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A lot of people my age have vague memories of a Star Wars holiday special
sometime in the 1970s, but beyond that their memories go blurry. Maybe they recall it had something or other to do with wookies. In my circle of
friends, it was referred to simply as A Very Wookie Christmas, and the search for a copy was nearly as furious as our
search for a copy of Bruce Lee Versus Gay Power and Cleopatra Wong, featuring that sexy Asian girl dressed up as a sawed-off-shotgun toting bad-ass nun. Yep, those are things for which we
live.
But just like those films, the Star Wars Holiday Special eluded us. It seems that some secret conspiracy
was working to erase any and all memory of the show's existence, so much to the point that even people who knew they remembered
began to wonder if I wasn't just planting that memory in their brain. And in fact, the conspiracy theory was partially true.
George Lucas, the man behind the Star Wars phenomenon, refused to acknowledge the existence of the special. When it was brought
up, he would suddenly become aloof and pissy, sort of like whenever anyone mentions Forever Monaco to Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was his first movie role, and he had a small part as a knee-squeezing gay kickboxer in a little
sportscar.
Perhaps as part of the fervor surrounded the tremendously disappointing Phantom Menace, in 1999
the Holiday Special -- in it's own right very much a phantom menace to Lucas himself -- finally emerged. Someone out there
had it on tape, complete with old commercials intact, and within mere weeks, copies of the thing propagated across all underground
film channels. The Holiday Special, like the Jedi, had returned. Hundreds of us finally got to sit down once again and see
why we'd labored so hard to forget.
The show aired on November 17th as part of the Thanksgiving season, which is more
or less the kick-off for Christmas. The 1970s were a time during which the branches of network
television were positively dripping with the overripe fruit of holiday specials. There were the weird "furmation" Rankin-Bass
things about Rudolph and big-eared Baby New Year, and Jack Frost kicking Frosty's ass, and then there were the variety specials.
You kids who weren't around in the 1970s should be thankful for the demise of variety hour type programming like The Sonny
and Cher Show or Captain and Tenille. Bad disco jumpsuits, bad disco music, and the most hideous comedy sketches
imaginable, usually involving Tim Conway in some capacity.
During the holiday season, there would be a glut of Christmas-themed
specials which consisted mostly of Donnie and Marie Osmond singing, then acting surprised when special guest stars stopped
by for a visit. "Who could be at the door on Christmas Eve? Why, it's Tim Conway!" followed by the requisite applause being
piped in. As sprouts, we'd have to suffer through this banal bullshit in hope of perhaps catching that Charlie Brown special.
Remember, this was before America's disillusionment with holidays and before A Christmas Story was played 24 hours
a day for two weeks straight on eleven different channels. Instead, they played It's a Wonderful Life. Do ya...do ya
know me, Burt!
When we caught wind of there being a Star Wars holiday special, it was like someone walking
up and going, "Hey there. Here's the Holy Grail. Oh, and also a billion dollars. Enjoy!" The prospect of spending the holidays
with the cast of Star Wars was overwhelming. You young folks have no idea ... you have no idea ... how huge
Star Wars was. Nothing, not even the new film, not even Pokemon, can remotely compare. So it was with giddy anticipation
that I sat down in front of the television set with my friends Jeff and Chris to watch the wild holiday exploits
of Chewbacca, Luke, Han Solo, and that foxy Princess Leia. Rrrrowwrrr!
Plus, it would answer a question I've had since
I first saw Star Wars: what do they do when they're not, you know, star warring? Is Darth Vader's average day spent
filling out paperwork, doing photo ops, and dealing with new zoning laws? I mean, the guy has an empire to run. What about
storm troopers? I mean, these are just regular guys, for the most part. One of my favorite parts in Star Wars is where
two storm troopers on guard are just standing around bullshitting about some new car or something. How come in space, no one
has television? In Star Trek, it's because they'd all rather get together and read poetry or listen to Data's violin
recital. Ugh. Screw that. Surely Han Solo enjoys kicking back and seeing what's on TV once in a while.
Well, the holiday
special would answer all our questions in excrutiating detail. I can remember only two times in my childhood when I was pissed
beyond the capacity for rational thought. The first was after finally getting Pac-Man for the Atari 2600. I waited
for months, and that game was so pathetic that I wanted to reach into the TV and choke the life out of that pellet eating
sumbitch. Brwamp brwamp brwamp brwamp. Agh, it still pisses me off and makes me shake. The other incident was watching this
special.
