If there is an event more synonymous with the folly of man than the Star Wars Holiday Special then no one has yet discovered it. The two-hour, 1978 TV show, which sent Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia to Kashyyyk (the home planet of the Wookiees) for something called “Life Day” is notoriously one of the most execrable pieces of entertainment ever committed to film. It has never been re-broadcast, and George Lucas once said he would have personally destroyed each and every bootleg copy if given the chance.
The costumes are cheap, the makeup even cheaper (Hamill has so much caked on he might as well have just stepped off the stage after playing a pantomime dame), nobody is in charge of the script, and in fact there is no script at all for the first 15 minutes or so as Chewbacca’s family mug around their Wookiee home, speaking entirely in impenetrable grunts with no subtitles. Everyone who actually has something to do with 1977’s Star Wars looks as if they would rather be sucked into a Sarlacc’s belly than spend another moment on set. It is a mercy for James Earl Jones that he only had to provide his voice as Darth Vader , but the only participants to really embrace the grating banality of it all are now long-forgotten variety show stars of the 70s such as Harvey Korman and Art Carney.
It’s rumoured Carrie Fisher was high on cocaine when she sang the final song about the glory of Life Day to the main Star Wars theme – for her sake, you really have to hope this is true. There is an excruciating segment in which Chewie’s gurning dad Itchy watches VR porn featuring the singer Diahann Carroll telling him how much she fancies him. The special did mark the first ever screen appearance of iconic bounty hunter Boba Fett in an animated section, but even this isn’t enough to make up for the dismal quality of the remaining 110 minutes.
It simply makes no sense that George Lucas would have allowed a blockbuster and cultural event such as Star Wars to be followed by something so preposterously bad. And so a new documentary, A Disturbance in the Force, has done its best to unpack what happened in the late 70s to allow this monstrosity to actually screen in the US. It’s a fascinating watch, even if it fails to explain why nobody intervened to stop the special almost ruining the long-running space opera before it could hit the jump to light speed.
One of the biggest takeaways from Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak’s film seems to be that in 1978, despite having seen Star Wars almost singlehandedly usher in the blockbuster era (with apologies to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws), Lucas clearly had no idea what he had done, or at the very least, wasn’t aware that allowing a bunch of TV hacks into the galaxy he had so painstakingly created could end up going so badly wrong. Comedians such as Bruce Vilanch were hired to write corny jokes despite having no idea what Star Wars was actually about, while the final cut of the special was edited together by producers Ken and Mitzie Welch, who had never carried out that particular task before and were variety show stalwarts who also knew nothing about sci-fi. Lucas, meanwhile, was apparently so worried that the cinemagoing public might forget about Star Wars before they got a chance to see 1980’s spectacular The Empire Strikes Back that he was prepared to take the view that any publicity was good publicity and leave all the creative stuff to some other mug.
In the 70s, still popular but fading variety shows were just another part of the promotional machine for new movies. Star Wars stormtroopers had already danced cheerfully on the Donny & Marie show and Mark Hamill had turned up on Bob Hope’s show in full costume by the time they arrived on the special. Richard Pryor got to hang out in the Star Wars cantina, while C-3PO and R2-D2 did ads for Burger Chef. Nothing, apparently, was off-limits. So why not have give audiences a cheesy variety special just before Christmas to sell a few extra toys?
Somebody somewhere should have stepped in before it was too late, but nobody did, and the Star Wars Holiday Special was the result. If you’ve ever seen it, you are to be pitied. For this is a cultural atrocity that goes beyond “so bad, it’s good” into a terrifying netherworld of half-arsed hokum, a two-hour advert for the kind of major studio quality control that at least means these days the worst we are likely to be subjected to in terms of small screen Star Wars is a TV repeat of The Phantom Menace.
So the next time you find yourselves flinching at the prequels’ dodgy cosmic racial stereotypes or the bit where Anakin tries to feed Padme a floating pear, just remember that in the 70s, it was a lot, lot worse.
