Some Ingredients Simply Aren’t Meant to be Mixed Together. Ever.
July 12, 2021 9:46 AM   Subscribe

 
But without Lucas’s hand on the wheel, the car goes into a ditch immediately and by that point, he’s already washed his hands of it. So as the dailies come in, it’s like, “I’m taking my name off of this.” Again, I believe the result from his turning control of that project over to someone else is that it taught him a valuable lesson: it was a mistake he was not going to make again.

And the next time a Star Wars project went into a ditch, Lucas did indeed make sure it was his hands on the wheel.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:19 AM on July 12, 2021 [31 favorites]


Again, I believe the result from his turning control of that project over to someone else is that it taught him a valuable lesson: it was a mistake he was not going to make again.

How many of us would refuse to change our beliefs if $4.05 billion were in it for us?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:23 AM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


And the next time a Star Wars project went into a ditch, Lucas did indeed make sure it was his hands on the wheel.

I'll admit that my previously-negative stance on the prequels has definitely softened in recent years. But even 15-20 years ago when they came out to widespread fanboy disgust, I still came away feeling like Lucas had made more or less exactly the films he had wanted to make, whether anyone else liked them or not.

I also think that the expanded storytelling made possible by the various TV animated series -- including ones that Lucas explicitly had a hand in like Clone Wars -- has helped to rehabilitate some of the weaker parts of the prequel trilogy into actual selling points. Of course, one of the key elements of their success was also Lucas giving control to hand-picked folks like Dave Filoni rather than the 1970s CBS variety-special randos responsible for the SWHS.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:42 AM on July 12, 2021 [12 favorites]


The Pitch Meeting for this thing has some great horrifying clips if you want to see!
posted by Glinn at 10:49 AM on July 12, 2021 [6 favorites]


My takeaway from the SWHS was that Life Day was a Wookie holiday dedicated to watching interspecies porn, so it wasn’t all bad….
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:02 AM on July 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


it was a mistake he was not going to make again.

BS. All through my childhood I played a litany of shitty Star Wars based video games that Lucas can't have signed off on when they were knowingly dogshit.

Or do video games just not count?

How much did Lucas have to do with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order because that was pretty darn good.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:03 AM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


I...I liked the Holiday Special when I first saw it.

In my defense, though, I was only eight years old, and really the only thing I liked was "whee Princess Leia is singing in this!"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:04 AM on July 12, 2021 [11 favorites]


I still came away feeling like Lucas had made more or less exactly the films he had wanted to make

This is part of the new prequel-fanboy revisionism, and it's nonsense. For one very concrete example, Lucas spent a bunch of time in AotC filling out a backstory for Boba Fett, with the intention that it would pay off in RotS, but then had to cut the whole thing because he had too much story left to squeeze into a single movie. What appeared in the prequels was Lucas's "vision", but that vision was a slapdash, ill-planned mess.
posted by The Tensor at 11:07 AM on July 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


Isn't it now generally recognized that Marcia Lucas was the one who took her then-husband's incoherent Starcrash-with-better-special-effects creative dumpster fire of a movie and edited it into the tightly paced, absolutely perfect film we know as A New Hope?

And isn't it also widely acknowledged that a huge difference between the original trilogy and the prequels is her absence because they had divorced in the interim?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:19 AM on July 12, 2021 [41 favorites]


How much did Lucas have to do with Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order because that was pretty darn good.

Unfortunately, it's only pretty darn good for people who play with a controller, because even on training-wheels mode the mouse + keyboard controls made the game nearly unplayable.
posted by tclark at 11:21 AM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


But without Lucas’s hand on the wheel, the car goes into a ditch immediately and by that point, he’s already washed his hands of it. So as the dailies come in, it’s like, “I’m taking my name off of this.” Again, I believe the result from his turning control of that project over to someone else is that it taught him a valuable lesson: it was a mistake he was not going to make again.

Which makes it all the more ironic -- and telling -- that one of the most acclaimed Star Wars films, The Empire Strikes Back (which I watched on May the Fourth), was neither written or directed by Lucas (though he gets a "story by" credit, having plotted the film with Leigh Brackett and overseen the production).
posted by Gelatin at 11:21 AM on July 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


What appeared in the prequels was Lucas's "vision", but that vision was a slapdash, ill-planned mess.

Isn’t that basically “Star Wars” in a nutshell? How often do we call out the love triangle hinted at in ESB turned into Luke and Leia being twins (and the now-incestuous kissing)? How did Leia remember her “real” mom in RotJ, but that mother passing after basically just naming her? There are plenty of other examples. Lucas created a great world, and had lots of ideas, but, let’s face it, the details of this world have been best left in the hands of others.

