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[logo music]
Because of the following special program,
Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk
will not be presented this evening.
[star wars-like music]
Let me ask you something.
And this is a question I’ve wanted to ask you for a while,
and I’ve always restrained myself.
A Christmas special came out that was produced
by George Lucas in which all of the participants in Star Wars
were--
[laughter]
came together.
And they made this Star Wars Christmas Special,
and the tape’s been passed around for years.
And the rumor is that Lucas is trying to suppress it.
It all started in 1978 when I let people make a Star Wars TV
special without me.
The Holiday Special.
I remember.
It came out so bad.
I hate it.
I hate it! I hate it!
George, George.
Do you remember making this Christmas special?
No, you don’t remember it?
[laughter and applause]
I-- nobody is allowed to mention this.
It is so bad.
It’s not good.
[laughter]
You are about to see the worst half hour of television ever.
[tie fighter lasers]
Star Wars.
Star Wars is going to be on TV?
And it’s a new thing?
Oh, I see.
It’s the Star Wars holiday special.
We popped it in, and my life was never the same.
Come on, Malla.
Let’s see a little smile.
It will provide many years of fun.
I felt a great disturbance in the force.
We rolled a doob and sat back and watched it.
And we thought it was fabulous.
I feel something terrible has happened.
To explain the Star wars Holiday Special is
like trying to explain to someone how the pyramids were
built. It’s kind of impossible.
All you have to know is it was the ’70s.
There might have been some cocaine.
Happy Life Day.
I saw it as a kid.
I thought it was great.
They didn’t tell the people this was not Star Wars
the movie two.
You can say that again.
It seems we’ve landed on some sort of comedy variety show
planet.
The Star Wars holiday special is sort of like the holy grail.
It’s completely mental.
It’s so funny, and it’s so stupid.
I love the holiday special.
The holiday special is definitely canon.
You probably wouldn’t think that Maude would
be one of the guest stars.
And I was never into the whole Star Wars thing.
I love all of the awkwardness.
I am your fantasy.
So experience me.
The whole production was fraught with problems.
Oh, no.
the ship you seek.
Follow me, friend.
That Boba Fett cartoon rules.
Settle down!
The Star Wars special sucked so bad,
I was amazed that I wasn’t in it.
I would really like to know what CBS was thinking
when they greenlit this thing.
But now, let’s get started, shall we.
[triumphant music]
There are always better stories about failure than success.
It’s much more interesting.
It’s much more compelling, and it’s much more human.
Supposedly a TV movie existed, and no one
knew where they could get it.
I had never seen it.
You couldn’t convince me it was true.
To me, it was all urban legend.
Now that I was a ninth grade man,
I wanted something you couldn’t find in any store.
Psst.
Yo, Goldnerd, come here.
It was like finding this artifact of something
that I was such a fan of but I had no conception ever existed.
Yeah.
And for a while I believed that it was impossible to get.
It became a currency of sorts in geek culture.
You know, talking about it, dropping references to it,
producing a copy to watch.
Christmas came early.
He had a bootleg copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
Holy Kenobi!
The legend is true!
I had to get like a tape of a tape of a tape.
You know.
The Zapruder film was easier to watch
than the copy of the holiday special that I got.
On the back cover, it said, if I had a hammer in time,
"I would destroy every copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special,"
George Lucas.
And I was like, sold.
That was so cool.
Were we watching two different things?
You don’t know Star Wars.
This special is really for the true fans.
So the true fan wants to watch Dorothy from The Golden Girls
flirt with an alien?
We have seen something that we weren’t supposed to see.
Clearly, something had gone wrong.
You were in the area because you were
in Hollywood making a Star Wars special that’ll
played around Thanksgiving.
Got all the characters from Star Wars
and it’s got quite a few extra people as well.
For one thing, you meet the whole Wookiee family.
And the Wookiees lived up in the tree house.
And that’s where we met Chewbacca’s family--
Itchy, the little kid, and--
what was her name--
Jawa?
Itchy is the grandfather.
Who’s the-- oh, Lumpy is the kid.
I’m so sorry.
It’s only been 40 years.
Chewie’s family had to be name something.
Lumpy and Itchy?
Couldn’t they have spent 15 more seconds on the names?
And we meet Chewie’s family, and we
realize that, oh, they’re just going to all chew it and not
talk.
[mimics wookiee sounds]
And so, you’re literally watching a bunch of mimes.
(LAUGHING) But you just have zero dialogue.
Zero dialogue up until this point for 15 minutes.
Like, have you timed it?
I would love to know that stat.
How much of the Star Wars Holiday Special
has absolutely no discernible dialogue?
[tape whirring]
[r2 beeps]
R2, look.
It’s Chewbacca’s family.
Let’s never speak of this again.
So you didn’t love it.
Who cares?
I care!
I love Star Wars!
It’s my life.
It makes no sense why I didn’t love this too.
You know, we spent years of two weeks
at a time working directly with George developing what
would become this animated series,
and we had access to the theater downstairs.
And we made a date--
all the writers.
Hey, we’re going to watch the holiday special.
And you tap out any time you want.
Like, we’re going to see who can make it all the way through.
And that’s what we did.
And like, one by one, like flies, people were like,
"I’m out."
I like to watch bad stuff, but that’s a hard watch making it
through the holiday special.
[laughs]
The cockpit of the Millennium Falcon
is clearly just a cardboard cutout.
Everything just-- it takes you a while
to realize that everything’s wrong.
When you first see the Star Wars Holiday Special
in its entirety, you’re like, how did this happen?
Who decided to create one of the most confounding pieces of Star
Wars entertainment in the history of its existence?
In order to understand how the holiday special happened,
you have to put it in context.
Star Wars pioneered a whole different kind
of almost grassroots attention.
The real secret to the success of Star Wars
was a guy named Charlie Lippincott,
who pioneered an entirely new way of marketing movies.
Oh, Charlie was a good guy.
He had kind of an oddball sense of humor.
He went to Film School at USC.
I don’t remember Charlie ever making any movies,
but Charlie was involved with all of the filmmakers
and keeping track of everyone.
He was like a den mother.
But when I learned, shortly thereafter,
that Charlie was becoming a publicist,
it made perfect sense to me.
I’m talking with Charlie Lippincott, who is
associated with the production.
Charlie, could you tell us exactly how are you associated?
I’m the executive in charge of advertising, publicity,
promotion, and merchandising for Star Wars corporation.
Charlie had come up with the idea
of marketing Star Wars directly to fans
because there really wasn’t a good hook for marketing Star
Wars.
Science fiction wasn’t popular.
None of the actors were big names
that you could get booked on The Tonight Show.
A year before Star Wars came out,
Charlie went and showed slides about this movie
and got this amazing groundswell.
Fandom was never really a part of the marketing plan
until Charlie Lippincott made it so.
Even though he didn’t have footage to show them,
he would show them like Ralph McQuarrie’s artwork.
He would tell them the story of what the film was about.
He went to the Star Trek conventions
and got the Trekkies interested in it.
And this is something right up their alley.
The idea is if you can get the enthusiasm
with them, that will spread.
These are the kind of people that
will see a movie 10 times if they like it.
I’d like to introduce you now to producer Gary Kurtz.
[applause]
And the star of the film, Mark Hamill,
who plays Luke Skywalker.
He knew how to get people excited
and how to stir up interest and word of mouth.
And from these science fiction conventions,
people left being interested to see what
this film was going to be like.
And then they would tell their friends about it.
Ballantine Books was one of the major houses
in paperbacks-- major publisher in science fiction.
Charlie went to them and made a deal
to do a novelization of Star Wars
and have it come out like nine months
before the movie came out to get it out there.
And then Charlie made a deal with Marvel Comics
to do the comic bookization of Star Wars.
And the real problem, I think, in some ways,
was I didn’t want one comic book,
and I didn’t want two comic books.
I wanted five to six comic books telling the story of the film.
So that was a bit of a hard sell at first.
And I wanted at least three issues out
before the film came out.
And nobody had done that up to that time.
Basically, everything with Star Wars
that wasn’t making the movie was Charlie.
He taught Hollywood a very important lesson
that they are still learning from today.
Nine months after Charlie started these fan promotions,
the movie comes out.
[band playing star wars theme]
To the world famous Chinese Theater
come the stars of the biggest box office success
in motion picture history.
Star Wars.
It is more than just a successful movie,
it is a box office phenomenon.
The film is breaking attendance records all over the country.
Not since Jaws have so many people
stood in line to see a movie.
