This has been a weird time. As of this writing, a worldwide pandemic as engulfed the earth quicker than an old Miller High Life Super Bowl ad. During this time, I have been searching for something to do other than school, essential work, or sleeping. Originally, I was going to write about The Rise of Skywalker and dive into its novelization and what it fixes or neglects in the movie, but I quickly realized that several other people of much higher notoriety than me have torn through every page and written word and I wouldn’t be bringing anything new to the table. Besides, who hasn’t given a critique about the movie already, including myself?
Then, I decided to write about God’s Not Dead, and its aggressive argument of the existence of the Christian God and its equally as aggressive depiction of atheism and…Islam for some reason, and seeing as I myself am a Christian and hate the movie with almost every fiber of my being for—in my opinion—its misrepresentation of Christian faith in how characters behave and the meta elements of the story, I thought it might be interesting to dissect that beast. It was soon after, that I was met with resistance and encouragement both from the wrong places and I lost confidence in myself, as usual.
After that, something happened. As if by some act of God, my story had fallen from heaven and right into my lap as hard as a piano falling from a building and into your ears as loud as…a piano falling from a building. On my podcast, we have wheels that we spin at the end of each episode if we’re not already in the middle of a movie series. There’s the curiosity wheel, which contains movies we have either never seen before or haven’t seen in a long time. Then there’s the good movie wheel, which is self explanatory.
And then there is the bad wheel. It contains some of the worst films we could name. Some are “so bad it’s good,” and others are just miserable times. Coming off of the heels of watching About Time (which is a genuinely wholesome good time and made me cry like the water sprinklers outside my window), we spun the bad wheel.
It landed on The Star Wars Holiday Special.
For further context, we conceived of the bad wheel when we wrapped up our inaugural series on the Star Wars saga in early January of 2018. The Holiday Special was one of the first movies on there. Zach, my co-host, has been begging the wheel to land on it. For nearly two and a half years, the bad wheel rejected him, as if it was created for torture and not pleasure.
And finally, when he had given up, it granted his wish.
I am expected to tear this motion picture asunder being as I am an enthusiastic Star Wars fan. The problem is that I don’t feel like it, honestly. This movie didn’t really piss me off as a fan. And I think know why.
Originally, the plan me and my co-hosts agreed upon was that we would watch the movie together over Skype, since the episode about Plan 9 From Outer Space was less than adequate because I didn’t watch it in a group setting. But a few days before, I got really depressed.
Even thinking about Star Wars right now sets me off. We just came off the much-applauded finale of The Clone Wars, which itself is coming off the heels of the aforementioned The Rise of Skywalker. Out of all the Star Wars material that was coming out, The Rise of Skywalker was the thing I was looking forward to the most; even over The Mandalorian. I just wanted spectacle and finality at the least, and I got a rapid-fire dull knockoff of Harry Potter. I liked The Last Jedi, but that stance now is viewed upon as a sin against the religion that Star Wars has always been.
The Clone Wars finale was awesome in every conceivable way, but I’m going to be wishing that the movies got the same amount of care. I equate this feeling to when the Minnesota Vikings choke away every single season, but a team you like on the side wins it all. It’s nice, but it wasn’t my home team in the end.
Also, to get real because I need this off my chest, the world has gotten to me; 2020 is cancelled, and I can’t go outside. I can’t go to any movie theater in my area or anywhere and I am constantly reminded that they certainly won’t be around by the time this pandemic has ended. I can’t go to any live events like pro wrestling shows or football games. I can’t even go to church. Everything is closed. All I am left with is my now online school work and my essential retail job; both of which I am struggling to keep up with.
So with all that in mind, I loaded up on about twenty-five hundred calories of McDonald’s and watched The Star Wars Christmas Special. By myself.
It was surreal.
This movie feels strange almost start to finish. From a practical standpoint, this is a window into the life of Chewbacca’s family as they prepare for Life Day and await his return, but it takes place smack dab in the middle of the Galactic Civil War, so it pretty much goes as I’d expect. Empire shows up, wrecks shop, then leaves. Heroes win, and celebrate.