Al that being said, I sometimes have to remind myself that “Star Wars” is, to a large extent, a thing for kids. The Best Star Wars is the one you grew up with—the Original Trilogy for Gen-Xers, or the Prequels for Millennials. It took me a few years to realize that kids who grew up when the Prequels (and related series) have always been around are thrilled by the story of Annakin Skywalker. I’ll be honest: I regret some of the Prequel-Bashing-in-Front-of-Kids I’ve done. There is no One Right Way to love “Star Wars” (or anything else).
posted by MrGuilt at 11:40 AM on July 12, 2021 [20 favorites]


tightly paced, absolutely perfect film we know as A New Hope

That... may be stretching things.
posted by Saxon Kane at 11:45 AM on July 12, 2021 [17 favorites]


Lucas spent a bunch of time in AotC filling out a backstory for Boba Fett, with the intention that it would pay off in RotS

I don't know that it was ever Lucas' intention per se to fully develop the Boba Fett storyline within the confines of the prequel trilogy. There's literally dozens of story threads that never pay off or are fully explained within the prequels (as well as the original films), and it's always kind of fallen to the ancillary material (the novels/RPG sourcebooks/video games in the '90s and now the cartoons/live-action series as subcanons) to fill in the gaps of the movies.

I'm looking forward to what they end up doing with the Boba Fett TV miniseries because I think that's a format that makes more sense for a side character like BF than the foreshortened tertiary character subplots of the movies.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:46 AM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


Isn't it now generally recognized that Marcia Lucas was the one who took her then-husband's incoherent Starcrash-with-better-special-effects creative dumpster fire of a movie and edited it into the tightly paced, absolutely perfect film we know as A New Hope?

I think that's definitely a big part of the story, but I think it helped a lot that he had other incredibly talented people (Ben Burtt, John Williams, Ralph McQuarrie to name a few).

But yeah, you can see how editing saves parts of the film - the second act really benefits from quick cutting, even when it's completely redundant. What's up with them blowing up like thirty cameras and wall greebles in the detention level? I don't know! But it's much more exciting than it could've been!
posted by condour75 at 11:49 AM on July 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


(also, all those people, and most of all Marcia, could say "no" to him still)
posted by condour75 at 11:52 AM on July 12, 2021 [8 favorites]


There is no One Right Way to love “Star Wars”

I don't know about that- my cousin and his wife are huge Star Wars fans, and they're raising their daughter pretty Orthodox Non-Special Edition.

I can't say I disagree with them.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:56 AM on July 12, 2021 [13 favorites]


It took me a few years to realize that kids who grew up when the Prequels (and related series) have always been around are thrilled by the story of Annakin Skywalker. I’ll be honest: I regret some of the Prequel-Bashing-in-Front-of-Kids I’ve done.

Kids growing up in the last 20 years also had the benefit of growing up with a more or less complete arc for Anakin Skywalker as depicted in Clone Wars instead of just the partial snapshots given in the prequels. The last two prequels show Anakin at his various breaking points, whereas Clone Wars gives us a better sense of the "great pilot, strong Jedi, and good friend" (to paraphrase Obi-Wan's description of him in RotJ) that he was throughout his earlier life. It doesn't "fix" the prequels so much as create a new line of best fit for Anakin's character arc that fits with what we already knew while also giving him opportunities to be the heroic figure we never quite saw.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:57 AM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


Kids growing up in the last 20 years also had the benefit of growing up with a more or less complete arc for Anakin Skywalker as depicted in Clone Wars instead of just the partial snapshots given in the prequels.

And this hints at some of my frustration with the state of “Star Wars” today: the experience of a casual fan is different from the obsessive. If I don’t read all the novels, watch all the animated series, and play the Fortnite game, I won’t get some of the context of the story. It’s one thing if it’s a casual wink to the obsessive. In no small measure, if you’re not an obsessive you miss out completely.
posted by MrGuilt at 12:03 PM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


The problem with The Clone Wars is it treats Anakin as basically a hero with an anger-management problem, when in fact he's already a mass-murderer (of indigenous Tatooinians) who has fallen to the Dark Side by any plausible definition.
posted by The Tensor at 12:04 PM on July 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


Of all the ways to ruin Star Wars that have been deployed, this holiday special has probably done the least damage.
posted by thelonius at 12:05 PM on July 12, 2021 [18 favorites]


Is the original Clone Wars still considered to have any validity? The actual traditionally animated series, not the second CGI one.
posted by Fukiyama at 12:05 PM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


The problem with The Clone Wars is it treats Anakin as basically a hero with an anger-management problem, when in fact he's already a mass-murderer



"Oh, I'll take care of the younglings."

"You mean, 'evacuate them from the temple and get them to safety,' right?"

"..."

"RIGHT?"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:07 PM on July 12, 2021 [23 favorites]


I know that meme !!
posted by Pendragon at 12:13 PM on July 12, 2021 [8 favorites]


Is the original Clone Wars still considered to have any validity? The actual traditionally animated series, not the second CGI one.

Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars is not canon (and it is mutually exclusive in some ways with the canon 2008 cgi series), but the way Star Wars canon works now is that pieces can be plucked out and promoted to canon if they are referenced by canon works or if like a Disney exec says they are.
posted by Ultracrepidarian at 12:19 PM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


Of all the ways to ruin Star Wars that have been deployed, this holiday special has probably done the least damage.

Agreed: mostly the damage was to dignity. SWHS hasn't entered the canon the way, say, the Hogan's Heroes Christmas Special has scorched their heritage.




