The TV special so bad that even George Lucas refuses to capitalize from it. That’s serious, folks. It must be seen to be believed, but if Lucas had his way, no one would ever lay eyes on it again. It showed on television once in 1978 and then disappeared down the memory hole. No reruns, no home video releases. It’s survived the years via fuzzy bootleg copies sold at sci-fi conventions and today it’s easy as pie to find streaming on the internet so you can see for yourself this story of Chewbacca’s family awaiting his arrival for the holidays as evil Imperial forces chase him. The cast of the original film all show up (Harrison Ford is clearly less than enthused about being there), along with Art Carney in a supporting role, Harvey Korman in a few bad comedy skits, and some pastel-painted acrobats. Let’s also mention the music segments from Diahann Carroll, Jefferson Starship, and, uh, Bea Arthur, all set within the Star Wars “universe”.
It’s so unwatchable that it’s insanely watchable. It starts off with a nearly ten-minute scene of Chewbacca’s wookie family growling and mewling at each other (no actual dialogue spoken) and it just gets more bizarre as it goes on over the next ninety-odd minutes. What were they thinking? My theory is that Lucas and company simply didn’t know how much longer Star Wars-mania would last—and no one knew how seriously it would all be taken eventually—so they milked it for whatever they could get.
If you ask me though, a disc of The Star Wars Holiday Special is one piece of merchandise that George Lucas SHOULD put out. Release a disc that makes fun of it. Put “THE WORST STAR WARS MOVIE EVER” in large font on the bottom of the cover. Get Patton Oswalt to do a commentary track ridiculing the whole thing. Get as much of the original crew together as possible for another commentary track where they talk about how embarrassing it is. It could be a real hoot.
The Star Wars nerds have a lot of forgiveness in them. They forgive Lucas for Ewoks and crappy re-edited versions of the original films. And they’d forgive him for this, too.