But it isn’t the broad strokes that make The Holiday Special so infamous. It’s the content. Lumpy watches some kind of interpretive dance that I can only best describe as second-rate Cirque de Soleil but…not even Star Wars. It just looks weird
Malla watches a cooking show that is Martha Stewart but with four arms and an emotional breakdown, I think.
Itchy gets a VR machine that projects a PG-13 pornographic music video. I was then subsequently disappointed that when Itchy comes out that there isn’t a massive red rocket between his legs just because I wanted to laugh at something. But alas, this is not Robot Chicken.
An Imperial officer watches another holographic music video of a band that I have never heard of before this viewing (Jefferson Rockets).
There is a cartoon segment halfway through the film that I think was supposed to be real in the context of the film based on the fact that Lumpy watched it as it aired on a tiny monitor, but the meta element treats it like it is its own thing, like a special presentation within a special presentation, like it’s just a bizarrely animated and edited cartoon for you to enjoy to break things up. Perhaps, in storyline, it was Rebel propaganda featuring his dad to get Lumpy through this stressful moment, but it’s still weird to me.
Lumpy then watches a malfunctioning android teach him how to build a mini transmitter, but the tutorial video ends with the android dying not even halfway through the tutorial, and Lumpy just figures it out himself anyway.
The Empire calls all personnel to watch Beatrice Arthur get hit on in a Tatooine bar. The Empire then force a curfew and the bar is closed indefinitely, and the occupants’ response is to burst into song.
Chewy finally arrives home, and they can finally celebrate Life Day, which is a trip to an ethereal plane where the only people anybody likes in Star Wars these days show up somehow, and Carrie Fisher breaks into song.
What did I just watch?
Let’s go back to Beatrice Arthur in the bar. This is a perfect example of just how surreal this movie is. The Empire made it immediately mandatory to watch an episode of a soap opera that takes place on Tatooine where the Empire instilled a curfew which closes the bar by default, and Bea Arthur breaks into song to lure the drunken occupants out of the building.
Okay, so this comes out of nowhere as the Imperials are searching the premises. They stand there and watch this scene in the bar unfold on the TV. They are just as hypnotized by the proceedings as I was watching this movie. Bea Arthur leads everyone in a song in a fake TV show within a fake world where stormtroopers and officers watch it as propaganda as I look on in the real world with some form of psychosis.
Now I can’t decipher whether or not this was a scripted program they were watching because not only did the exact same message of curfew appear in full screen on the TV in Malla’s house, but then they cut to it playing on the TV in the bar. So this is either a scripted satire on nightlife AND Imperial propaganda which sounds ridiculous or this is a live look inside a “real” bar going under “real” curfew and this is what the real-world producers of this TV special decided should be the result. I’m at a complete loss as to this part of the feature.
But luckily, my other co-host Alex managed to go back and find that the narrator in the show on the TV in Malla’s house said that said show was “unscripted and unedited.” Fine, but it’s still weird to think about given how it was all edited and shot because the scenes in the bar are shot the same way as everything else.
But you know what; you can apply that kind of meta logic to almost every movie, so let’s rewind further back to the VR machine.
THIS was the point I was lost to a vacuum of time and space. The trippy imagery and the seductive words out of the Dihanne Carroll’s mouth combine to make something erotically stimulating to an old geezer Wookie like Itchy, but to me, this was surrealism. To be clear, I wasn’t aroused by this at all, but this didn’t feel like somebody coming up with an idea of what in-universe Star Wars pornography would look like, but more like what somebody actually sees when they sleep at night here in the real world.
Whoever came up with this was experiencing it in real life in their dreams. They had to have been. Like a call for belonging and intimacy, and they just had to get it out there and The Star Wars Christmas Special provided the opportunity to do just that. The same goes for the mini-transmitter android (falling apart trying to do his job) and the cooking show lady (failing to fake happiness) and even the cartoon.