It was kind of like a nuclear explosion had gone off
in pop culture.
It blew people’s minds.
I mean, I remember people waiting in line all day
to see this movie.
Star Wars became the new box office champion
by providing pure, 100% escapist entertainment.
And it appears this is what just about everybody in the country
is in the mood for.
This was world-changing.
It’s like the Beatles.
We’d all seen science fiction movies before, but not
like this.
It only opened in America at the end of May,
but already it’s the biggest box office hit in cinema history.
The overwhelming success of the picture surprised everybody.
As one Fox executive put it, it’s not so much a film,
it’s more an industry.
I love that the world between Star Wars and Empire--
the world between Star Wars and Empire to me is this bizarre--
it’s not completely thought out.
There’s no mythology built up.
For the fans, it’s interesting in many ways.
One of the ways, it gives them an insight
into this very brief period where
things were not set up yet.
And it was kind of like Lucasfilm 1.5.
1.0 is over, but 2.0 wasn’t there yet.
And it wasn’t until Empire forward that everything
became more fully formed.
So I have a real affection for that time
where it was this wild thing that nobody could figure out.
So somewhere in the summer after Star Wars has come out,
George takes a meeting with Frank Wells of Warner Brothers
with Gary Kurtz and Charlie Lippincott.
The goal of that meeting was to re-release to try and piggyback
on the success of Star Wars.
Somewhere along the line in that meeting,
Frank said something to George to the effect of,
come September you guys will be nothing.
And George left really angry.
And so, it kind of redoubled George’s interest
in making sure Star Wars succeeded
and continued to be in theaters.
To promote Star Wars, getting the stars of Star Wars
to appear on all of these talk and variety shows--
Donny and Marie or any of these other places.
The Star Wars Holiday Special may well
have been created out of spite.
[jazzy music]
(SINGING) We’re Darth Vader’s raiders,
and we can’t believe the things that you do.
You’re all right.
We never met a trooper played hide and--
My brothers were dressed as the storm troopers dancing.
I’m Luke, and Marie’s Leah with the bagels
on the side of her head.
Han solo, played by Kris Christofferson.
And I’m dancing around R2-D2, and there’s C-3PO,
and we’re talking, and Chewbacca is there.
And I’m thinking, this is probably
one of the coolest finales we’ve ever done.
(SINGING) His transistors are in trouble and his tubes are weak.
And if we stay, our chances for survival are bleak.
So show us the way to get out of this world for that’s
where everything is.
[beeps]
I’m thinking, how in the world is George Lucas allowing
this to happen?
Because that’s just so far from the movie.
But it sure was funny at the time,
and it’s funny to look back right now.
(SINGING) Push the fuel button.
Light the fire.
Fire.
Going to take you higher.
We broke a lot of rules when we had the Star Wars
characters on the Donny and Marie show for that finale.
There was a shot with Chewbacca with his arm
around Darth Vader.
Oof.
How does that happen?
But on Donny and Marie, I guess everybody was friends.
[laughs]
(SINGING) Come back to me.
Come back to me.
Come back to me!
The Star Wars Holiday Special is Citizen Kane compared
to that Donny and Marie thing.
I mean, that’s truly train wreck sort of television.
You-- you intergalactic fool.
You’ll never get them back that way.
I suppose you have a better plan.
No plan at all, just a little "force."
You can’t imagine that happening in 1981.
Like, that Star Wars couldn’t have gone
near a show like that in ’81.
But in ’77, everyone’s going, I don’t know what this is
or how big it’s going to be, but yeah, take it.
Go.
Put it on a t-shirt or whatever.
Put it in your show.
Do a dance with the stormtroopers.
["get ready"]
But fee-fi-fo-fum, look out people, cause here we come.
I think that’s one of the coolest moments
my brothers ever had in show business
was transforming stormtroopers to vaudevillian dancers.
[laughs] That’s so funny.
(SINGING) So get ready.
Get ready.
Here we come.
So the public appearances helped the ticket sales
in the theaters.
They had the entire family watching the Donny and Marie
Show.
George wanted to tap into that magic.
We had the demographics that he wanted.
And through research, he was right.
And that Donny and Marie Show aired,
and everybody saw Star Wars characters on Donny and Marie.
They went back to the theater.
It’s almost as if at that time in the entertainment world
there were like two tracks.
It was, like, for entertainment.
And it had been going on since the silent movies,
where you did your kind of high art form, which was the movie,
and then you did a lot of stuff to support it,
whatever it took.
If you had to put on the disguise in front of a shopping
mall, you did it.
And they did it for Star Wars.
George was about to start shooting The Empire Strikes
Back, and he was concerned that there be momentum,
that there would be a stirring the pot to make sure people
were aware of the franchise.
And you saw the proliferation of Star Wars
on television in the late 1970s, in 1977 specifically,
on these variety shows, as a way to keep Star Wars cemented
in the zeitgeist.
Prior to that, the big movie was Jaws, right?
But you couldn’t just throw Jaws onto a thing.
Like, ladies and gentlemen, Jaws is here to sing.
In retrospect, I think it’s exceptionally foolish,
because the brand was not going to die.
It was very, very popular.
Somebody, somewhere, said, if we don’t give them something,
they’re going to forget about us.
And suddenly, it’s everywhere on TV after that.
Like, just the promotion was everywhere you looked.
Let’s crank out as much stuff as we can.
Let’s let Richard Pryor have all the alien makeup for a cantina
sketch on his show.
[big band star wars theme]
That sketch actually kind of works.
It’s Richard Pryor in that world,
and he’s using it to ding riffs on race, and social class,
and stuff like that.
Hey, Hey.
Hey!
Why don’t you watch where you’re going?
You got the biggest eyes in the place.
[laughter]
Also, these characters weren’t embedded
in our consciousness the way they are now.
We’d met them once in one film.
It’s not like we’d gone on a nine-film adventure with R2-D2,
and we know the parameters of R2-D2
or how he would speak-- or C-3PO.
Hello, welcome to Burger Chef.
We’d like a Star Wars poster, please.
Or even Darth Vader.
With guest appearances by Darth Vader!
Humongous.
[breathing sounds]
[explosion]
[applause]
[groans]
We’d seen them once in that film,
and that was the only voice we knew.
So the fact that Darth Vader was being lampooned,
or that the droids were doing things out of context, or even
Mark Hamill was doing something in a different way--
Bob Hope’s All-Star Christmas Comedy
Special, starring special guest star Mark Hamill.
[big band music]
[applause]
It’s more egregious now looking back than it was, I think,
at the time.
It was a very normal way of getting it out there,
and Star Wars embraced that opportunity.
Its Luke Skywalker!
Did you bring the force?
You better believe it.
The Los Angeles Police Force.
[laughter]
How did you find them?
[laughter]
Now, you’re all under arrest for malicious mutilation
of a marvelous movie.
[laughter]
I should have stuck to looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Any kind of artwork out of context
is going to look funny--
any kind of artwork.
Any kind, period.
If you don’t know the history and the context,
you cannot appreciate it fully.
This was in the days of crazy specials-- you know,
Wayne Newton at SeaWorld.
Wayne, meet Shamu.
Kids, let’s do a show.
From Orlando, Florida, it’s Wayne Newton at SeaWorld.
[applause]
And special guest appearance by Shamu, the killer whale!
[WAYNE NEWTON, "BAD, BAD LEROY BROWN"]
old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog.
When ’70s TV was bad, there was no description for it.
I mean, it’s corny, and it’s stupid.
That’s kind of what it was.
Everybody had a variety show.
Howard Cosell had a variety show.
You know what’s going to make this show work?
Yours truly, the born superstar.
Didn’t Shields and Yarnell have a show?
They were mimes, and they did something on Donny and Marie,
and it was popular.
So they went, well, give them a show.
Let’s see if it works.
At least ’70s television was way more in touch
with, hey, no one knows anything.
Oh, didn’t work.
Well, we tried.
Like, they don’t know.
They don’t know!
It became a way to bring the family together
in front of the television set without fully satisfying
any one member of that family.
It was disposable television.
People are going to see this once, and that’s it.
Variety shows did not repeat well.
They look arcane today.
The funny thing is, if you think the Star Wars Holiday
Special is bad or the "worst thing" that ever aired on TV,
you never saw The Lawrence Welk Show.
And that calls for a little soul music.
[variety music]
You never saw the Paul Lynde Halloween special.
(SINGING) Move it in, move it out.
Move it in and about.