It's all about Chewbacca's struggle to return to the wookie home planet, named Rouflumpplofrum or some such
wookie name. So, that sounds okay, right? Only it's not about Chewbacca at all. Almost the entire two hours of the special
focuses on Chewie's family. There's his wife Molla, who is worried that her husband won't make it back in time for Life Day,
the most scared of all wookie holidays, sort of like Guy Fawkes Day. There is Itchy, Chewbacca's father. You remember that ugly orangutan monster from Big Trouble in Little China? Well,
he looks like that. Itchy is one ugly dude, and if this is any indication of how wookies age, Chewbacca might as well off
himself right now.
And then ... there is Lumpy, Chewbacca's son, who looks like that annoying little brat from Eight is Enough. I swear! Look at his picture! It looks just like him, only with a little more facial hair.
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get home from his life of running guns and breaking the law (Chewbacca really isn't a very good role model, not to mention
the fact that he's never around for his kids. From the family man point of view, Chewbacca is sort of a dick), they amuse
themselves in all sorts of ways. Molla frets in the kitchen. Itchy watches a little wookie porn. Yeah, you heard me. Wookie porn is pretty lame, even by porn standards. It's a hologram of a scantily clad human woman wriggling around and giving
the usual phone sex phrases. Pretty risque for a family show. I don't know why wookies jerk off to humans, other than who
watching this movie would want to see a hairy wookie writhing around in a teddy? Well, okay, who besides the people who read
this website? But it sort of works, I guess. After all, there were rumors that part of the reason Han Solo knew so much about
wookies was because he was married to one. I swear! So if Han can dig a wookie, I guess wookies can ... well, you know. That
Itchy does this right in front of his family is even more disturbing. Keep in mind that the entire show, which up
until now seems to have been about fifteen hours long, has been performed in wookie, with lots of lame community theater arm-waving
and pantomime. In order to inject some English into the special, the Chewie family (I thought Lumpy and Itchy were stupid
names until I remembered he's called Chewie) is visited by their old friend. Who could that be at the door on Life Day Eve?
Why, it's Art Carney! Weak applause. And I'm guessing they are the Chewbacca family. I really don't know what their last name is. It could be
Chewbacca Jones for all I know, and in his youth, Chewbacca Jones had a sweet, perfectly spherical afro and did kungfu. Art
Carney hangs with the Chewies and brings li'l Lumpy a hologram of some weird Cirque du Soleil meets The Mummenschanz sort of thing. So for about ten minutes we get to watch people dressed as chickens do flips and swing around on a trapeze.
Jeez, no wonder Chewbacca deserted his family. The wookie home planet sucks. To remind us that we are in the Star
Wars universe, we occasionally cut to Han Solo and Chewbacca aboard the Millenium Falcon trying desperately to outrun stock
footage of star destroyers from the actual movie.
Molla places a call (did she use 1-800-CALLATT?) to Luke Skywalker, who she apparently
caught indulging in his secret life as a drag queen. He has eyeliner on thick as Dr. Frank Furter. Luke tries to cover for
himself by pretending to work with R2-D2 on his little space ship engine, which is sitting out on blocks. Thus Luke becomes
much like the white trash guy in my old neighborhood, who had the engine for his Mustang sitting on blocks in the front yard
while he worked on for what seemed like years.
Luke can magically understand wookie and reassures Molla that Han and
Chewie are probably just dead drunk with a couple of three-breasted hookers in some space cantina. Well, maybe not that exactly,
but he does blow off her arm-waving concern and returns to breaking the space ship. Of note is the fact that R2-D2 actually
has a little robotic hand that he uses to hold his space screwdriver. You'd think with all the gadgets that pop out of R2,
he'd have a screwdriver built into him.
From time to time, storm troopers also stop by to hassle the Chewies and see
if they can find Chewbacca, who is a wanted fugitive. Luckily, Art Carney wows them with another little hologram, this one
of the band Jefferson Starship. So we get another five hours as the band, dressed like gay space harlequins or something,
performs some droning song that is apparently a big hit with storm troopers.
Itchy, in the meantime, watches cartoons,
which are for some reason about Luke, Solo, and the rest of the gang. The cartoon, which is drawn in a weird style that reminds
me of some of the stuff in Heavy Metal magazine, though not the sexy naked Guido Crepax stuff, is notable only because it introduces the character
of Boba Fett.