But what truly makes this movie feel so abstract to me is the fact that all these scenes play out in their entirety. They don’t cut away to something else that’s happening; no, we are shown the PG-13 porn all the way through. As if it was on purpose. Sure, they were probably stretching to fill time, but these scenes are just bizarre to me.
I didn’t feel like I was watching a shameless cash grab or a complete misunderstanding of the Star Wars property, but more like a descent into madness; a dive into the mind of someone losing their mind. This feels like the nightmares of the people who were locked in a writers’ room and had to create a ninety-minute Star Wars feature on a cheap sitcom budget where the main characters don’t speak English and aren’t allowed to have subtitles because Wookies don’t have subtitles in Star Wars; why would they? Oh, and this will be airing in front the whole country at the beginning of the holiday season.
Blame it on drugs if you want since it was the late 70’s which would actually explain a lot, but such an answer is just too simple for me. It seems like it’s always drugs.
Why does Lumpy walk on a railing when the house is several miles above the ground? Drugs.
Why are there long stretches of irrelevant activity such as Malla watching a cooking show, Lumpy watching Cirque de Soleil, or Itchy watching musical abstract PG-13 pornography in VR? Drugs.
Why does the Empire think that watching Bea Arthur singing in a bar is essential viewing for its military personnel? Drugs.
How did the Original Trilogy cast cross into the ether to celebrate Life Day with the Wookie population? Drugs.
Jon Bois, a sports writer for SB Nation, said it best in a video of his: “We are wandering the streets of the absurd. If we can’t make one right turn, then three left turns will send us into the same direction.”
Okay, then how did we get here? Well, it’s still a mystery with many conflicting reports. I’ll leave links to my sources at the bottom and let you follow whatever breadcrumbs fell out of the basket should you choose to do so. But as best as I can surmise…
It’s 1978. A New Hope is a hit and all the stars and producers on the film are doing additional marketing and probably putting together The Empire Strikes Back at the same time. CBS approaches Fox and Lucasfilm and pitches a Christmas TV special. George Lucas, who always wanted to take Star Wars to TV, wanted it to be centered around Chewbacca’s family with no subtitles for the Wookies, and wouldn’t budge on that idea. He told the cast of A New Hope that they needed to keep Star Wars fresh in peoples’ minds, so they came along (also as a favor to George, who apparently gave all of them extra money for their efforts).
The studio brings a litany of variety show writers and producers and hires director David Acomba, who went to USC at the same time as Lucas, but the two never met (though some say they were classmates, so…). Acomba did not know how to maneuver a multi-camera stage setup (similar to what you would see in a soap opera) and had some beef with the producers, so he left after shooting the hologram band scenes and a handful of other stuff, including putting the cartoon segment together with Canadian animation studio Nelvana (according to them, Lucas wrote that segment himself).
In comes credited director Steve Binder who’s only affiliation with Lucas or Lucasfilm was a “Wookie bible” that detailed the species and its history. He keeps the ship “afloat” and gets everyone through the production phase, but since he had other projects, he wasn’t in the editing room. Ken and Mitzie Welch were, and of course, they were songwriters by trade.
November 17, 1978. The special airs. Thirteen million viewers in an era where television only has three channels is less than ideal, and that was as good as it got. It was panned by everyone and their grandmother; viewers and critics alike. Lucas never met or spoke to Binder in the aftermath or even in production despite Lucas reportedly seeing and approving dailies. Lucas denies the amount of involvement that various people from production have stated he had, saying that he just wanted to promote A New Hope, and Fox said that was one way to do it, so Lucas obliged. Lucasfilm wanted to get some toy sales out of it. They never did.
Everyone involved hates it; cast, crew, and creator. Some have claimed they either haven’t seen the finished product or can’t sit through it in one go. It’s understandable.