Disco baby.
You never saw The Brady Bunch Variety Show.
(SINGING) There’s a new kind of dancing.
It’s going to be the rage.
Just move yourself behind like an actor on a stage.
The Brady Bunch Variety Hour and the Paul Lynde Halloween
Special, those stand out because they are so bad.
But there are other ones that are forgotten just because they
weren’t even memorably bad.
There are astronomically worse shows
that aired around this time, they just didn’t carry the name
Star Wars.
The Star Wars Holiday Special happened, again,
for multiple reasons.
CBS approached Lucasfilm wanting to do it.
We talked to George at one point about how this happened.
You don’t like this piece of content.
How does anything that you don’t like or you didn’t approve of
get through?
It’s like, it’s not that I didn’t approve of it.
There was so much pressure in between Star Wars and Empire.
The way that executives thought about the audience
is that everyone would just forget Star Wars was a thing.
The audience, they just can’t be depended upon.
So you got to make some other kind of short-term Star Wars
content.
What kind of TV show can you make
on the kind of budget it takes to make Star Wars?
And they’re like, holiday special.
And this was a way, a TV special,
to get mass exposure, to get more excitement until Empire
comes back and certainly it would help the toys.
Star Wars, the toys came later on.
They were ill-prepared for how successful
the movie was going to be.
Because there was no such thing as merchandising on movies.
Some TV stuff, but not movies.
Their lifespan is just too short.
Back then, by the time you would get a toy line out,
it would be 12 months to 18 months
after the movie already left theaters,
and nobody would remember the movie.
So nobody was willing to take that risk.
The official Kenner Star Wars models
are still in production in the orient
and won’t be ready for several months.
First Christmas, every kid in America wants a Star Wars toy,
but they had nothing to sell for Christmas.
And so, what they did was they sold you a coupon that you
would send in, and once the toys had been made,
they would ship you a set.
But in 1978, the toys were everywhere.
And this was the first Christmas where you could get Star Wars
toys, Star Wars everything.
And a key component of marketing that was the Star Wars Holiday
Special.
May the force be with you and your children.
[r2 beeps]
Our agent called and said that there’s a Star Wars Holiday
Special.
And we got really excited because we
thought this was going to be our annuity, that this holiday
show would run every year for an eternity.
The Charlie Brown Christmas, the Grinch That
Stole Christmas I mean, all of these things that’ll
be one forever.
As it turned out, it was only one viewing.
So the people who wrote the special--
and there were a bunch of them--
were not science fiction people.
They weren’t Star Wars fans.
I don’t know if they all had even seen Star Wars.
They were people who wrote variety,
and that’s what this show was.
It just happened to be themed to Star Wars.
I mean, you have to remember, we were comedy writers.
And to get into something like this was really thrilling.
And I said, where do I sign?
And it was fun from the beginning.
And the first day it was the staff--
Lenny Ripps and Pat Proft.
They were there.
And Ken and Mitzie Welch, who were writers
from The Carol Burnett Show, who did all the big musical things,
and George--
George Lucas.
And Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion,
who were actually allegedly producing it,
but they didn’t really produce it in the end.
When I was looking at the credits on the show and I saw
that they had-- it was a Smith-Hemion--
I said, it was a Smith-Hemion production?
That’s so stupid.
Because I don’t remember them being there.
But they were at the beginning when I thought about it.
And the other thing was we worked
with his director, a guy named David Acomba, who
was a director of rock and roll videos.
He made a successful rock and roll documentary there.
And there was that USC connection.
David was the voice of George.
If David had an idea, or we wanted to run something by him,
or there were questions, our assumption
was that it’s also what George wanted.
My intent was to see what George wanted
and try and make it happen.
But quickly there were--
Ken and Mitzie were assigned to the show, whom I didn’t know.
And then, when I found out what they did, I mean,
they wrote the music for the singing numbers and that.
I just thought that was one of the worst
parts of the show when she started singing
and all those kinds of fake, Broadway, forgettable show
tunes.
The wrong people to be assigned to work with me or vice versa.
The film industry and the variety television industry
are completely two separate animals.
I hear that David did not get along with the Welches.
And I didn’t realize that because I
wasn’t in the room with them when that was happening.
But that was the team.
What’s so unique about the Star Wars Holiday Special is not
just that they have the costumes and the permission
to use everything that we know of Star Wars,
but they actually got the cast--
the cast of Star Wars.
When I read it, I said this is awful.
[laughter]
I was-- it was in my contract.
[laughter]
There was no way--
no known way-- to get out of it.
Oh, all right, but I’m not singing!
They all slum it for a TV special.
Again, I have to imagine the paychecks made it worth it.
The talent was supposed to be the caliber of Cher,
Baryshnikov, and Ann-Margaret.
That was the people that they had hoped
would be on the variety show.
I didn’t think it was going to be
so much of a traditional variety show.
It never occurred to me that Harvey Korman, and Bea Arthur,
and Art Carney were going to be in it.
Yes, they were TV stars, but they were the elderly audience,
CBS audience TV stars.
It always occurred to me as something that
was put together by old TV.
You know, what is this?
Star what?
Whatever.
You know, where’s Captain Kirk?
Bring in-- you know who we need?
Art Carney.
He’s a TV legend.
You felt like they could have had cooler, hipper
people that they would have brought in
to do these various parts.
Ken and Mitzie were old school, and they were
used to doing it a certain way.
And David wasn’t crazy about that.
So there’s an interesting rumor about the Star Wars Holiday
Special, which I’ve always found fascinating,
which is that David Acomba was scouring improv clubs looking
for great acts that could appear in the special
and came across Robin Williams.
This was after he’d already been Mork on Happy Days
but before he had gotten Mork and Mindy on the air.
And he brought Robin to the Welches, who
immediately turned him away and said,
we’re only looking for name talent.
About a month later Mork and Mindy airs,
and Robin Williams explodes and could
have been a part of what made the Star Wars Holiday
Special fantastic.
They weren’t on-- just weren’t on the same wavelength.
And David felt that he was on George’s wavelength and that
they weren’t.
And they were there because there
had to be professionals who had done this kind of thing
before who knew what the requirements were.
And George came up with the original story.
It was going to be a one-hour special.
Now, the Star Wars holiday special that we know
didn’t start off the way that we experienced it.
It actually started off I think from a much purer place, which
is George Lucas trying to write a variety holiday
special, or at least just a holiday special.
So after Ralph McQuarrie passed in 2012,
they discovered, in his archive, a five-page treatment
for the Star Wars Holiday Special.
And it’s debated as to who actually wrote this treatment.
And when reading it, it does feel decidedly Lucas.
And when you look at those old Ralph McQuarrie concept pieces,
it makes sense that George would have
floated this five-page treatment to his key collaborator
on A New Hope.
When you read through the treatment,
George Lucas has a Jules Verne quality.
He sees the future.
Whether it is an iPad or virtual reality,
this idea of this kind of walking through a teleporter
and being able to be in a different spot.
But then there are other things that are so decidedly
weird like Raquel Welch.
"Guest star-- Raquel Welch--
volunteers for the job and leaves
to intercept the starship."
So Raquel is playing a starship officer,
which is already odd because most imperial officers are
British.
And she’s going to infiltrate the Starship Musica to stop
the Life Day celebration.
Raquel, under the guise of telling Lumpy
a story with dance and gestures about what drives a spaceship,
dances her way into the power supply room and screws
everything up.
This idea that Raquel Welch is doing some performance
art, Alvin Ailey kind of--
she’s describing how a spaceship works through dance?
There’s a lot of questions to be had here.
Look, who am I to judge?
But in reading this, it feels like, hey,
a nerdy guy who has maybe a crush on Raquel Welch.
He’s like, maybe I get to meet her.
Maybe she’ll be impressed by me.
Maybe we’ll hit it off.
We’ll go get a sandwich.
Nothing weird.
We spent one full 12-hour day working with George Lucas,
and that was worth everything.
I mean, he was the most-intense, most-focused person
I had ever met.
I mean, we were so into it that I forgot about lunch.
And that’s infrequent for me.
Then he told us the mythology of the story.
There was this Life Day.
[wookiee talk]
I know your family’s waiting.
[wookiee talk]
I know it’s an important day.
[wookiee talk]
All right, we’ll give it a try.
The story was Luke and Leia were--
and Han Solo were-- accompanying Chewbacca home
to his home planet for Life Day.
Which was a holiday George invented,
and he thought it would be like later
"Festivus for the rest of us" from Seinfeld would be.
