. Sadly,
10:05this is unlikely to be indicative of any kind of corporate reappraisal of the holiday special in
10:09the future. And for now, it seems that Star Wars' black sheep is destined to remain an
10:14unhappy footnote in the history of the franchise.