(NOTE: OK Bob Crane was a broken person and you might be happier with a SLYT link but I was so amazed at the depth of the first site I wanted to include it. It's essentially trying to get him elected the the National Radio Hall of Fame. I can't recall ever seeing a campaign around getting anyone elected to something as obscure as the NRHOF. And before you rush to judgement, consider that there are important things to learn here, like "The Liberty Aviation Museum in Port Clinton, Ohio, is the official and permanent home of the authentic Hogan’s Heroes artifact and prop collection.")
posted by Cris E at 12:24 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


I was seven when Star Wars came out and saw it many, many times. I don't know if I watched the holiday special--probably, but my memories are tangled. I do know I saw the Donny-and-Marie Star Wars special.

Having been obsessive about Star Wars, I read and believed a lot of the PR pieces, which told this narrative of George Lucas having a grand vision. This was, if not a lie, at least bullshit: he was farming toys and crappy TV out for cash at first, and only later trying to pretend it was some hero-with-a-thousand-faces epic that transcended its pulpy roots.

@StrangeInterlude: Yes, I think one issue (of many) with a lot of people my age is that the story we saw of Annakin in the prequels is not actually the story that Alec Guinness told us in the original, even with the "I am your father" retcon taken into account. It doesn't gel and the timelines are strained. Kids who watch it Annakin-arc-first need to deal with far fewer inconsistencies.
posted by mark k at 12:31 PM on July 12, 2021 [5 favorites]


Clone Wars gives us a better sense of the "great pilot, strong Jedi, and good friend" (to paraphrase Obi-Wan's description of him in RotJ) that [Anakin Skywalker] was throughout his earlier life.

I have to say deciding to watch all of Rebels and then plough through all of Clone Wars was possibly one of the best things that I did during the last lost year of C19. After dozing toward the end of Rise of Skywalker (and managing to do so while watching at a Dolby Cinema w/ all the shaking and booming) I had decided perhaps these stories no longer held any interest for me. But several of the arcs in those animated shows totally re-kindled my interest in Star Wars again. In fact I'd say the real future for the franchise lies with the episodic format (helmed by the 'Faveroni' duet) and NOT with the feature films.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:36 PM on July 12, 2021 [8 favorites]


Hogan's Heroes Christmas Special

I hope that Sgt. Schulz had a good Christmas. I hope he got some strudel.
posted by thelonius at 12:39 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


But even 15-20 years ago when they came out to widespread fanboy disgust, I still came away feeling like Lucas had made more or less exactly the films he had wanted to make, whether anyone else liked them or not.

I once went into a really deep dive into the visual effects on the prequels and I'm still convinced that he didn't specifically try to troll all of the so-called superfans just to mess with them.

Almost every shot that I thought was CGI or digital was actually a practical effect and models, and a lot of the shots I thought were actually practical effects were actually digital. This is so pervasive throughout the three prequels that I'm convinced that this is intentional just to mess with basically everyone just because he could.

And that's long before you get into exploring how campy the plots are. There's little tweaks and nods all over the films to vintage SF films or serials like Buck Rodgers and even Busby Berkeley choreography.

Also - as noted many times the Star Wars films and universe as a whole just aren't that good. The editing and pacing of all of them is mediocre at best and downright awful at its worst. They're supposed to be pulp science fiction and cowboy space opera or whatever.

Trying to hold them up as great filmmaking or story telling is a fool's errand. The plot and universe has so many loose ends and just generally bad scripting that it's like complaining that instant ramen has cheap noodles in it.

I mean this is one of the reasons why the original episodes were so popular and easily accessible. They were very familiar to any movie goer, just presented in a veneer of cool visual effects and SF tropes presented with a clarity - well, a large enough budget - that was the only real newness to them.
posted by loquacious at 12:44 PM on July 12, 2021 [10 favorites]


Trying to hold them up as great filmmaking or story telling is a fool's errand. The plot and universe has so many loose ends and just generally bad scripting that it's like complaining that instant ramen has cheap noodles in it.

Yeah, but it's fun to do that.

For a non-writer like me, Star Wars is the storytelling equivalent of that escalator at the science museum with the plexiglass window on the side so you can see how it works combined with the best Lego technics set ever. I've spent hours sitting around staring at all it's working parts and obsessing over how they go together and imagining how things might work if they were arranged differently--like what if Darth Vader had actually said "Obi Wan killed your father" as in the shooting script, or what if Rey really was "no one" and not a clone of Palpatine. And I think it's the same way for lots of people because it's practically an Internet parlor game to think of ways the Prequels could have been more interesting or how The Rise of Skywalker might not have sucked so bad.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:05 PM on July 12, 2021 [5 favorites]


I mean this is one of the reasons why the original episodes were so popular and easily accessible. They were very familiar to any movie goer, just presented in a veneer of cool visual effects and SF tropes presented with a clarity - well, a large enough budget - that was the only real newness to them.

The production values, sure, but you gotta add the reactionary political angle as well. Star Wars made violence fun for the whole family again with it's black and white, good vs evil machinations after a decade of Hollywood grooving with the complicated political legacy of the era, with fewer "heroes" in the Manichean sense and plots that regularly featured the protagonists unable to defeat the larger systemic problems or confronted by complexity that had no easy solution with even popular family films often only having a "moral victory" as with Bad News Bears and Rocky, an important backlash precursor to Star Wars, and new opportunities to explore sex and violence in ways not previously permitted and weren't "for the whole family".