But not so much.
Never happened.
It was kind of a Wookiee Rosh Hashanah.
You know?
I mean, it was the biggest day of the year.
The whole Life Day with the Wookiees
was something that George took very seriously at the time
and that also sort of expanded the Star Wars
universe in his first major visual expansion.
George didn’t choose the storyline lightly.
They wanted Chewbacca’s family have
exposure to show them as a loving family of creatures.
And to George Lucas, this was real.
I mean, you have to remember, he had come up
with at least a dozen stories, so he knew what this was about.
George met with the writers on the special
and actually showed them a large binder--
a Bible of sorts-- for the universe, where
we got to know a lot more about the characters
that we didn’t know at the time.
He was kind of like a reporter sharing with us
a world that we didn’t know.
Obviously, we were going to get to know a lot about Chewbacca’s
home life on Kashyyyk.
But there’s rumor that we were even potentially going
to learn more about Han Solo.
You’re like family to me.
[wookiee talk]
He said that Han Solo was married to a Wookiee,
but we can’t say that because people wouldn’t accept it.
Family to me.
That Wookiee looked at you with-- with lust.
That was--
[laughter]
Real affection.
[laughter]
No, Han was never married to--
that’s-- that’s not true--
That’s impossible!
Uh, OK.
Most of our work was with the Chewbacca stuff, not
the variety stuff.
The variety parts we left blank.
And originally the special was going
to be a one-hour special, which was typical for those variety
specials that the networks did.
But as Star Wars was more and more successful,
CBS got more and more excited and came back and said,
can we do a 90-minute special?
Can we do a two-hour special?
Then I found out what it actually
was going to be once we went to work.
And so did George.
And I think he was stunned.
You know?
I mean, we were pretty clear that it
was wonderful to spend a day with Lucas,
but we knew that we were not going to spend any more
time with him.
You know?
I mean, he had much bigger fish to fry.
George had detached himself.
I don’t think he ever envisioned a show with guest stars
and numbers.
Once again, we weren’t creating the material.
They were.
We just sort of approved it.
And then George got busy with pre-production
on The Empire Strikes Back, so he got less and less involved
with the holiday special.
Smith-Hemion were the top.
I mean, they had 92 Emmys, and they
were famous for doing really classy shows.
And Smith-Hemion, who the previous year had just done
the iconic David Bowie Bing Crosby Christmas special,
which endures to this day--
[BING CROSBY AND DAVID BOWIE, "PEACE ON EARTH - LITTLE DRUMMER BOY"]
Peace on Earth, can it be?
was put in charge of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
This was not really in their wheelhouse.
The first day I went to the set, and nobody was paying attention
to David Acomba because he was kind of bouncing off
the walls a little bit.
It was a mixture of worlds, and David’s approach
was to try to do it documentary, kind of one camera, even
shaky camera kind of thing.
And the production company really
wanted it to be multiple camera more often because you
could just get more done.
This is not-- everything was taking forever.
And I remember the beginning of the Star Wars show
was just absolutely brutal.
The hours were ridiculous.
But now, let’s get started, shall we?
And Harvey Korman is working his butt off,
but ooh, boy, does he know what he’s doing is not good.
And Harvey would wear anything I’d put on him.
And he did like to get into drag.
He also dressed up as Julia Child and did a bit as her.
A bit of the chloranthum root.
Wonderful.
Just adds that touch of piquancy.
I mean, Harvey has a character called
Mother Marcus on The Carol Burnett Show,
a big Jewish mama with big boobs and really funny.
And this is not that far from that character.
Consistency, don’t we?
And on the count of 1, stir, whip, stir, whip.
Whip, whip, stir.
Stir, whip, stir, whip.
Whip, whip, stir.
Sometimes when I’m cooking, that does come to mind.
Stir, whip, stir, whip.
Ooh, coming along.
Very nice.
OK, Harvey Korman is in a purple dress with silver hair
and forearms, and that’s still not the most weird thing
that’s happening in this film.
Harvey Korman is trying to pick up Bea Arthur, uh,
which is very disturbing.
What’ll it be?
Hello, Ackmena.
Come back soon.
I’ll be waiting.
And to somehow make the scene weirder,
he has, like, a hole in his head that he pours the drinks into.
I don’t remember it.
I just absolutely eliminated it from my mind.
It was too bizarre.
It was too otherworldly.
I couldn’t remember it.
I didn’t know what it was.
I couldn’t recognize myself.
The only thing I remember out of it
was the fun of working with Bea Arthur.
I mean, we had fun, but I don’t know what the hell
that thing was about.
Some things are so contradictory to the film that just came
out and established it.
Like, so, is this that cantina?
Because it’s all the same costumes and characters,
but it’s not at all dangerous.
Right?
Like, that is the purpose it serves in the film.
This is the most dangerous place, where arms are cut off,
people are shot under tables, and occasionally
Beatrice Arthur will break out into song.
Bea wanted to sing the "Alabama Song."
She wanted to do a number.
That was her proviso.
They finally, I think, went to the Brecht
estate, which was not interested in having the song done
on the Star Wars Holiday Special.
Oh, and you know who was in it?
Harvey Korman and I were in a bar with aliens
and strange-looking people.
And it’s a lovely piece written by Mitzie and Ken Welch.
So Ken and Mitzie wrote a song for Bea that was a lot like--
(SINGING) those were the days, my friend.
We thought they’d never--
which was like an up version of--
(SINGING) show me the way to the next whiskey bar.
and that’s what Bea winds up singing on the show.
(SINGING) Then homeward bound, friend,
don’t forget me in your dreams.
It’s the cantina music slowed down.
But it’s so funny, because none of us had lyrics to that.
And then this happens, and then kids
are starting to sing it on the playground and stuff.
I was hired as a Wookiee.
But I remember, when I showed up,
they had plenty of Wookiees, and they were looking
for someone that could dance.
So the choreographer said, we’re just going to pop you in here.
You’re going to be walrus man from now on.
And I became walrus man, and I got to dance with Bea Arthur.
I think part of the issue for that day
was the fact that there were so many people
being fitted into costumes.
That took hours.
I mean, the Bea Arthur thing took forever too.
But that was because the aliens kept fainting.
Those costumes were pretty hot, pretty unbearable.
There is no oxygen in these costumes.
You could not breathe in these costumes.
And this went on for hours, and hours, and hours.
Because it was like 103 degrees on the set, and you put
those heads on, and it’s kind of like waterboarding.
I think had we not stepped in, the actors--
We would have killed them.
David had no sense of--
The fact that they were suffocating.
their needs as human beings.
[laughter]
My eyes were supposed to be here,
but I’m looking through two little holes.
I can’t see out of the holes.
It’s like, OK?
And then, I have to--
and I don’t have hands.
I have hooves.
So it was just kind of like, here, you go grab her.
I felt my way down, and I just kind of grabbed her wrists
as best I could.
And I just started doing this with her.
(SINGING)-- one more dance, friend.
Just one more--
Kind of like L’chaim to life, like from Fiddler on the Roof.
That’s kind of that two-step dance.
So going, swaying back and forth to the music with Bea Arthur.
(SINGING) If you’re a friend, friend.
One part, it looks like Bea Arthur is having
an affair with a giant rat.
Just one more drop, friend, before we stop friends.
And interestingly enough, the gigantic rat
was saying, oh my god, get Bea Arthur off me.
And there’s that scene where Bea Arthur is like nuzzling a rat.
Rick Baker actually used that on another project.
And it was from a film he’d done two years ago, Food
of the Gods--
which is insane.
So we got a lot of remainder aliens
that kind of had mill flaws, so they looked fairly cheesy.
So the idea was, don’t go too close on any of them.
I never gave it much thought once we finished with it.
But even to this day, I get pictures
that fans send of me in the costume and everything.
And please autograph it.
I don’t remember how long we went.
I just remember doing another take, and then another take,
and another take.
I’m not surprised if I was there for 24 hours.
Is that a tear, friend, in your eye?
And it wasn’t even that good.
Like once you saw it, you went, wow.
You know?
They could have done that in an hour or two hours.
Now, it’s good night, friend.
What?
I’m Bob Mackie.
Welcome aboard, Mr. Mackie.
I’m Captain Stubing.
It’s an honor to meet you.
Thank you, captain.
Mr. Mackie designs the gowns for all the big TV stars.
Carol Burnett, Ann-Margaret, Cher.
That’s right.
You’ve heard them say, "clothes make the man?"
