Check your illusions at the door. "The Star Wars Holiday Special" is genius. Oh, sure, it'll cost you your immortal soul to watch, but it's genius. It's like the apple Adam and Eve famously snacked upon--a myth-destroying wake-up call. Once you see this, you'll never look at "Star Wars" the same way.
Behold the power of the Dark Side: Bea Arthur of "Maude" and "Golden Girls" fame tends bar at the Mos Eisley cantina. Harvey Korman is a wisecracking transgendered robot. The lamest band of the 70s, Jefferson Starship, plays a song called "Cigar Shaped Object." Carrie Fisher, high as a kite, sings a plaintive Wookie "Life Day" ballad. Boba Fett and Snaggletooth get down and get funky. Chewbacca's dad gets all Wookie-aroused at a singing holographic Diahann Carroll. Mark Hamill is made-up like Gloria Swanson. Bruce Vilanch "zingers" abound. And that's just the beginning. There is ample evidence here that Mel Brooks wasted his time making "Spaceballs"--this is much, much funnier.
Fans love to imagine that George Lucas was forced to do this special at gunpoint, that he was drugged and abducted and brainwashed, but it's just not the case. He may have taken some bad, bad advice, but he was the writer and director of the biggest movie of all time. He could have said no. His presence here--and the presence of almost the entire original cast--makes denying this special's existence a little disingenuous. "Star Wars" as a film and as a phenomenon did not exist in a vacuum--it's very much of the 70s, just as the heartbreakingly bad altered versions of the original films, and the nearly unwatchable first prequel are very much of the 90s. And the 70s were a cheesy, cheesy time where Bea Arthur and Bruce Vilanch ruled the earth. I was a first-generation "Star Wars" fan and I still love it, but it wasn't the laughable, inconsequential "Star Wars Holiday Special" that first broke my Jedi heart. It was those sickeningly cutesy singing Ewoks in the tremendously disappointing "Return Of The Jedi." I would have much preferred Bea Arthur.
Lucas need to stop denying this beast exists and release it on DVD--maybe as a hidden "special feature" on "The Phantom Menace". He could then set the record straight once and for all about how it came to exist. The man came up with Michael Jackson's "Captain EO" and "Ewoks." He produced "Howard The Duck." This special is no more embarrassing. And it doesn't diminish the greatness of Lucas' original achievements. Watch "The Star Wars Holiday Special." Laugh at it. Mock it. Learn from it--that no mythology is perfect, that no writer/director/actor is above a few colossal mistakes, that no creative entity is immune to the excesses of its own era, that hubris is a dangerous thing. And beware of anything that takes itself too seriously.
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