Star Wars threw all that out in a naked call back to the kind of fifties era entertainment Lucas had already started to fetishize in American Graffitti writ even larger and less connected to reality. People liked it, Hollywood liked the money, and the eighties followed where Star Wars like movie making was the new Hollywood ideal.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:12 PM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


All through my childhood I played a litany of shitty Star Wars based video games that Lucas can't have signed off on when they were knowingly dogshit.

I hope that you're not including the original arcade game because that was pretty awesome.

As for the SWHS, yeah, it was dumb... but I kind of accepted it for what it was, because I processed it as a pretty typical 70s comedy variety show, and dumb is what they did, for the most part. The big tip-off was Harvey Korman, who by no means was going for some serious dramacred with this thing.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:17 PM on July 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


What's up with them blowing up like thirty cameras and wall greebles in the detention level? I don't know! But it's much more exciting than it could've been!

Heh. When I was a kid I used to watch that scene repeatedly on my VHS tape trying to figure out exactly where all those cameras must be hiding in the wide shots. As I recall, it never quite made 100% geographical sense. (There always seemed to be 1-2 shots too many.) But, as you imply, it didn't matter because it was cool!
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:26 PM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


I follow Sid Krofft's account on Instagram. Every so often he posts a clip from the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, with obvious pride. Whenever I see this, I spent the next few hours wondering, at the back of my mind: variety, huh? Yeah. Variety. Why? Why variety? Why, variety?

What I think is, the Holiday Special was a doomed idea in part because it was conceived at a time when two major entertainment trends were changing. Variety was on its way out,* and intense cinematic-universe fandom was on its way in. The show appeared in front of a bunch of adults who weren't that interested in variety anymore and young people who were appalled at their treating Star Wars so lightly. (Some of these people are still mad at The Last Jedi for the same thing.) It was destined to fail, even if it hadn't sucked, which it did.

Anyway, that's just my idea, and I could be wrong.

-----
* There were still variety shows that survived that time -- The Muppet Show and SNL -- but they had stuff you couldn't see anywhere else.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:34 PM on July 12, 2021 [5 favorites]


What I think is, the Holiday Special was a doomed idea in part because it was conceived at a time when two major entertainment trends were changing. Variety was on its way out

Yeah, that was a function of demographics, to a large extent, where TV was still trying to capture the interest of the older generation that grew up during the early part of the century, where the stage and "variety", in the Ed Sullivan sense, was still an important cultural touchstone, so shows tried to have a little of that to keep the older viewers happy, while nodding to the younger post-60s generation that grew up on mass media that Star Wars ultimately came to represent. You could see it in all sorts of shows from the time.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:56 PM on July 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


Some of these people are still mad at The Last Jedi for the same thing.

The rest are pissed off at Rise of Skywalker for the same fault.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:57 PM on July 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


You may have an abstract sense of how you can't fix weak storytelling in the editing phase of a movie, but have you seen it?

I encourage you to watch this clip from the official behind the scenes documentary of the Phantom Menace .

This is the early days of pure cgi and digital manipulation circa 1999: "cyber-directing" as the co-editor Ben Burtt says in this video. Keep in mind this is the sanitized, approved version of what Lucas wanted the world to see; an amazing new world of possibilities and unlimited creative freedom. Storytelling liberated by computers. Wheee!

What I see is Burtt's soul slowly getting sucked into the dark side as he realizes he's going to have to spend the next two days of his life digitally cleaning up a 5 second clip of a throwaway scene, all because Lucas thinks it makes something better, and of course because he can and noone (*cough* Marcia) is there to tell him he should be focusing on more important things.
posted by jeremias at 3:07 PM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


Whenever the Star Wars Holiday Special is mentioned, I always refer to the Donnie and Marie Star Wars Special, which is not objectively good but pretty funny and kind of entertaining in a cheezy way.
posted by ovvl at 3:27 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


If you can imagine it, there is fanfic of it.
17 Works in Star Wars Holiday Special (Archive of Our Own search results)
posted by otherchaz at 4:10 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


The Pitch Meeting for this thing has some great horrifying clips if you want to see!

I bought the RiffTrax of the SWHS a few years ago, and, as Pitch Meeting suggested, chose to watch it under the influence. The Pitch Meeting short can't really convey just how long everything drags out, the terrible unending wrongness of the Harvey Korman bits, or the terrible unending wrongness of everything else (except the cartoon) (also, it's sort of amazing what a funky 1970s suburban treehouse Chewbacca ostensibly lives in). Maybe RiffTrax got in a few more jokes than Pitch Meeting. However, because Pitch Meeting packed all the snark into 6 minutes instead of two hours, I declare Pitch Meeting the winner.

P.S. RiffTrax still gets bonus points for leaving in the 1978 commercials.
posted by polecat at 4:27 PM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


The first episode of the Netflix series The Toys That Made Us has a great behind-the-scenes look at the birth of the Star Wars merchandising juggernaut. Things like: they didn't have any action figures ready in time for the first Christmas season after the movie opened, so they had to give kids IOU certificates.
posted by gottabefunky at 4:35 PM on July 12, 2021 [6 favorites]


I always refer to the Donnie and Marie Star Wars Special, which is not objectively good but pretty funny and kind of entertaining in a cheezy way.