Well, I’m the man that makes the clothes.
[laughter]
Well, I had heard enough people enthusiastic about the Star
Wars Christmas Special.
And someone said-- and they were talking about it,
and I said, oh, I designed that.
You did?
[gasps] really?
It was like that.
And I just went, oh, OK.
Well, I guess it was more important
than I thought it was.
And when we walked in, they had big drawings of the costumes.
And we saw the ones that we would be wearing.
It was fantastic, and Bob Mackie was there,
and we had to do fittings.
And Bob Mackie was there.
It was-- I was thrilled.
We had the acrobats, and the gymnasts,
and all that whole group of circus people, which
I loved doing.
So that was our going to be our role.
We would be tumbling inside this little music box
to entertain the baby Chewbacca, Junior. (LAUGHING) I
don’t know what his name is.
Sorry.
It is very similar to a scene my father did in a movie
many years prior to that, Thief of Bagdad.
So in that one, pop was inside.
He was miniature, inside a little music box.
And then I have to have their heads cut off.
Oh!
And in this particular movie, we were going to be on a table,
like a flat surface.
And we were more like holograms.
I wanted to do them in bright colors
because everything in that film was like a neutral color.
You know, it’s all grays, and taupes, and browns, and beiges,
and a little black, and a little.
But basically no color really.
I guess in space they don’t have color.
This is the girl--
the gymnast girl.
And it’s a whole body suit.
So anything-- any time they moved,
the elastic would move with them,
and it would stay in place.
And then the five of us were in hot pink and Black.
That took a little getting used to for tumbling in and doing
pyramids, climbing up.
Because I was the top man--
person.
So climbing up, and so they wouldn’t get in your way.
So we had two jugglers, and they were in the Spandex as well.
What better testament to the mastery of John Williams
than whoever scored this entire holiday special?
Because somebody came in with a new Casio, like, synth sound.
And they’re like, you got to let me flex this out, you guys.
I’m telling you, it’s going to be timeless!
This is the first sketch I did.
And I wanted to have this kind of Asian, half man, half bird
kind of situation.
And he’s still a warrior.
They’re all like warriors of a certain kind.
He had this big tail that he could whip around like a whip,
but it was attached.
And he had all these pheasant feathers that
were dyed this green color.
Dance, slave.
Dance.
It was comfortable.
But only problem was then bathroom.
Yeah, every once in a while, someone will pop up
and they’ll want us to-- oh, I bought all the costumes.
One of things I love to collect are
when I have costume sketches of an actual costume I own.
So this is the only costume I own from the holiday special.
And this was very exciting too, that, like,
when I saw the things in the Julien’s auction,
I was like, that is one I definitely have to win.
It’s been over 40 years.
There’s people are still watching it online.
Like, it just-- yeah, it’s-- people still talk about it.
Jefferson Starship had this song that was a deep cut.
It was the last song of one of their albums
called "Hyperdrive."
Almost as if a producer looked at a list of artists
that were popular and then called someone and said,
"Hyperdrive."
We have hyperdrive.
Call up this Jefferson Star--
Starship?
We have starships!
It’s as if it wrote itself.
Yeah.
So we recorded this song "Light the Sky on Fire"
with Marty Bannon singing.
And he was the main singer because Grace was in rehab.
So we went ahead and ended up-- somehow we ended up on the Star
Wars Christmas--
Holiday Special-- it was Christmas special we called it
at the time.
And none of us really knew what was going on,
but we ended up playing there.
So when I found out that Jefferson Starship was going
to be part of the shoot-- we were actually
going to shoot a number with them.
So I thought, oh, this is going to be really cool.
We had a connection-- not really.
I mean, I didn’t know a lot about what was going on.
I remember we were rehearsing at Paul’s-- it was Grace’s house
over in San Francisco overlooking the Bay.
It’s a beautiful house.
And Darth Vader came by, and it was like a publicity thing.
Came by and took some photographs,
and we got some photographs of us hanging out
with Darth Vader.
So we had some relationship already.
Of course, I didn’t really know what to expect.
I mean, I figured they had their stuff together, you know?
[laughs]
It’s really bizarre.
It’s really bad, bad special effects.
But you know what?
A lot of reviewers in 1978 praised this.
They thought the special effects in this thing
were the highlight of the show.
Looking back on it now, this can’t be a highlight.
It was a trip.
I remember a little bit about it.
I mean, I remember they let us loose in a room full of props,
like a costume room kind of thing.
They said, just try and make up an outfit.
No direction really, just individually
make up anything you want.
And it just-- as long as it looks
like it’s from another galaxy or something or from the future.
I think the finished product didn’t really
come out as if it was a music video as much
as they thought it might.
I guess-- yeah, I guess Art Carney--
it’s sort of they’re interacting,
and it’s with his wry humor with one
of the stormtrooper guys sitting there in front
of this futuristic device.
Will you get on with it?
OK, OK.
And they press the button, and then we start--
we’re suddenly, there we are, playing
our song "Light the Sky on Fire" with all
these weird, cheesy effects all around.
And we’re all sort looking like we’re from another galaxy
supposedly.
But we really probably didn’t.
We looked pretty silly.
[JEFFERSON STARSHIP, "LIGHT THE SKY ON FIRE"]
Will you light the sky on fire.
Will you light the sky on fire every night?
You can take me higher than the diamonds in the sky.
We didn’t really know how they were going to use it.
I’m not even certain they knew how they were going to use it.
So eventually we started just running behind
on that schedule.
And the more we ran behind, the more the people
who are in the production side of things with the money
got a little bit nervous.
And I remember that we shot considerable amount
of the entire show budget the first three
days of the production because we were over into overtime
so much.
And the network freaked out.
Because they said, this guy is going
to go over schedule, over budget,
and then we’re going to have to edit this thing,
and we won’t have what we need, and all that.
And it went on to the point where they
said we have to get rid of him.
We have to lose him.
[dramatic music]
One of the reasons why I left was
that it just was not working.
You know?
And it was very confusing because so many people
had their fingers in the pie.
And I’m not sure if George understood
just what the difference was between film
and television in the US.
Because I don’t think he ever worked in television.
I don’t think George realized that he picked the wrong format
in which to do these stories.
That wouldn’t happen today.
But then, 40 years ago, this was the style.
And so, it was executed by people who
did these things all the time.
But I felt sorry for David.
Because he kind of went back with his--
partially with his tail tucked between his legs,
but partially with the time-honored--
"it’s Hollywood.
They don’t know what they’re doing.
No wonder everything is such crap
when it comes out of Hollywood.
I’m going back to Toronto."
And he went back and did some beautiful stuff.
I don’t want to answer any more questions about the show.
OK?
It’s just-- it’s just that simple.
You know?
You guys go ahead and do whatever you want.
You do whatever you want to do with all the people you get
and all that, but I’m not interested in contributing
to the story at all.
At that point, given the amount of overtime
that they were creating and how expensive that was all
becoming for the production company, something very unusual
happened is that we just hit the brakes
and we came to a complete stop.
When David left, there were problems.
Because directors don’t leave when things are going well.
So they were scrambling.
But we were out of it at that point.
I mean Ken and Mitzie apparently were on the set
every day working with the show all day.
They put in an emergency call into Steve Binder,
who was a terrific variety show director who had done the Elvis
Comeback specials and a lot of other stuff
and who knew how to direct a variety
show in the conventional way.
So when Gary phoned me at home, and I said, what’s going on?
And he said, well, the truth of the matter
is we started a two-hour prime time special for CBS.
We’re way over budget, and there’s
a decision being made right now whether to continue
making the special or shutting it down permanently.
He was replaced by Steve Binder, who
was really a top-notch guy who knew what he was doing.
He brought a sense of control that
was missing from the production, I think,
which helped get things back on track.
The budget was $1 million.
I don’t think that Steve had the opportunity to really make
very many changes.
The way I saw it, for him, it was pretty much triage.
[wookiee talk]
It’s long been said that George had always
wanted to do a story that focused specifically
on the Wookiee home planet.
I can’t tell you why.
That’s something that he wanted to see on screen.
The origins of this concept of a Wookiee family
can be traced back to Lucas.
I know there’s audio, 1976, and a brainstorming
session between Alan Dean Foster,
George Lucas, and Charlie Lippincott which was recorded.
[dramatic music]
Obviously, he didn’t go and do that as a sequel concept.
But that idea remained in his head.
And it seems like it was the seed for the holiday
special, which he then revisited several years later.
There was no way it could be done.
