“Maybe I can help you. I am Boba Fett.”

Justin’s rating: This does the Kessel Run in 0.5 parsecs

Justin’s review: One of the greatest unsung benefits of the internet age is that so much media’s being preserved that was on the verge of being lost in the analogue era. I certainly would never have known that The Star Wars Holiday Special existed if it wasn’t for the efforts of die-hard geeks to save and spread this Lucas anomaly. What was once an incredibly obscure piece of media is now legendarily famous thanks to the fun we’ve had viewing and commenting on it online.

What I realized this year was that while Mutant Reviewers did a viewing of this special a long time ago, we’ve never formally reviewed it. So here it is, your Christmas — and Life Day! — treat.

A long time ago on a CBS station far, far away, events conspired for a one-off holiday special that would star the cast of the then-year-old Star Wars. What’s important to realize is that this is the confluence of the standard variety show, which was at its peak plague in the ’70s, with a scifi film that was only starting to become an actual franchise. It was a weird mixture that absolutely shouldn’t have worked… and it didn’t. It really didn’t.

That The Star Wars Holiday Special is awful is beyond question at this point. It’s two hours of the most insane padding and bizarre filler with elements that simply do not work in the Star Wars universe that we know today. It’s got 14 minutes of Wookiees doing nothing but growling (with no subtitles). It’s got Luke with a creepy amount of makeup. It’s got Leia when Carrie Fisher was in a drug stupor. It’s got Bea Arthur singing, Jefferson Starship playing as a hologram, an off-putting foreshadowing of virtual reality sex, a four-armed alien doing cooking slapstick, and a little Wookiee kid named Lumpy that you will want to punt across the room before this thing is through.

So yes, it’s awful. Yet it’s also endearingly fun, and I’ve really grown to love it.

For all of the insults slung at this special, it does deserve a few small accolades. Hey, I said a few! It’s the first and only Star Wars TV spin-off that happened before the sequels arrived, and that makes it wholly unique. If this sort of thing was made in, say, 1983, it would’ve been a totally different product and probably coated wall-to-wall with Ewoks.

It’s the first look at Chewie’s home planet of Kashyyyk as well as the first appearance of Boba Fett (which happens in the animated portion, which is undoubtedly the best part of this entire show). I’m impressed they got all the core cast back, the Millennium Falcon cockpit shows up, we see some funky Wookiee designs, and a very, very short bit of “never before seen footage” from the movie is shared that’s mostly Darth Vader having a walk-and-talk with a surrogate. Finally, this added the Life Day celebration into Star Wars canon, which has popped up in video games among other places.

Yeah we laugh at The Star Wars Holiday Special, but if we’re fans, we also laugh with it. It was trying so hard to be a lot of things, and while it didn’t succeed in being entertaining the way it wanted, it’s still making Star Wars nerds happy nearly five decades later.

Drake’s rating: Forty-seven years later and this one still hurts

Drake’s review: There’s a common refrain when people talk about anything weird that came out of the 1970s: They were on drugs. That’s it. That’s the explanation. That’s really all it takes to explain away an entire decade of weirdness. And, honestly, it’s often hard to argue with it. But still, there were some mitigating factors at play in those odd ‘70s moments.

For example:

• Shag carpets? They were on drugs and they wanted a comfy place to lie around.
• Lava lamps? They were on drugs and wanted something to watch.
• Man from Atlantis? They were on drugs and they got bored of watching lava lamps.
• Pet rocks? They were bored and wanted someone to talk to.

Sure, the drugs were an impetus, but there was still the idea that the drugs were an enhancement, and not the entire entertainment.

Which is dandy explanation right up until you run face first into The Star Wars Holiday Special, which exists for one reason, and one reason only: They were on drugs.

And I’m not just talking about the cast here. Or the musicians, who were always on drugs anyway. No, I mean everyone here was high as a kite, from the biggest of bigwig producers sitting in their high-rise office (complete with shag carpet) to the lowliest intern schlepping Harrison Ford’s luggage from the airport to the hotel, and then immediately back to the airport once Ford got a glimpse of the script, and then back to the hotel again when the producer threw himself in front of the star’s plane as it taxied down the runway and bribed him into staying with enough Maui Wowie to get the entire city of Portland high.

The big Portland, by the way. That much weed would wreck Portland, Maine for a decade.

Because, look, there is just no way you can convince me that a trio of actors put on full-body furry costumes and ran around grunting unintelligibly for a good 30 minutes of introductory screen time without inhaling something considerably stronger than the odors from their latex prosthetics. I mean, you can’t shine me on here. I was around back then.

And, being probably the only Mutant alive and cognizant when The Star Wars Holiday Special was first broadcast, I did indeed see this abomination the only way it could be seen for years,* which was on CBS on November 17, 1978. And I watched every painful minute and swiftly became aware of two indisputable facts:

1. They were on drugs

2. Star Wars could be bad

That first fact wasn’t necessarily a shocker, given what we’ve discussed about the decade thus far. But that second one was quite a kick in the teeth. Remember, there was no prequel trilogy yet to pollute the original film’s storyline, and no sequel trilogy either. Heck, even the Ewoks were still half a decade off! All we had was Star Wars, which, while not universally loved, was still a critic-proof piece of entertainment that crammed audiences into the theaters week after week and month after month. It seemed like it was pretty infallible, right up until The Star Wars Holiday Special wandered in like a drunken uncle, insulted everyone in the room, and then knocked over the lava lamp before passing out on the shag carpeted floor.

Justin recently pointed out the glut of variety shows in the ‘70s and the weakness of the format. Yet certainly Star Wars could elevate even pedestrian material into something watchable, right? After all, if the Force could help Luke Skywalker blow up a planet-sized weapon of mass destruction, surely it could be relied on to save a holiday special.

Sadly, no. As it turned out, the Force was no match for the TV variety show. Lame jokes, unfunny sketches, and questionable cameos were a staple of the convention, and Star Wars was not immune to any of it. And all any of us who watched at the time could do was suffer through it, make it through the weekend, and then pretend by the following Monday that it had all been a bad dream. Any talk of the special was met with vacant stares, and repeat offenders were banished from the lunch tables until they figured out the new rule: We don’t talk about The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Still, the wounds were there, and they never quite went away. A Muppet Jedi Master** two years later was less a surprise than an admission of defeat, and by the time the teddy bears were overrunning Imperial Stormtroopers there was a definite feeling that maybe The Star Wars Holiday Special had not really been an aberration after all.

And considering some of the decisions made 20 years later in filming The Phantom Menace, that feeling has some merit. But, hey, if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on about everyone working on that flick, it’s this: They probably should have been on drugs.

I mean, it couldn’t have made things any worse, right?

*Before tape traders expanded the audience and the internet made it available pretty much everywhere.

**I had my little Mutant Heart set on Toshiro Mifune playing Luke’s new Jedi Master, and that’s still a hill I’ll die on.