30 Yrs/5 days later: The SW Holiday Special

[Kryton]

November 17th 1978 saw the one and only airing of this surreal oddity that set the bar for really horrid TV tie-ins ever since. I found a bootleg on usenet forever ago but lost it...and today managed to "obtain" a DVD of a pretty good recording of it. They were nice enough to include the option of watching it with the Rifftrax audio on, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Wars_Holiday_Special

So...what were they thinking/smoking/snorting/shooting up at the time? This thing is insane! Anyone else seen this crazy thing recently?

 

[Trekker4747]

A DVD copy with a Rifftrax audio option.

Ooooooo.

I needs me that.

 

[AdmiralGarak]

The only way I've ever dared to watch it is via Rifftrax. Without the gang from MST3K to tear it a new one, it's too horrible to even contemplate.

A lot of people bash Lucas for never releasing the thing on home video, but I praise him. He could easilly make a fair bit of money off of it, but he wisely leaves the abomination to rot in relative obscurity.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^The fact that he won't release it is the one solid indicator for those of us who have been critical of his actions for over a decade that he hasn't completely lost all sense of perspective.

I consider it to be a sort of geek rite of passage, though...everyone who wants to hang out in a crowd like this really needs to make themselves watch it just once.

I have a multi-generation VHS copy of this which I haven't watched in at least 13 years....Had I known that the 30th anniversary was passing, I might have popped it in...not much chance now. Today's the 45th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, that's enough tragic anniversary for me.

 

[Chess Piece Face]

I couldn't make it through...there are literally sections of wookies cooing back and forth with no subtitles for what seems like twenty minutes at a time. It's unbearable.

 

[Nardpuncher]

This is one of those things where the people that haven't seen it say they're dying to; the peole who have say NOOO! The people who haven't say "How bad can it be? I want to see everything I can of Star Wars..especially with Harrison Ford and everyone else in it!"
Everybody should see it, but they must admit that it was awful...like a car accident that you can't look away from.

 

[davejames]

The only way I've ever dared to watch it is via Rifftrax. Without the gang from MST3K to tear it a new one, it's too horrible to even contemplate.

Frankly I had a hard time sitting through it even with the Rifftrax gang.

It was SO much worse than I ever imagined.

 

[RedFenix]

So...what were they thinking/smoking/snorting/shooting up at the time? This thing is insane! Anyone else seen this crazy thing recently?

Last Christmas some friends and I tried to sit through this thing. We hoped that witty company and beer would make it funny, but even still, I think I'd rather slam my fingers in the door than sit through that 30 minutes again. Amazing we even got that far!

Why did it seem so good when we were like...five? I'd like to think that even as a tiny kid, my taste was more discretionary than that!

 

[Mr. Adventure]

When it first starts, you're like HAHAHA, this is so funny, but then eventually you sit there slack-jawed thinking when is this going to end? Either that or you fast forward to the Boba Fett cartoon.

Still, Wookies watching virtual reality porn, you don't see that every day.

 

[Marc]

Oh God - I can actually remember seeing that show when it first ran though the only thing I can really remember is being upset when the stormtroopers were ripping about the baby wookiee's stuffed toys.

 

[destructive]

What is seen cannot be unseen

 

[The Old Mixer]

I think that part of the reason that everyone needs to see this at least once is that you can't possibly know just how bad it really is until you have seen it. You can't take somebody else's word for it, you have to see for yourself.

For those whippersnappers of the digital age who aren't tough enough for the '70s...here, we can just cut to the chase for you.

It just boggles the mind that they would have been working on The Empire Strikes Back about the same time as this....

 

[FalTorPan]

I really should watch it one of these days.

 

[Christopher]

It just boggles the mind that they would have been working on The Empire Strikes Back about the same time as this....

Different "they," except for the cast. The special was made by TV variety-show producers, with little involvement from Lucasfilm. That was the problem. And it would've been before filming on TESB, since it was very soon after Mark Hamill's motorcycle accident and reconstructive surgery, as you can tell by the very heavy makeup used on him in the special to cover his healing scars.


I tracked down the Boba Fett cartoon on YouTube a few months ago, and I kinda liked it. The character designs were somewhat surreal, but the animation was actually unusually fluid and dynamic for TV animation back then -- really fairly good by the standards of the day. And I really liked the imaginative settings. Plus, Boba got more characterization in this cartoon than he got in his two subsequent movie appearances. I kind of wonder if Boba Fett would be such a popular character at all if this cartoon hadn't given him a personality.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^I'm not sure how old you were then, but as somebody who was exactly the right age at the time, I can testify that Boba Fett's initial popularity was All About the Action Figures.

 

[Kryton]

I was just a couple weeks away from 16 at the time and kinda missed out on the whole doll thing after GI Joe had stopped being 10 inches tall.

Oh, did I say "doll"?

 

[Christopher]

^I'm not sure how old you were then, but as somebody who was exactly the right age at the time, I can testify that Boba Fett's initial popularity was All About the Action Figures.

Oh, that would explain it. I wasn't exactly lavished with toys as a child. The only Star Wars toys I ever owned in my life were a board game based on the first film and a Kenner figure of the R5D4 droid (I think that's the one in ANH that Owen and Luke were going to buy from the Jawas until R2D2 beamed a signal that killed it or something). I still have the droid figure, by the way. R5 ended up being partnered with a couple of those little wind-up Tomy robots that looked kinda like miniature versions of Robby the Robot. (By coincidence, I think the two in that photo are exactly the same colors as the two I have.) I built a whole laboratory for them out of odds and ends, including a "master computer" made out of an instant oatmeal box, which also made a handy storage case for the whole set. I still have the whole shebang down in storage, including R5.

 

[The Old Mixer]

(I think that's the one in ANH that Owen and Luke were going to buy from the Jawas until R2D2 beamed a signal that killed it or something)

The sad thing is, that sounds exactly like something that might have come from an EU novel....

Yeah, the Boba Fett figure was an event. AIR, he was released completely separately (as opposed to being part of a line of 12 as the figures were usually released) ca. summer of '79, with a blurb on the package saying that he was from the Star Wars Holiday TV Special or somesuch. I don't recall Fett having stirred up much buzz after the special, and by the time the figure came out, I couldn't even recall much about his role in it. But I recall that figure and its more detailed 12" counterpart causing quite a stir. I'm pretty sure it was known around then that he was supposed to be in the next movie.

Fett in the OT films was never meant to be an honest-to-gosh character, as far as I can tell...he was a merchandising tie-in first and foremost.

 

[Klaus]

I have a really fuzzy copy of that usenet version mentioned above, and am actually going to throw caution to the winds and watch it soon, as one of my good geek friends has never seen it and he needs to be punished to further spread the pain around. I haven't seen it since the original airing myself.

I'll report back, assuming I survive.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^I'd like to add something to an earlier statement of mine--If you haven't seen it since it originally aired, then you can't possibly remember how bad it really was.

Have fun! You'll be one of us soon....