And it doesn't get enough credit for casting a brother and sister as Luke and Leia, five years ahead of that being a thing.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:42 PM on July 12, 2021 [6 favorites]


Every time this special comes up, I feel I have to plant my flag, so:

I unironically LOVE the entire Bea Arthur skits and musical numbers.
posted by ShawnStruck at 5:10 PM on July 12, 2021 [5 favorites]


Of course you can fix weak storytelling with enthusiasm and the good will of fans. A counterpoint; those of us of a certain age who grew up with 'ahh, but what I told you was true, from a certain point of view' and were prepared to accept that and play along on the basis of wanting to believe in the good faith of the story, were completely unprepared for the public-relations intelligence-led leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:45 PM on July 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


Question: can anyone talk about the place of the SWHS in culture between , say the day after it was broadcast and the mid 2000s when broadband became fast enough for video?

So first, you'd have to be about 50 now to remember the broadcast. Only one or two tapes of it survived into the modern era, so it can't have been that much of a phenomenon even of hate when it was new (granted, video tapes cost like $100 inflation adjusted dollars in 1978). I'm imagining it was passed around in 20th generation dubs at cons in the mean time, but cons weren't exactly the Thing they are now.
posted by wotsac at 8:58 PM on July 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


what a crazy fascination with a movie franchise - our need to cling to nostalgia is amazingly over developed.
posted by djseafood at 9:20 PM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'd rather ironically watch the holiday special than watch any of the Disney crap. And as far as letting those assholes determine canon, I'm still pissed that Splinter of the Mind's Eye wasn't the second Star Wars movie.
posted by 445supermag at 9:22 PM on July 12, 2021 [7 favorites]


wotsac - it was so awfully weird, reviled and traumatizing, nobody wanted to see it again, ever. When it was broadcast, I wanted to like it, but just a few minutes drove me from the room. My little brother tried to get me back when the cartoon Luke sequence came on, but I wasn't having any. Years later I saw that was the good part.
posted by Rash at 9:34 PM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


I watched a 2nd-generation VHS copy of the special in the mid-1990's. It was an item with some mystique that attracted attention, and it was certainly sold or traded at comic book conventions. These bootleg video dealers are still present at the right type of conventions.

The VHS copies also had additional cachet if they included the 1970's commercials. With the dearth of new Star Wars content (aside from the Timothy Zahn novels), the special was of interest to Star Wars completists, mainly to confirm if it was as bad as the rumors indicated.
posted by JDC8 at 10:07 PM on July 12, 2021 [4 favorites]


The holiday special was just a sign of awful things to come, such as landing the Millennium Falcon inside a planet sized space monster or anything involving Ewoks or the two TV specials in the 80s. All of it dreck. Face it, folks. It's all downhill after #4 and you know it.
posted by Beholder at 10:43 PM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


Question: can anyone talk about the place of the SWHS in culture between , say the day after it was broadcast and the mid 2000s when broadband became fast enough for video?

It was largely forgotten by all us kids pretty quickly. I mean, we remembered it happened. A few of us would occasionally reference something specific, all for laffs, which would usually spark a few fading memories.

It was pretty well understood by us kids at the time that TV was second tier entertainment, and that the SWHS was a kind of cash out promotion. An absolutely bog standard TV variety show of the time. I was a pretty Star Wars big fan, but not an obsessive, which a few of my classmates were. We all watched the Holiday Special, but it all faded quickly, except maybe the cruelly short animated segment. I was absolutely tickled when the vhs copies hit the internet sites a couple decades ago. I view it a valuable time capsule to both American pop culture and the nuts and bolts of Star Wars machinery desperately grinding away. In retrospect, they probably didn't need to be so desperate, as Star Wars was still unprecedentedly huge even a year and a half after release of the movie.

I mentioned the Holiday Special role in merchandising before. It still amazes me how slow the machine was to cash in on the demand.
posted by 2N2222 at 10:43 PM on July 12, 2021 [6 favorites]


It's all downhill after #4 and you know it.

There is no #4 it is Star Wars.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:54 PM on July 12, 2021 [5 favorites]


it was so awfully weird, reviled and traumatizing, nobody wanted to see it again, ever.

Tell me about it. I still have the occasional wistful dream that the funding for Star Wars never came through and instead the number two box office hit of '77 went on to become the obsession of a generation. Oh, to live in a world where we could talk about the Needham cinematic universe with such reverence. We'd have arguments over whether Smokey and the Bandit best represented the apex of Needham's vision or if Hooper took it to another level. We'd be looking at grainy VHS captures of the Smokey and the Bandit Christmas Special where Bea Arthur would be driving a big rig and Harvey Korman would be on the CB hopelessly trying to outwit her. CB radio would have lived on as a cultural force and we'd venerate stunt men as near the pinnacle of the film hierarchy, behind only Burt Reynolds and Needham himself. Right now we could be in a new golden age of movies and shows about truckers and car racing filled with crazy stunts and hijinks. And, sure, we'd also be expressing dismay over how the third film in the original trilogy didn't live up to the promise of the first two and bemoan the studio interference that killed the Smokey is the Bandit! concept and brought in a new director who of course couldn't live up to Needham's distinctive style and abilities. Oh what might have been!
posted by gusottertrout at 12:22 AM on July 13, 2021 [9 favorites]


Now that I think about it, maybe Vin Diesel had the same dream!
posted by gusottertrout at 1:21 AM on July 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


There are plenty of other examples. Lucas created a great world, and had lots of ideas, but, let’s face it, the details of this world have been best left in the hands of others.