It featured the Wookiees.
They were the stars of the story.
And the Wookiees speak no known language.
[wookiee talk]
This was in the era when they wouldn’t put subtitles
on television because they figured most of America
would not read them.
There’s a terrific YouTube thing where someone has gone in
and added their own subtitles.
[wookiee talk]
Had we been able to use subtitles,
it would have been a lot easier.
Because we could have had the Wookiees interacting more.
But we didn’t.
Instead we had to have people translating from the Wookiee
to English, which was an opening for a lot of guest stars.
CBS liked that.
I suspect Art Carney didn’t really know what Star Wars was.
And how are my favorite Wookiees today?
[wookiee talk]
Why are the long, hairy faces?
Art Carney understood the Wookiee language,
and he could translate so the audience would understand
what they were talking about.
[wookiee talk]
Officer, maybe I could be of some help here.
I found, in Art Carney’s trailer,
he filled the shower with ice, and then he
had bottles of different kinds of alcohol
in the bottom of the trailer.
So when I met Art, he was pleasant enough.
But I learned soon that I had to shoot all of his scenes
early in the day.
That wherever he went to eat lunch,
he may have had a little bit too much to drink at the time.
It’s me, Saun Dann.
[wookiee talk]
God bless, Art Carney and his character
of Saun Dann, where Saun Dann brings gifts to the family,
hands Itchy a mind evaporator, which tells you
everything you need to know about what they
thought VR would be for people.
Now then, Itchy, I thought you might like this.
It’s one of those--
well, it’s a real-- it’s kind of hard to explain.
It’s a wow!
If you know what I mean.
When you put this helmet on, it attached
to a port that had been put under your skin in your brain,
and it would realize your fantasies.
So you could sit at home in your chair,
and your fantasies would play out in front of you.
Happy Life Day.
I do mean Happy Life Day.
So we were going to see all the Wookiee’s dreams.
So itchy, the silverback Wookiee, had a fantasy.
It was supposed to be about Cher,
but Cher suddenly couldn’t do it.
And so, Diane Carroll stepped in.
And Diane fit into the Bob Mackie costume.
I exist for you.
I am in your mind as you create me.
Oh, yes.
I can feel my creation.
[giggles] I’m getting your message.
Are you getting mine?
[wookiee talk]
In what world, planet, galaxy, in any time,
has anybody ever wanted their grandpa
to enjoy porn in the middle of the living room?
That’s the least believable thing in a holiday special.
Oh.
We are excited, aren’t we?
Well, just relax.
Just relax.
Yes.
It’s him watching humans or aliens that are not Wookiees.
And we had to be careful--
I remember this-- not to make it too racy for the grandfather
with Diane.
(LAUGHING) Yes.
You know, I didn’t have approval of anything,
but that just seemed wrong.
But I didn’t see that when I was a kid.
All I saw was, why isn’t Han Solo on the screen?
Why can’t we see the real Chewie?
Chewie’s family sucks!
Now, we can have a good time.
Can’t we?
And it’s cringe-worthy.
Because as he sits there and rewinds, and replays,
and rewinds, and replays.
I find you adorable.
And then goes into a song that Itchy enjoys thoroughly.
(SINGING) This minute now.
This minute now.
This was not made for children.
Whoever the creative team was in charge of the Star Wars Holiday
Special has zero time for children’s entertainment.
They’re like, uh, uh, uh, I saw that Star Wars movie,
and there wasn’t enough VR Wookiee porn for me.
[wookiee talk]
Where’s Chewbacca?
[wookiee talk]
When you were on the Wookiee home planet,
how did you even understand what they were saying?
I don’t remember ever being on a Wookiee home planet.
[laughter]
Actually, Luke was on the Wookiee home planet Kashyyyk
in the Holiday Special when he helped
Chewie get home to his wife.
[laughter]
Chewie had a wife?
Her name is Malla.
Come on, Malla.
Let’s see a little smile.
Come on.
Mark Hamill’s makeup in the holiday special
rivals Huey Lewis’s makeup in the "Do You Believe in Love"
video.
We always thought it was because Mark Hamill was covering up
a scar, like the plastic surgery didn’t heal.
And that’s why they added that wampa capture scene,
because they needed to show why Luke Skywalker had
a scar on his face.
Now, decades pass.
We find out that that’s not true at all.
But that really wasn’t the main emphasis
of why we wrote the monster in the beginning.
It was just we needed something to kind of keep the film
suspenseful at the beginning while the empire is
finding them.
But the truth is, it’s just bad makeup.
These are Tony producers making this special.
They are used to caking on the makeup for musicals,
for stage performances.
Also, you have to remember the degradation
of each copy of the holiday special gets worse and worse
and worse, which means the coloring is not
going to be corrected.
Over the period of years, it’s built up
into having my face reconstructed
with plastic surgery.
George told us that he had 10 stories
that he had come up with, and he was
planning on making six movies.
And he had four other stories that he was
putting in different places.
And one of them was Boba Fett, but he hadn’t quite
figured out what Boba Fett’s story was going to be.
So he took his pilot version of it
and made it an animated thing and was going to inserted it
into this special.
They were doing this holiday special,
and there wasn’t much of our involvement,
but I came up with the idea, why don’t we take the Boba Fett
character and put him in that.
Make a little movie out of it.
I am Boba Fett.
Follow me, friend.
After Return of the Jedi, all the Tim Zahn novels,
all the Dark Horse comics, like all of this content
came out about how awesome Boba Fett was.
But it all starts with that animation
in the holiday special.
The animated bit, which I think was
done by Nelvana, which is a Canadian company that
eventually did the Droids and Ewoks TV series.
George had seen a special that we did called Cosmic Christmas
and really liked it.
And so, when he was working with David Acomba, who
was a mutual friend, you know, David
had suggested that we might be good for the Star Wars special.
That was how the relationship all started.
So the cartoon that’s contained within the holiday special
is this kind of short, 10 or 11-minute cartoon,
subtitled "The Faithful Wookiee."
And it’s the story about how the rebels are
looking for Han Solo and Chewbacca who have disappeared.
They find them, and they’ve been affected by this sleeping
virus that only affects humans.
And as soon as they discover it, Luke gets infected.
And then it’s up to Chewbacca and the droids
to try and rescue them.
And it was written by George.
And I loved the roughness of Star Wars.
I loved the fact that everything was beaten up and lived in.
We wanted to get that kind of real world quality
into the animation too and not make it too pristine.
It was a little bit loosely based on Moebius.
George wanted the style of Moebius,
who was a famous science fiction Illustrator.
And so, that was the inspiration for the style
of the characters.
That style of animation, that like nearly rotoscoped,
everything that was vogue in animation in that era,
it was that applied to Star Wars.
But it was crazy.
Like, this was-- there’s nothing like it, that animated
sequence.
To me, to this day, even if I don’t--
I know what the holiday special is.
I know it’s crazy and kind of a mess.
But I still point to that animated bit and go,
this is crazy.
Like, this is just vibrant.
But I love the introduction of Boba Fett and that rifle
that he had.
That animated piece still holds up.
It’s pretty cool.
And I draw inspiration from that.
Jon Favreau has declared himself a fan of the Star Wars Holiday
Special and he made a concerted effort
to put lots of little Easter eggs and little references
to the holiday special throughout The Mandalorian.
Because we all ordered the Boba Fett figure
by sending in our proofs of purchase
from the back of the package, and we got this figure
before he ever appeared on screen.
You could get Boba Fett in the mail before the movie came out.
So at the time, the action figure
Boba Fett was supposed to have a little rocket that fired out
of the jetpack.
But there were a lot of safety issues
at the time with a lot of toys that came out then that had
that rocket-firing feature.
And so, they never made it that way.
His toy is so badass, it might kill me.
They had to include the rocket in.
And so, a generation of kids were like, whoa,
who is this guy?
And the only time we’d seen him was
in the holiday special, which you know well
because you put the gun in.
So the forked rifle that the Mandalorian carries
is a direct reference to the holiday special,
because Boba Fett does not have that weapon when he appears
in The Empire Strikes Back.
So it’s not in any of the movies.
It’s only in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
I remember when you were all proud when George came to set.
Did you see the gun we have?
Yeah.
Do you know that was a homage too.
That cannon, right?
Because you wrote it.
Not really.
You said, hey, we put that gun in from the holiday special.
And he goes, oh, I had nothing to do with that.