Then what? Well, you were probably thinking, "This all sounds really good and all, but what we really
need is a rousing cabaret number with Golden Girl Bea Arthur. Well, you got it, buddy! Cut to Tatooine and the famous
Cantina at Mos Eisley space port. Bartender Bea Arthur rips into a rousing torch song with the cantina regulars, who may be
wretched scum and villains but are still way into cabaret acts and vaudeville. I'm guessing the dolled-up Luke Skywalker we
saw earlier would be into this. Maybe that's just the way things are on Tatooine, a planet colonized by a race of Joel Grays
from the film Cabaret. I can just see Uncle Owen dressed in fishnets and leather dancing around with naked Jawas going,
"Zee Cabaret!"
So after an endless parade of wookie cooking, wookie porn, Bea Arthur musical numbers, Jefferson Starship,
holograms of gay clowns, and wookie arm waving, Chewbacca finally gets his ass home, which allows Han Solo to hug a lot of
wookies, making me think that maybe the thing about Han's wookie wife might be true. He can't keep his hands off them! But
wait! Who could be at the door? Why, it's Luke Skywalker, who apparently flew at super hyper warp speed from his trailer park
to be at Life Day. Because there's nothing humans love more than wookie holidays, sort of like how Muslims all over the world
can't wait to celebrate Chanukkah. And here's Princess Leia and C3PO! Oh happy day! Oh happy Life Day!
Life Day consists
of a bunch of wookies loitering at a tree for about five minutes while Princess Leia -- sexy Carrie Fisher herself -- belts
out a song set to the tune of the Star Wars theme. This reminds me of that Saturday Night Live skit where Bill
Murray sings the Star Wars lounge song.
The end. Total running time: six hundred hours.
I know, I know.
It sounds funny, but wookie sit-coms can only go so far. How long can we watch Molla in the kitchen? Apparently, not
long enough for the writers, who keep us in there forever watching her mix some wookie pancakes or something.
Pretty
much everyone considers this a black eye on the handsome face of the Star Wars franchise, though I at least enjoyed
it more than Phantom Menace. George Lucas vehemently denies any involvement in this horrendous debacle, but let's look
at the evidence, and I think we'll see this is probably George's favorite part of the Star Wars family.
Case
in point: George Lucas makes the Star Wars trilogy, then stays up late an night for twenty years thinking of all the
other scenes he wanted to put in. Someone invents shitty computer graphics, and George is able to go back and add more Jawas
to certain scenes. And what does he do in almost every single film? He adds extended musical numbers. Song and dance, baby.
We're talking Sly Snoodles meets Rogers and Hammerstein. Lucas loves musicals. And the Star Wars Holiday Special is
packed with shitty musical numbers that have the stink of George Lucas all over them.
What I find most amusing about
this holiday special isn't that it's done like a typical holiday special, only with wookies, but that the entire cast of Star
Wars thought it was cool. I mean, they must have read the script. Surely they knew. But no, even respectable Harrison
Ford read "Bea Arthur launches into a rousing cabaret tune, then hugs one of those Greedo looking things." He read that and
nodded and went, "Yes, this rocks!" I mean, we can expect this sort of thing from Mark Hamill. After all, he made Corvette
Summer. And Carrie Fisher, ahh the lovely Carrie Fisher, probably harbored childhood dreams of being a singer, so she
could live those dreams out be being in this heart-warming special. But what was Harrison Ford thinking? I mean, even back
then he'd already done more quality work than the entire cast combined except for Peter Cushing. But here he is, feeling up
every wookie within reach.
Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have a term for this
sort of movie -- "deep hurting." This review maybe makes it sound like it's so bad it's good, and in some ways, I guess it
is, but in most other ways, it's sort of like putting live hornets in your ass.
So now we know why we all blocked
the existence of this movie from out collective consciousness, relegating it to the distant nether-regions of vague recollection,
sort of like that song, "What Do You Get a Wookie for Christmas When He Already Has a Comb?" Well, apparently you get him
some porn or a hologram of Marcel Marceau or some shit like that.
I can sum up the entire Star Wars Holiday Special
with a line from the film Aliens: "My mommy told me there's no such things as monsters, but there are, aren't there?"
Yes, Newt. Yes there are
Click here to D/L a Flash Version of The Holiday Special!
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