I have said it before, but there is no great SW movie. I think the closest to great is Rogue One, and that's because it has a rather tight, coherent script. It tells one fairly simple story and does it well. Other SW movies are all over the place. I can never get a sense of place or of scale with the SW universe. The Empire Strikes Back is considered to be great, and I think it's very good, at least compared with others, but there's a lot of incoherence and odd pacing with it as well. They go from Hoth to Degobah to Cloud City with mere wipe transitions. Much is made of the Millenium Falcon's warp drive, but Luke seems to manage the same thing with his X-Wing fighter. And don't get me started on Luke, Leah, and Chewie stepping out on (what they think is) hard vacuum in that asteroid, an asteroid that somehow has Earth-standard gravity. Yeah, so much is problematic.

For anyone who is a science fiction fan, and by that I mean novels, the science fiction of SW is kind of a joke. It's fantasy under the guise of science fiction.
posted by zardoz at 1:27 AM on July 13, 2021 [5 favorites]


zardoz: "the science fiction of SW is kind of a joke. It's fantasy under the guise of science fiction."

zeeponysterical.
posted by chavenet at 1:39 AM on July 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


For those who've never seen it, here's The Secret History of Star Wars' long, detailed article about Marcia Lucas and her essential editorial contributions to the original Star Wars.

She was fresh off the supervising editor gig for Scorsese's Taxi Driver and brought a ton of insight and clarity to Star Wars, including the suggestion that George kill Obi-Wan when he was having trouble resolving that character arc in the third act, re-editing the Death Star trench run scene, etc, etc. And it wasn't just Star Wars; her editing skill was a major reason Lucas' American Graffiti was so successful and she also noticed the boys had left Marion completely out of the ending of the rough cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg reshot the ending so the film gave the leads some kind of emotional resolution.

The original link has apparently rotted so you have to find the article at archive sites, but it's a fascinating must-read for any Star Wars fans. This part about her decision to divorce George is particularly pointed:

"I felt that we had paid our dues, fought our battles, worked eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day. I wanted to stop and smell the flowers. I wanted joy in my life. And George just didn't. He was very emotionally blocked, incapable of sharing feelings. He wanted to stay on that workaholic track. The empire builder, the dynamo. And I couldn't see myself living that way for the rest of my life.

I felt we were partners, partners in the ranch, partners in our home, and we did these films together. I wasn't a fifty percent partner, but I felt I had something to bring to the table. I was the more emotional person who came from the heart, and George was the more intellectual and visual, and I thought that provided a nice balance. But George would never acknowledge that to me. I think he resented my criticisms, felt that all I ever did was put him down. In his mind, I always stayed the stupid Valley girl. He never felt I had any talent, he never felt I was very smart and he never gave me much credit. When we were finishing Jedi, George told me he thought I was a pretty good editor. In the sixteen years of our being together I think that was the only time he complimented me."

posted by mediareport at 5:06 AM on July 13, 2021 [15 favorites]


I unironically LOVE the entire Bea Arthur skits and musical numbers.

For sure. That cantina song is an absolute classic of the Melancholy Bartender Wipes Counter With Dishrag And Remembers Things genre. She really sells it, absurd as the surroundings are.
posted by mediareport at 5:11 AM on July 13, 2021 [6 favorites]


And the next time a Star Wars project went into a ditch, Lucas did indeed make sure it was his hands on the wheel.

At which point he clearly used the Star Wars Christmas Special as the blueprint for every subsequent film. From Return of the Jedi onward the films got progressively worse. Well produced, great sound, garbage stories.
posted by juiceCake at 6:40 AM on July 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Question: can anyone talk about the place of the SWHS in culture between , say the day after it was broadcast and the mid 2000s when broadband became fast enough for video?

It occupied this weird cultural space between being an iteration of this story we would go watch in the movie theatre dozens of times and being an example of the totally disposable teevee product of the kind that you would see every week. TV was wall-to-wall with Mac Davis and Charo and Bert Convy and Nipsey Russell and Charles Nelson Reilly being filmed before a live studio audience with song stylings and painful skits.

I suppose the signal differences here were instead of some other media property being the organizational principle for one sketch or musical number, it was the whole thing. And the other was it was presented, with varying degrees of dedication, as a serious continuation of the narrative. It was the all of the core original cast reprising their roles, which was freakishly unusual. Maybe at the time you might get Burt Reynolds turning up on The Sammy Davis Jr. Show with a Stetson and some chewing gum gamely pretending to be the Bandit for a sketch, but that was it.

Very little else had any vibe like it. Just this week I saw a link to a late-sixties Bing Crosby Christmas special variety show, with the usual assorted songsters and comedians arriving to do their thing. Because Crosby’s production company produced Hogan’s Heroes, we saw a filmed bit where Colonel Hogan and his four henchmen climb down into their tunnel in Stalag 13, then emerge live seconds later from a trapdoor in the stage in Hollywood. They banter with Crosby about how they must have dug too far. They are followed shortly by a pursuing Klink and Schultz, so that Werner Klemperer and John Banner can now sing Stille Nacht (Silent Night) in full uniform. Classy.

