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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The night the Star Wars empire almost self-destructed

Today marks an extraordinarily dubious anniversary for the Star Wars saga. Because it was thirty years ago tonight, on November 17th, 1978, that CBS aired the first and last broadcast of The Star Wars Holiday Special.

The two-hour schlockfest is now widely considered by many to be the absolutely worst block of television in the history of anything...

"One of these things is not like the others..."

I'm not even going to try to pretend to make sense of this... thing. If you want to see it, you'll be able to find it all over the 'net and if you don't want to see it well, that's two hours of your life that're your own to spend how you wish. I remember watching this as a way wee lad on the night that it aired, and even then I thought it was pretty terrible. I mean, Harvey Korman as a four-armed alien version of Julia Child?!?

No wonder that George Lucas has strenuously prayed - both privately and publicly - that every copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special might somehow be incinerated. The "special" came to be considered the low point in the careers of everyone involved, including Bea Arthur and Art Carney. Let's not even mention Carrie Fisher singing "What Can You Get A Wookiee For Christmas (When He Already Owns A Comb)?". Or Mark Hamill's post-motorcycle accident "Mannequin Skywalker" plastic-faced visage that reeks of way too much makeup.

Little wonder then that The Star Wars Holiday Special has been branded the worst moment of the entire franchise...

What the hell were they thinking?

But to its credit, The Star Wars Holiday Special did make a few (a few mind ya) decent contributions to the saga. The Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk was introduced, though it wouldn't get any more screen time until Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in 2005. So was Chewbacca's family, which would be cemented in the mythology's canon by way of Expanded Universe literature. And then there is Boba Fett: the most famous bounty hunter in all of fiction made his debut in an animated segment during the special, just in time to whet fans' appetites for more of him a year and a half later when The Empire Strikes Back came out.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the fun that I got to have with The Star Wars Holiday Special when I was Humor editor of TheForce.net: it provided plenty of "bantha poodoo" for the Star Wars Captioning feature, like this one and this one and this one and this one.

For what it's worth, I think The Star Wars Holiday Special stands as a curious fixture of not only a successful legend, but of a cultural mindset as well. Something like this is a unique product of the Seventies: there's no way it would have been sanctioned even a few years later. For that at least, I have to render some faint appreciation for The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Anyhoo, if... if... you want to find out more, check out StarWarsHolidaySpecial.com. And if you just want to see how this fiasco begins, here's the opening courtesy of YouTube...

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