THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL aired 37 years ago tonight

It was on this night in 1978 that The Star Wars Holiday Special - arguably the WORST two-hours of television in history - aired on CBS.

Y'all won't buh-LEEEVE what is going on here.

So in honor of this misauspicious occasion and thanks to some poor tortured soul on YouTube, here it is (absent some music for copyright purposes):

It's all here: Chewbacca's son Lumpy, Mark Hamill's make-up overkill, Princess Leia's singing, Boba Fett's first-ever appearance (the special's one redeeming feature), Harvey Korman, Bea Arthur (?!), lots of unused B footage from A New Hope, what can only be described as a porno machine... and about twenty-seven minutes of incomprehensible Wookiee grunting.

One viewing and you'll see why George Lucas has said he would take a sledgehammer to every copy if he could.  But what about you?  Can you endure to the end?

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"When the skies of November turn gloomy..."

Forty years ago tonight. Here's the post that I composed on this evening in 2005.  But YouTube wasn't as pervasive as it is today.

So here is Gordon Lightfoot's forever haunting ballad, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

The tradition will continue today.  The church bell at Mariner's Church will ring thirty times: one for each man on the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and once more in memory of all who have perished on the Great Lakes.

As I wrote ten years ago tonight: Here's to a good ship and crew.

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