Anyway, it was the weird contrast between the movie being kind of perpetually available by seventies standards (played for a year or more, rereleased in 1979 and 1981, one of the first and most popular movies on home video, the very first thing on pay TV in this country) and this weird blip of a tv special that happened once and was never spoken of again.

I saw it as a kid in 1978 and my recollection is that Monday morning the few dedicated Star Wars fans at school all sort of conferred and tried to figure out what we had seen. The schoolyard in the pre-computers era was a forum where we were like shepherds discussing what we had seen in the night sky. The SWHS was a comet a few had seen, but it left no trace, so we had to confer on its meaning.

After that single airing, of course, like 99% of TV it vanished without a ripple. I next saw it about twenty years later when a friend had a dub of it on VHS, so four of us gathered to watch. The owner had seen it a couple of times, but two of us had faint childhood memories of it and the third had never had a chance, living abroad as she had.

I am sure I am not alone when I say that almost the most enjoyable part of it is all the original commercials, preserved as if in amber. Because of the samizdat nature of every extant copy today being a snapshot of two hours of ABC primetime in November 1978, it carries a clinical dose of nostalgia for Gen-X types.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:43 AM on July 13, 2021 [17 favorites]


.... From Return of the Jedi onward ...

I offer the suggestion that The Empire Strikes Back set an impossibly high bar for Star Wars: the 'quests' are really mild -- "escape hoth", "go to dagobah" -- and the rest are just natural progression of their steps, interspaced with a lot of internal and interpersonal drama; as far as most scifi/fantasy goes there's really not much boom-crash fight scenes and nobody wins and gets a party at the end. If it had been "we need to accomplish the macguffin" from the start to finish with more starship and laser sword fights and less "who am I and what do I want" interludes there's be less complaining about how the rest of Star Wars turned out.

I mean, The Christmas Special introduced weird-fanfic-like weirdness, but there's a canon story about how the asteroid-belt-space-slug is actually sentient and has feelings.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:04 AM on July 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


variety

I can practically see the big cut glass ashtray on the living room table, thinking of those shows. Gather the whole family, Jim Nabors is singing "Skylark"......yeah, this is definitely an index of the end of the 1970s.
posted by thelonius at 7:11 AM on July 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


The schoolyard in the pre-computers era was a forum where we were like shepherds discussing what we had seen in the night sky.

have all my favorites
posted by thelonius at 7:17 AM on July 13, 2021 [5 favorites]


Question: can anyone talk about the place of the SWHS in culture between , say the day after it was broadcast and the mid 2000s when broadband became fast enough for video?

I think that for some kids - particularly those with not-quite-so-refined palates - the opinion was "it is Star Wars, Star Wars is good, therefore this was good." I've seen clips from the special after the fact and cringed in embarrassment, but I have literally no memory from the in-the-moment time I watched it, save for some hazy recollections of the animation segment, being faintly puzzled at the wookie porn scene and being super-impressed that Carrie Fisher sang something. I don't remember discussing it after the fact with any of my friends. But I'm pretty confident that my brother and I both likely begged our parents to let us see it; I was eight and he was five, and we were regularly playing Star Wars with the neighbor kids so we probably were drawn in by the name, and unsurprised by the variety-show format because that's always what TV seemed to do with this kind of thing:

TV was wall-to-wall with Mac Davis and Charo and Bert Convy and Nipsey Russell and Charles Nelson Reilly being filmed before a live studio audience with song stylings and painful skits.

For a taste of this, there was an earlier FPP with a bunch of Gen-X mefites torturing/amusing each other with clips. When I was growing up, this was just, like, what TV was. You had your sitcoms, you had your Saturday morning cartoons, you had the Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers/Electric Company stuff on PBS, Mom and Dad would watch "The News" sometimes, some moms watched soap operas in the afternoon while you were in school, and every once in a while people would put on spangly dresses and sing songs. Sometimes even the regular sitcoms would do a "variety show" format - I remember the original One Day At A Time would occasionally use the excuse of "The cast are volunteering at the local senior citizens' center" as a framework for variety-show episodes, with Valerie Bertenelli dressed up as Elton John and singing "Don't Go Breakin' My Heart" with Schneider on piano or some such. Not every kid imagined that it could be any different, so we just sort of shrugged and went with it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:34 AM on July 13, 2021 [9 favorites]


It was on, you watched it. Like being raised in one of those homes where you have to eat everything on your plate.
posted by thelonius at 7:38 AM on July 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


Question: can anyone talk about the place of the SWHS in culture between , say the day after it was broadcast and the mid 2000s when broadband became fast enough for video?

I remember watching it and thinking it was crappy, but then pretty well all teevee aimed at kids in those days was complete crap and holiday specials were almost always particularly terrible dreck. We had one television and got maybe 6 different television stations, so choice in what to watch was pretty limited anyways. We watched the least terrible thing my siblings and I could agree on to watch or whatever was put on by our parents.

I was kind of surprised in the 90's when it started coming up as a be-all-end-all of terrible holiday specials. I didn't recall it as being all that much worse than anything else.

