Forty years ago tonight, the Star Wars universe came to television in a production so bad that it makes Jar Binks seem positively Shakespearean by
Forty years ago tonight, just a year after the blockbuster movie that would go on to spawn four (so far) sequels and four prequels (including Rogue One), the event that nearly every Star Wars fan agrees was the darkest moment in the history of the franchise (yes, worse than Jar Jar) aired for the first and last time on television:
Forty years ago, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, something very strange happened. A special television event that had been billed as “a dazzling lineup of stars, animation, adventure, music and visual effects” turned out to be two hours (including commercials) of “The Star Wars Holiday Special.”
In a way it made sense. It was the golden age of the variety show, and the cast of “Star Wars,” which had blown up the cinematic universe the year before, had made appearances on the “Bob Hope Christmas Special,” “The Richard Pryor Show” and “Donny & Marie.” It wasn’t entirely without precedent that the most popular movie of the previous year would have a variety show of its own.
Even so, it wasn’t quite what fans, or television viewers, were expecting.
The show opened with Wookiees. Ten minutes of Wookiees. Yes, Chewbacca had a family, and they lived in a rad treehouse loft with thick green shag carpeting on a planet called Kashyyyk. Wookiees speak Wookiee, not English, and there were no captions, so it was 10 full minutes of grunting and miming, which is a lot.
There was something of a plot — Han, played by Harrison Ford, and Chewie had to get home in time to celebrate “Wookiee Life Day.” But then Harvey Korman appeared in drag as an alien Julia Child. Bea Arthur sang, tended bar at the Mos Eisley Cantina and danced with Greedo. Diahann Carroll showed up for a virtual reality number, and Jefferson Starship played a hologram concert in a box. Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) made appearances but so did Art Carney. Boba Fett was introduced in an animated sequence, and at the end, the Wookiees donned red robes, grabbed orbs, and marched into the sun. Princess Leia sang.
Not surprisingly, the special was never aired again; neither was it ever officially released by Lucasfilm. It took on an urban-legendary status, occasionally popping up in bootleg VHS trading groups; Carrie Fisher once joked that she had a copy to play at parties “when I wanted everyone to leave.”
Over the years, as “Star Wars” morphed from film to franchise, much has been written about its regrettable holiday special. And now, to mark its 40th anniversary, there’s even a play about its making. “Everybody went into it with good intentions,” said Andrew Osborne, author of “Special,” a semi-factual retelling of how it all went down that opens at L.A.’s Theatre of Note on Dec. 14.
Most of the writers and crew “were coming from a disposable pop culture perspective,” he said, and while George Lucas was hard at work creating a richly textured and expansive science fiction universe, “everyone [at CBS] was like ‘how do we work in more musical numbers?’”
It all started with the merchandise, or lack of it. When “Star Wars” premiered, no toys had even been developed. Christmas 1977 came and went without the fans getting to play Jedi and Stormtroopers at home, a situation Fox wanted to correct by Christmas 1978. But if the studio was going to sell toys, it needed something to remind kids how much they loved their heroes from a galaxy far, far away.
“Everybody agreed that a television special was a good idea,” said Jonathan Rinzler, who worked closely with George Lucas at Lucasfilm.
Lucas was very busy in 1978. Expectations were high for the sequel, and he was moving his production company to Northern California. So he didn’t have time to get very involved with the special. He came up with the general concept, Rinzler said: He wanted to expand on the Wookiees and introduce Chewbacca’s family; with concept artist Joe Johnston, he designed a “Clint Eastwood-style bounty hunter” named Boba Fett.
Then, according to first-person accounts, production was turned over to CBS, who put the project in the hands of veteran variety show writers and producers. The first director got frustrated with the budget and fast-paced production schedule of television, and quit. The costumes were so thick and bulky that the actors sometimes passed out. By the end, the whole thing had run out of money: The Wookiees in the final scene were shot wearing Chewbacca masks.
Osborne compares it to “the variety show version of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’: Everybody participated a little bit in the murder.”
He was 10 years old when “Star Wars” premiered, and he’d had the date of the holiday special circled on the family calendar for weeks. And then: “Almost immediately, from the opening credits, I started thinking, ‘Wait, why is Bea Arthur in this? Why is Jefferson Starship in this?’”
The Boba Fett cartoon — widely considered one of the few highlights — came in just shy of the hour mark in the special. After that, Osborne said, his family flipped to “The Love Boat.” (They weren’t the only ones: The special came second to “Love Boat” in the Nielsen ratings that night for the 8-9 p.m. hour, and second to Part 2 of the miniseries “Pearl” from 9-10.)
Richard Woloski, who with his wife, Sarah, co-hosts several “Star Wars” podcasts, was 9 years old when he watched it live; he remembers thinking: “This is all we’re gonna get until 1980, we better enjoy it.”
And he did — sort of.
“I enjoyed it. I was confused. In the ad for the holiday special, it said Han and Luke battle the Empire and get Chewie home before the Wookiee holiday. So I was like, when does this battle take place?”
The most important message of Life Day, he said, was clearly, “Buy toys.”
“I told my mom, ‘OK, when the commercials come on, grab a pen and paper and write down everything that you see,’” he recalled. “It worked on me like it was supposed to.”
Yahoo Entertainment has more:
Long, long ago — 40 years, to be precise — The Star Wars Holiday Special brought George Lucas’s far, far away galaxy out of movie theaters and into living rooms for the very first time. Lucas himself conceived of the notorious two-hour variety show, which aired on CBS once, and only once, on the evening of Nov. 17,1978. Arriving one year after the original Star Wars became a pop-culture phenomenon, the Holiday Specialreunited everyone’s favorite Rebels — human, alien and droid. That meant that the Luke, Leia and Han (Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford) were back, alongside Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and the dynamic duo of C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2 (a radio-controlled version stood in for Kenny Baker). They were joined by a cavalcade of celebrities eager to be associated with the biggest blockbuster around, including Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll.
It could have — heck, it should have — been a new Yuletide classic. But the Star Wars faithful were immediately left with a bad feeling about the Holiday Special. The special remains a traumatic memory for the actors as well. Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment in 2015 prior to the release of The Force Awakens, both Ford and Fisher reacted in real (not mock) horror when the subject of the special was raised. “It’s awful… not awful in a good way,” Fisher said. Ford was even harsher in his assessment of the show. Asked whether he hoped we’d ever see another attempt at a Holiday Special, he replied: “Not if I have anything to say about it! And if I have anything to say about it, you won’t see the first one. What an embarrassment.”
But when Yahoo Entertainment spoke with the special’s director, Steve Binder, he revealed himself to be one of its biggest fans. “I had a great time shooting it,” remarks the now-85 year old director. “I got to work with all of the cast of the original, and we had a crack A-plus television crew on the show.”
And Binder has a convincing explanation about why the show flopped so badly upon its original airing. “The public never knew this wasn’t Star Wars II. This was a television show that Lucas sold CBS to sell toys to kids, and that’s all it was. Everybody who tuned in without that knowledge was expecting it to be a big expensive movie! But Lucas made a deal with Hasbro and wanted to get on national television to sell merchandise, and that was the whole purpose of the show to begin with. The public never knew any of this — it was behind the scenes.”
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As he anticipated, the lengthy, dialogue-free sequences with Chewie’s extended family — which remain the most ridiculed parts of the Holiday Special — were difficult to shoot.