[laughter]
One thing people love to talk about in terms of Chewbacca’s
role and how important he was at the end of Star Wars,
and how important he may have even
been seen by the filmmakers at the end of Star Wars,
is that you give Han Solo a medal,
and you give Luke Skywalker a medal,
but Chewbacca only gets a chance to stand up
on the platform and roar at the end of Star Wars.
There was a question-- why didn’t Chewbacca
get a medal at the end of Star Wars?
And George’s answer to that was Wookiees
don’t want-- he didn’t want a medal.
But his reward was that Han would take them
back to his home planet for Life Day celebration.
So on the very last day of shooting, from day one
when I arrived at Warner Brothers,
I was curious how we were going to approach
shooting the finale, which has not only the original
cast from Star Wars I the movie, but also about 100 extras.
They saved all this money by not having
to suit them by just dressing them in these robes--
these honorary Life Day robes.
And they’re all parading through while Carrie sings her song.
And that song that I sing--
(SINGING) We celebrate a day of peace.
(SINGING)--a day of harmony.
She wasn’t-- she wasn’t a great singer.
But the song was apparently the deciding factor
in getting her onto the show.
Just the set itself looked so fake.
You know?
Film is very forgiving, especially
if it’s lit properly.
But this just looked so cheesy.
I called my art director in.
What’s the set for the big finale?
And he looked at me straight in the eye, and he said,
Steve, I hate to break it to you, but we’re out of money.
We have no set for the finale.
I want you to go into Hollywood, go to every candle
store you can find, and buy every candle
they have in their shop.
So the night before we actually shot the finale,
we placed fat candles, thin candles, tall candles,
short candles all over the floor of the stage.
And we spent the morning of the actual shoot lighting
all of these candles.
The end of this movie is basically
like the Heaven’s Gate cult occurs to the Wookiee family.
(LAUGHING) Like, they all--
right?
Like, they start singing a song, they hold up their light orbs,
and clearly they die and ascend to a new realm
where they enter the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.
I think that’s what it--
I think that’s what’s happening.
The line producers of the Star Wars Holiday Special
were Ken and Mitzie Welch.
They admittedly came to me and said, hey,
we’ve never produced anything like this.
Miki was the point person between Lucasfilm, and CBS,
and the production company, Smith-Hemion,
that was actually making the special.
We couldn’t tell them what to do.
I mean, that was their project, their show, and they didn’t--
it was, like, out of control.
I told Gary if I came in to direct and help put
the fire out, the one thing I would not be available
was I had a show to go to, I was already committed to.
I would not be able to participate in one day or one
second of editing.
But we weren’t in-- you have to understand,
we weren’t in the loop at that point.
I mean, at that point, it was Ken and Mitzie Welch’s show.
Ken and Mitzie were variety show producers,
but they didn’t know anything about science fiction,
and they didn’t know how to edit.
I had never edited anything in my life.
You know?
I write.
I’ll never forget this--
I saw all of those tapes, and I thought, what am I going to do?
And I do remember, I burst into tears.
I have never ever not edited any of my shows other than the Star
Wars Holiday Special.
And to this day, I regret it.
I’m sorry I wasn’t there.
Because I knew it would fall on Mitzie and Ken,
and I knew they had zero experience.
They were there to get the show done.
It would never have gotten done otherwise.
But we were in contact with George Lucas,
and he knew what he wanted in terms
of the look and everything.
Yeah, Miki Herman.
She was our liaison with--
That’s right.
George.
She was there all the time, every day.
And there in editing too.
And in editing, yeah.
They just left it up to the variety show producers.
And, you know, they regretted it.
[dramatic music]
On Friday night, blast off to a galaxy far, far away.
It’s the Star Wars Holiday Special.
You’re on.
So we would throw a Thanksgiving for the lost
boys-- for all the people who couldn’t go home.
So that was the night before.
So the next night we all went back and had leftovers
and watched the Star Wars special,
which was on Friday night of that weekend.
This is the days before the VCR, so we couldn’t tape it.
If you did not see it when it aired, that was it.
So I had a party at my house that night
for when the show was there.
It was catered, and it had all of my friends,
and there were people with trays.
I wanted to see this more than I wanted to live.
You know, I was a young Catholic kid,
and I was always afraid God was going to kill me and stuff.
And I was like, oh lord, please.
Please, just don’t kill me until I see the Star Wars Christmas
special.
And after that first commercial, I turned it off,
and I said, OK, everybody, let’s eat.
You know?
I had no idea what it had become.
And it was great.
I mean, they loved me Bea, and they loved Harvey,
and they loved all of that.
They loved all the crap, of course.
All the camp stuff they loved.
But what wasn’t camp in that show?
It just seemed so weird even at the time.
And when it came out, it was like, oh my god, this
is what they did for the holiday special?
They made the mistake of farming it out I think was the problem.
They farmed it out to people that
were used to doing Perry Como and Bob Hope specials.
And it shows.
I noticed that a lot of people who write me and make comments
about the Star Wars Holiday Special say,
I was five years old when I watched it.
I was 10 years old when I watched it.
They have a whole different perspective of it.
Because they usually add, "And I loved it."
From what I remember as a kid, the Star Wars Holiday Special
was tremendous.
I was super excited.
I was over anxious, simply because something
from the Star Wars world was going to be on television.
We’re starving, as fans, for anything Star Wars.
Other than the movie, that’s the only other thing
that I saw that had Harrison Ford in it or on it at all.
I’ll take anything.
I don’t care if they’re going to juggle, sing, dance.
And all the kids talked about it at school
the next day and so forth.
And then everybody promptly forgot about it after that.
A sinking feeling came in, where I was like,
oh, this isn’t going to be as good as I’d hoped it.
In a weird way, it was a prep for what
I would experience decades later with the prequels,
where I sat down, could not have been more excited,
could not have been more jazzed, and then
it took time, as I was watching it, to realize like something’s
wrong.
I think with probably like the plague in the Middle Ages,
after everybody died, they decided to change the subject.
So I don’t remember people talking about it much.
[mysterious music]
It’s like one of those Mandela effect things,
where for a long time a bunch of people
didn’t even know the Star Wars Christmas special existed.
As the internet grew, it became this sort
of like talking point.
Are you a Star Wars fan?
Yeah.
Do you know about the holiday special?
Now, I know you’re a Star Wars fan.
But this really showed a different level of commitment.
Like, most casual Star Wars fans don’t
know about the holiday special.
And so, all of a sudden, it kind of surfaced.
And that was when he tried to really bury it.
You tell somebody you can’t have something,
they want it even more.
So I got the Star Wars Holiday Special on a VHS tape,
sixth-generation copy.
That would have been valuable currency
to a prototypical nerd, Star Wars fan.
Years later, when I first interviewed George Lucas,
and we finished the main part of the interview, and I said,
I’ve got another question for you.
What about the holiday special?
And he said, "Oh, that damn thing."
He said, "If I could personally go out and find
all of the bootleg VHS tapes, I would smash them all."
And I told that anecdote at a convention in Australia.
That sort of went around the world.
George Lucas wishes there were never a holiday special,
and he would smash all the tapes.
I take some pride in having started that anecdote,
and I got it right from the horse’s mouth.
In a way, the fact that Lucas has
spent so much time denying it makes it
more popular for some people.
Because it seems like it’s something
they shouldn’t see or can’t see.
[dramatic music]
George didn’t say anything during production.
Because, again he had moved away to work on other things.
I blame-- not blame.
That’s the wrong word.
Lucas-- when Lucas walked away, he said, do whatever you want.
And then he got upset because we did whatever we wanted.
He knew it wasn’t going to be wonderful.
And really, I don’t think he saw it
until about the same time we all did.
And he immediately hated it.
Because I’m bold with George when we’re having
conversations, and I asked him.
And I was like, "Oh, man, what did you--
how did you feel when you saw the first cut?"
And he was like, "Well, I did ask if there was
a way that we couldn’t air it.
Did it have to air?"
But it was a lot of money, and it had to air.
To this day, I’ve never met George Lucas.
All I heard was he tried to buy the negatives
and never ever showed this again after it aired.
I don’t blame anybody, but he is the only person who really
could have controlled it.
You know, all the Star Wars actors
were in this thing playing the roles that they made famous
a year earlier.
And now, the guy who created those roles
for them, George Lucas, says, eh, I’m not
really associated with this.
I have my name on all the good things I’ve done
and all the bad things I’ve done.
But maybe if I could have taken my name off of the bad things
I would have.
George, to be fair, hasn’t been out there
going, like, I hate the Christmas special.