Well, there it is; as reported, at least. No one knew what they were doing. No one really knew exactly what this new IP was and in trying to make a buck, CBS hires a bunch of people who are not familiar with the property or the material to make the film they were making, and we have a recipe for disaster. Did drugs play a part? Most likely, I guess, and that’s disappointing. With something so weird and disjointed where the walls between realities are as thin as paper, I guess I was hoping for an answer that wasn’t so vanilla or something we haven’t heard of elsewhere.
So what did I take away from this? That’s a great question. I honestly don’t know. Like I said earlier: it didn’t piss me off at all as a fan. I mean, if you want me to go into it in terms of how it violates the universe, I can tell you that the Wookies were enslaved to the Empire after Order 66 both in the Legends universe this film occupies and in current canon. Hell, in Legends, the Wookies built the first Death Star.
I could and probably should be the next person in a long line of people to tear The Star Wars Christmas Special a new one, of which includes the people who starred in it and the man who created the whole universe. I will go as far as to say that I never want to hear anyone complain about the Sequel Trilogy ever again after seeing this because it never got this low. You can argue among yourselves if they were generally good or bad all you want. But to me, no matter what I may think of each movie in the trilogy on their own rights or collectively, none of them were ever this poorly made or treated.
I should rip it apart. Into pieces. Into dust…but I just don’t have it in me to go all in.
I don’t think it’s depression because I watched the movie due to me being depressed. Something inside me does not want to add to the hate in the community or conform to the natural ways, rules and regulations of a hardcore Star Wars religious practices: hate this, love that, hate that, love this, worship George Lucas and his pupil Dave Filoni, and curse Kathleen Kennedy. No one knows what Star Wars really is anymore and we are all to blame for that; fans, critics, and producers. And the movie speaks for itself anyway. It’s an unmitigated logistical disaster, and I wasn’t able to come to any other conclusion based on what was shown in the movie.
To me, as a watcher of moving visual artwork, I did not enjoy watching this film. I thought it was boring, I found most of the “action” is irrelevant or downright dizzy (except when Han threw the stormtrooper off the ledge and tossed his gun off with him; that was pretty funny for how bad it looked), I thought the decisions made were either baffling, bizarre, or both, I thought the sets were really cheap for a major network TV production (it was made on one million dollars and I can’t determine which way that number is adjusted for inflation but either direction implies money was not used or spent well), and Wookies with no subtitles is the fatal bullet for me because it creates confusing interactions when English speakers aren’t around. You have to understand Shriiwook to figure out what’s going on.
But I just don’t feel like really hating on it like everyone else. There is so much hate on much better things in Star Wars right now, that even beating this four and a half decade-old corpse makes me uncomfortable. It’ll just end as a joke about the Sequel Trilogy and start another fight about whether or not The Last Jedi was good or not becasue everyone gets offended about something. That’s what it’s come to and I’m not here for it. The state of fandom has literally forced me to enjoy this franchise that I love by myself on my own terms. It sucks because I want to talk about Star Wars with people, but if we’re hanging on to our own individual ideas of what it is and attacking others with a different opinion, then it’s just no fun no matter what comes out.
In closing, The Star Wars Christmas Special was a freak accident caused by the lack of knowledge of what Star Wars was due to it being brand new at the time and the bad decisions made because of that. Also, maybe drugs, too. It is the biggest black eye in the franchise’s history, and it came from the mind of its hallowed god.
Star Wars fans and disciples of all levels of engagement will try and forget this all happened, but Jon Favreau remembers because the titular character of The Mandalorian is clearly derived from this movie’s depiction of Boba Fett that it’s almost comical and takes away from the “all-important” mystique. For me, at least.
But hey, The Mandalorian is good…so, maybe some good came out of it.
Sources:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/72863/dark-side-oral-history-star-wars-holiday-special
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Holiday_Special
https://anchor.fm/maestro-movie-podcast-w-friends (Holiday Special episode, at 49:11 is where Alex breaks down what happened behind the scenes better than I did, and the actual review is me reading a draft version of this essay, so give it a listen.)
Maestro Movie Reviews & Essays 