It seems to me at this time of year, when one’s thoughts can’t help but veer toward childhood holiday experiences, it’s a good time to be thankful for all the things we did not have. Oh, you hear people complaining about the stuff they wished they had done or had, and it’s usually the same sort of things they talk about — if only they’d gone to the right school or had the right books, if only they’d followed through with their piano lessons, if only they’d had had a hardcore training regimen in a Beijing Opera troupe so they could be a complete martial arts badass and be in all kinds of movies and stuff like Jackie Chan — but me, personally, I tend to think of just how bad things could have been.
I mean, I could have had a job in a blacking factory like Charlie Dickens, or had a celebrity couple for parents, or have had holiday traditions revolving around the eating of this stuff. I’m guessing most of you are as lucky as I was in avoiding these things — and I think that warrants a collective sigh of relief on our parts, don’t you? And there’s another thing I’m glad I wasn’t exposed to, that I dodged with the kind of good luck that this guy showed by getting black-out drunk and robbed of his berth on the Titanic: somehow I never saw the Star Wars Holiday Special as a kid.
Frank DiGiacomo has a great article about the special, now celebrating it’s thirtieth anniversary, over at the Vanity Fair blog, but this excerpt should serve as a rough introduction to those of you who aren’t already familiar with the panoply of wrong that is the Star Wars Holiday Special:
Onto the body of Lucas’s sentimental and irony-free Wookiee plotline, the producers and writers grafted a campy 70s variety show that makes suspension of disbelief impossible. In between minutes-long stretches of guttural, untranslated Wookiee dialogue that could almost pass for avant-garde cinema, Maude’s Bea Arthur sings and dances with the aliens from the movie’s cantina scene; The Honeymooners’ Art Carney consoles Chewbacca’s family with such comedy chestnuts as “Why all the long, hairy faces?”; Harvey Korman mugs shamelessly as a multi-limbed intergalactic Julia Child cooking “Bantha Surprise”; the Jefferson Starship pops up to play a number about U.F.O.’s; and original Star Wars cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill walk around looking cosmically miserable.
If Bea Arthur singing to a packed house in the Tatooine creature cantina and a wookie watching a tv cooking show featuring Harvey Korman in drag sound like your idea of a good time then look no further, you’ll be celebrating life day before you know it in this five-minute ‘highlight’ reel:
If you want the whole shuddersome experience check here. Finding the complete special can be hard as Lucas, for good reason, has it suppressed. It’s never been officially released but, to Lucas’s misfortune, the special coincided with the dawn of the VCR Age, ensuring future generations would have access to this mountain of suck. I’m just glad my parents were probably watching Love Boat when the special originally aired in November of ’78.
Surprisingly enough, this show is the first appearance of Boba Fett (in an animated sequence). It also features an early Wilhelm Scream courtesy of the ILM sound guys no doubt — and for once the slap-in-the-face obviousness of this insultingly overused sound effect is in perfect balance with the hokeyness of the film.
And that clip above ends with an uplifting message, the real reason for the season, the sort of thing that would have got my three-year-old heart pounding against my frail little sternum had I seen it. A toy commercial — suddenly all that other crap falls into persepctive, and the question one asks when seeing the Star Wars Holiday Special isn’t “how did this happen?,” but “why doesn’t this happen more often?”
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Pity me, Bill; I was forced to watch the original broadcast as an adult (my nephew was spending the holidays and he was a staunch Stars Wars fan). As I recall, though, it was not nearly as bad as little wooden actor Anakin and that frigging pod race in The Phantom Menace. That travesty was enough to turn anyone to the Dark Side.
I have a million questions about that, but uppermost in my mind is — could you have possibly taken The Empire Strikes Back seriously once you had seen this strange concoction?
Great post, tell Bea Arthur I said hello! Oh, a-and Merry Christmas!
It depends upon your definition of serious, Bill.
You have to remember that thirty years ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Silent Running (1972) were anomolies. Alien (1979) was still a year away, while Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) weren’t even in the planning stages yet.
If you were a SF fan in the early seventies, you took what you could get. Watch the original Star Trek episodes; they seem trite and poorly produced now, but in 1966 those of us who read science fiction, male and female, couldn’t get enough.
We had Star Trek parties every week and the 0n-campus turn-out at each available set was in the hundreds. No beer, no food, no noise; just a bunch of SF nerds sitting hypnotized in front of the television.
Star Wars was a similar phenomenon. We knew the first one had gigantic flaws, if you had any brains and were any kind of critical reader, that was almost automatic. And we realized the television special sucked enormous boulders, but we stood in line, over and over, for Empire and later for Return of the Jedi.
Now, I watch George’s work and groan; there is so much better work out there. But if I had laughed back then, I would have been tarred and feathered.
At last, there was someone doing space opera and we ate it up, licked the bowl and asked for more. Even if it did feature Bea Arthur and Harvey Corman.
That puts things in perspective nicely, KC. I suppose the rise of the hyper-critical fanboy mentality only could have coincided with the explosion in entertainment alternatives and accessibility we’ve seen in the last fifteen years or so.
Now, who thinks Lucas will go ahead and release a digitally remastered version of this, replacing Bea Arthur with a singing Wookie?