It’s not like he’s lamenting it loudly.
But it’s very-- he’s made it clear over the years
that he ain’t into this.
I think, at the time, when the holiday special was broadcast,
it was not considered to be a big failure or giant
anomaly that it is considered to be today.
I don’t know for sure, but I certainly
didn’t hear from anybody that there
was any fallout from the show, that anybody was fired.
I think life just went on at Lucasfilm.
The whole purpose of this show was to sell toys to kids.
There were also going to be action figures of the Wookiee
family.
We only know of one set of the prototype Wookiee action
figures that Kenner was maybe going to make.
But there were the four action figures--
Itchy, Chewbacca, Mallatobuck, and Lumpy.
So clearly, somebody thought that there
was money to be made in doing merchandise based on the Star
Wars Holiday Special.
But that never happened.
When something is that huge, people
can’t control, as hard as they do, the way it’s
going to be marketed.
An advertising series in Japan for Panasonic,
between 1989 and 1993, and they used George Lucas and all
of the characters in Star Wars.
And I saw the contract.
There was a series of penalties if any of these commercials
showed in the US.
And in terms of embarrassment to the franchise,
I remember a commercial where Darth Vader was fighting
with a lightsaber, and then it shorted out,
and he opened up the hilt and the batteries were dead.
Energizer bunny, like, goes cymballing through the frame.
And I was like, there goes the dignity of the great Sith Lord.
You can see the awful George Lucas Super Live
Adventure in seven parts from Japan
from 1993 on the internet.
And it’s like a stage show.
And it covered not only like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
I mean, I think it was covering Tucker,
and it’s covering everything that Lucas has done.
That was all singing, all dancing stormtroopers.
I mean, you know, give me a break.
It’s just (LAUGHING) the machine is just going to take over.
And it’s like, why not make a holiday special?
And at that time, I have a feeling that George just
wasn’t--
either he was too busy, or he didn’t fully understand
the changes that were happening, or maybe just figured this is
a variety show, who cares. (LAUGHS) You know?
A lot of people came into watching it thinking, oh,
we’re going to get a TV sequel to Star Wars.
It’s going to be a science fiction adventure show
and stuff like that?
And that’s never what it was.
It was a variety show.
It’s easy to poke fun at stuff after the fact,
and question how it happened, and sort of make fun of it.
It’s cliche, at this point, to crap on the Star Wars Holiday
Special.
It really is.
Everybody, without even having sat through the entire thing,
just instantly it’s a punch line.
The legacy of the Star Wars Holiday Special
is in how it impacted all of us fans.
And as people continue to create for Star Wars,
they’ll keep on adding these Easter eggs in.
You’ll keep on seeing things in the background--
these callbacks, these little things that tip the hat to you,
the viewer, that this is made by someone
who truly loves Star Wars.
Together we will rule the galaxy--
Cut, cut, cut.
I quit.
This is the holiday special all over again.
[laughter]
The Glee Holiday Spectacular.
[PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY, "TREPAK (RUSSIAN DANCE)"]
Our first ever, live-action holiday special.
What is it, Star Wars Christmas?
[laughter]
No, don’t be ridiculous.
That’s Wookiee Life Day.
[laughter]
I’ve got you now.
[wookiee talk]
Sorry.
Yeah, I was hoping to be free for Life Day.
I love these connective tissues.
I love the fact that we’ve taken Life Day,
and we said, no, November 17, the day the special was
released, is now Life Day.
So on Earth, in the Disney Parks, in the world,
we celebrate it.
As much as Lucasfilm might not want to acknowledge its
existence, we’ve seen it infiltrate Disney+.
We’ve seen merchandise all over the theme parks themed
around Life Day.
No one’s talking about the holiday special directly,
but we are, as a fandom, embracing Life Day.
Maybe this could mean, down the road, at some point,
they might release the entire holiday special.
Who knows?
I think he should embrace it.
I mean, like, it’s not his fault. He didn’t do it--
I don’t think.
And am I going to stand on a soapbox
and proclaim that this is canon?
No.
But it’s really interesting, and it’s really fun.
The Star Wars special is kind of an anomaly for fans,
because it was kind of the one big thing
that Lucasfilm did before it got its act together and got
its system together to make sure that things like this
never happened again.
It’s just a curiosity.
I mean, the Star Wars universe is so different now.
As much as I, as a fan, would love
to have a nice, pristine copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special,
I understand why he probably wouldn’t want
to put that out in the world.
You know, it may not be, like, our favorite part of the Star
Wars mythos, but it has its place.
It’s an important part of Star Wars history.
Star Wars fans are collectors, right?
So it does have, built into it, more than any film or TV
show made for Star Wars, this exclusive collectibility
element of it.
I don’t think Disney+ should put it out.
Part of the thing that makes it so wonderful
is that it still has that bootleg feel to it.
I think it’s actually surprising that Lucasfilm and Disney
haven’t released the holiday special in some format.
Why let the bootlegs run the show?
They should actually have an official release of it.
Let the audience discover it.
And when they discover it, it means more.
Here’s the one way they should release it.
They should let George Lucas have it and then put
all the crazy--
just let him George Lucas the hell out of it.
I would love to do--
someday, maybe on Disney+, we’ll do a holiday special too.
Do you think we’ll ever see another Star Wars holiday
special.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
Maybe there’s a version that none of us
can imagine that would be genius.
Yeah.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Oh, that’d be insane.
I got to pitch that to them. We’ll see.
If you want to see a holiday special, let Disney+ know.
Wow, you heard it here first.
I also believe that George Lucas is, at his heart,
an experimental filmmaker, and he
wants to make things that are weird and different.
And the holiday special is that.
The greatest crime of the Star Wars Christmas and/or Holiday
Special is that it ain’t Star Wars.
But to be fair, what is?
At this point, George Lucas is probably
like, you know what, it’s been out there.
Whatever.
I’ve moved on.
It’s a thing that happened.
But if Star Wars Holiday Special kind of sneaks in there,
I don’t think he cares anymore.
Though, I don’t think he’d want another one.
[laughs]
[triumphant music]
George once asked us, please, never mention it again.
And I said, George, we should own that.
Because it shows that everybody’s fallible.
Everybody makes mistakes.
When you work in any project, you fall in love.
What else are you going to do?
I have worked on shows that were really popular
and shows that were horrible, and I didn’t work any more
or less hard on any of them.
[blues piano]
Every filmmaker has to grapple with not everything is
going to be a hit.
There is no being an artist without failure.
There just-- there is no being an artist without failure.
Time has a real amazing way of allowing
you to embrace the past.
It’s a very difficult place to be
an artist on the public stage making movies.
Because everybody is watching you,
and many people are rooting for you to fail.
All my life, since the Donny and Marie Show was created,
I’ve wanted nothing to do with it.
If you look at other franchises, they
would die to have the fan base of Star Wars.
It’s crazy.
Like, Star Trek would love to have what Star Wars has.
They don’t have anything like it.
Nobody does.
When you have a bunch of people that love something
and take it into their hearts, they claim it.
And when these things don’t behave the way we want them to,
well, it seems like we’ve become a culture that doesn’t
know how to handle that.
Watch the good stuff, and either ignore the bad stuff
or delight in the bad stuff ironically.
I have learned to embrace it.
I’ve learned to say, you know, I’m not embarrassed about it
as much.
You know, I did the best I could at the time.
That’s what was popular.
That’s what people were buying and watching,
and it was appropriate for the day.
I think failure defines people sometimes more than success.
I think failure is one of the great motivators.
The Star Wars Holiday Special led to stuff like Andor.
That all of that failure is part of that process.
Someway, somewhere, somehow, somebody
is going to make fun of you.
Don’t let it bother you.
Move ahead.
Be an artist.
Sometimes the magic happens, and sometimes it’s
the Star Wars Holiday Special.
[upbeat music]
There was a new flash in between the commercials,
and the bootleg had all the commercials from 1978.
And that was actually-- eventually,
that became part of the charm.
They’ve become part of this movie.
And the anchor is the funniest part is.
Because he’s just there, and he’s like
fighting the frizzies.
You know, tonight at 11:00.
Fighting the frizzies at 11:00.
I’ve been surreptitiously made a cult figure,
whether I wanted to or not.
And then they parodied that on South Park.
And now, fighting the frizzies.
Why are they doing this?
Why the parody?
Nobody remembers the serious things and the profound things
that I did in my career, but they all
remember fighting the frizzies at 11:00.
[music continues]