Watching various clips of it since this was posted is the first time I've seen any of it since it originally aired. I am surprised by how much of it I remember, so maybe by that metric it was a success.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:53 AM on July 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


It’s well and good to mock the Holiday Special which I saw when it first broadcast, but you have to admit that it’s interesting that while television was always seen as second tier yet The Mandolorian is, by far, the best written thing in the Star Wars universe. I mean have you actually watched those films? Seriously the worst dialog ever.
posted by misterpatrick at 8:08 AM on July 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


We had one television and got maybe 6 different television stations, so choice in what to watch was pretty limited anyways.

Yeah, ya gotta keep in mind that while the SWHS was a big deal, 13 million viewers, it was up against the Love Boat juggernaut and that night they had Van Johnson, June Allyson, Vivian Blaine, Larry Storch and Roz Kelly as guest stars! So not as easy a choice as it might first appear. (And, sure, I guess some people might have tuned in to Different Strokes and Rockford Files, but the celebrity guest stars there were minimal. Who wants to watch Hector Elizondo when you can se Roz "Pinky Tuscadero" Kelly play a stripper on a blind date with a minister!)
posted by gusottertrout at 8:11 AM on July 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


I think it's weird how it's being referred to by some here as the Christmas special. It's the Holiday special, and the holiday is Life Day. The program aired November 17; there's no red/green & jingle bells; I always considered it a Thanksgiving show, and I take a really dim view of (even unintentional) attempts to insert Jesus into the Star Wars universe.
posted by Rash at 8:56 AM on July 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


Who wants to watch Hector Elizondo when you can se Roz "Pinky Tuscadero" Kelly play a stripper on a blind date with a minister!

Here, have this "the best sentence I will read all week" award.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:03 AM on July 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


I would love to have a high quality recording of this just for endless meme fodder.
posted by mecran01 at 10:41 AM on July 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


It’s well and good to mock the Holiday Special which I saw when it first broadcast, but you have to admit that it’s interesting that while television was always seen as second tier yet The Mandolorian is, by far, the best written thing in the Star Wars universe

Suffice to say, television of 1978 is a universe away from television/cable/streaming of today. I'm sure this has been discussed before. There's no comparison.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:09 AM on July 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


Yeah, ya gotta keep in mind that while the SWHS was a big deal, 13 million viewers, it was up against the Love Boat juggernaut and that night they had Van Johnson, June Allyson, Vivian Blaine, Larry Storch and Roz Kelly as guest stars!

It wasn't easy to pass up a Larry Storch guest appearance, I tell ya, but it was Star Wars and I was like 11.

Also, I thought the animated Boba Fett sequence was the coolest thing ever.
posted by Gelatin at 11:39 AM on July 13, 2021


you have to admit that it’s interesting that while television was always seen as second tier yet The Mandolorian is, by far, the best written thing in the Star Wars universe. I mean have you actually watched those films? Seriously the worst dialog ever.

Everyone loves to put down poor Hayden Christiansen, but I will always rise to his defense by pointing out that Natalie Portman has proven elsewhere and otherwise that she can act, and she sucks in all of those scenes too.

Ewan MacGregor makes the leaden dialog work by doing a bang-on Sir Alec Guinness impersonation, but those were the lines Lucas gave Padme and Anakin, the performances he coaxed out of both of them as director, and the scenes he included in the final cut.

At least we got the "...Right?" meme out of it.
posted by Gelatin at 11:45 AM on July 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


Liam Neeson is another case in point--he was boring as hell and also bored as hell. He announced he was quitting movies afterwards because they didn't involve "acting." Obviously in other contexts he can be great, or can carry an action movie, have fun, etc.

This fits firmly into the theory that no one could tell George Lucas "no" by this point. Harrison Ford famously went off script when he got a lousy line, so Han Solo ended up with a personality and Qui Gon Jinn did not.
posted by mark k at 12:03 PM on July 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


...like complaining that instant ramen has cheap noodles in it.

I smell a tagline!


* There were still variety shows that survived that time -- The Muppet Show and SNL -- but they had stuff you couldn't see anywhere else.

Viking pigs, for one...
posted by y2karl at 12:24 PM on July 13, 2021


The animated Boba Fett from this show's animated segment is getting his own Hallmark ornament this year. Supplies are so limited that you likely can't buy one, of course.
posted by Servo5678 at 12:52 PM on July 13, 2021


I mean have you actually watched those films? Seriously the worst dialog ever.

I don't like George Lucas' screenwriting. It's all coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets everywhere.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:05 PM on July 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


I always considered it a Thanksgiving show, and I take a really dim view of (even unintentional) attempts to insert Jesus into the Star Wars universe.

You might want to sit down for this one.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:08 PM on July 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


I had the same thought at the time.
posted by y2karl at 6:05 PM on July 13, 2021


Courtesy of the George Lucas Talk Show (RIP?) a heartfelt cover of "Goodnight, But Not Goodbye"
posted by malphigian at 6:20 PM on July 13, 2021


I was born in the early 80's, and a rabid Star Wars fan. The Holiday Special was always kind of legendary bad, something most of us knew about. I believe there was usually at least one dealer with a copy at most conventions, along with questionably sourced tapes and burned DVDs of things like Hardware Wars, Ewok movies, and the Droids cartoon. It was a pretty common trivia question, about the first appearance of Boba Fett.

I remember a lot of speculation on just how high Carrie Fisher was...
posted by Jacen at 8:12 AM on July 14, 2021


« Older Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.   |   “… and Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln” Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments