Only once has George Lucas handed over the reins for Star Wars to someone else. It was a mistake he would never make again.
The first time director Jeremy Coon sat down to watch the Star Wars Holiday Special, on a bootleg DVD, “I made it 20 minutes in, and after that, I wasn’t convinced it was a real thing”, he says. “I thought someone had somehow edited other things together to make this look like it was Star Wars-related. I just couldn’t believe it had ever actually aired.”
But air it had, in the Christmas of 1978 – and despite Lucas taking his name off the project, asking his stars to never discuss it publicly, and going out of his way to ensure that it was never seen by anyone ever again, the Star Wars Holiday Special is now infamous, the stuff of legend, considered one of the worst pieces of television ever made. It might be the one Star Wars film Disney and George Lucas would rather you forget.
And now, it has been immortalised further in Coon’s documentary, A Disturbance in the Force. Co-directed with Steve Kozak, the film interperses interviews with those involved in the trainwreck with commentary from Holiday Special superfans like “Weird” Al Yankovic, stand-up Patton Oswalt, filmmaker Kevin Smith and actor Seth Green.
The Holiday Special came about just a year after George Lucas’s first adventure in a galaxy far, far away – Star Wars, later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope – had forever changed movie culture. Lucas hadn’t even had time to wrap his mind around the scope of its success, but he was already hard at work on its follow-up, The Empire Strikes Back. Determined not to compromise his vision, he made the unprecedented decision to self-fund the sequel in order to retain full creative control. It was a massive risk, one that left him rich on autonomy but poor on brain space – and when talk of making a festive special to keep rabid Star Wars fans happy between movies popped up, Lucas decided to delegate.
The result was a disaster. Campy, cringy and downright hard to watch, the Holiday Special takes the form of a variety show, and follows a core concept that was initially devised by Lucas before getting lost in a black hole filled with too many chefs. It sees familiar heroes Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) as they dodge Imperial baddies to accompany their pal Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) back to his home planet of Kashyyyk for Life Day – a sort of “Star Wars Christmas”. However, thanks to its many bizarre detours, that’s not what fans remember it for.
Instead, strange segments featuring unsettling VR wookie “porn”, bad space gags from American comics Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman and Art Carney, Princess Leia sticking lyrics in the Star Wars theme and a Jefferson Starship track welded themselves to viewers’ brains, making Holiday Special bootlegs prized collectables at Star Wars conventions for years to come.
“The VR wookie ‘porn’ scene is really the most memorable thing from the entire special,” says Coon. “That’s the part where I thought: ‘OK, we’re going to get some answers on this. I want to know the context of it.” The scene in question involves Chewbacca’s dad Itchy getting a little too excited at a one-on-one virtual reality encounter with the late actor and singer Diahann Carroll.
“I would’ve loved to have talked to Carroll about it because presumably when she recorded it, she had no idea what was on the other side of what she was recording,” chuckles Coon. “I assume someone told her eventually. Like, ‘Hey, you’re in this really weird scene where a Wookie is getting excited over you…’ Just to hear her response would’ve been great.” Carroll died in 2019, so while Coon and Kozak couldn’t answer that question, their film does shed light on some of the special’s many other odd moments through new interviews with those who made them.
“Context is everything for this special,” explains Coon. “In the context of 70s TV, variety shows were very popular. Looking back, it would’ve been weird for them to not try and do something like this. Some people think it was supposed to be a kind of connective tissue between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, which couldn’t be further from the truth: it leans more towards marketing than it does storyline. It was basically a way to market toys that were coming out at Christmas 1978, and if you look at it through that lens, it did its job.”
This guiding force is far from unusual in the Star Wars we all know today – but back in the late 70s, nobody had a clue just how huge this little space adventure would be. “People presumably thought Star Wars would fade into oblivion after a few years,” suggests Coon. “In the documentary, Patton Oswalt rightly points out that there were plenty of other variety shows released around the same time that were just as bad or even worse – but they weren’t memorable because they didn’t have Star Wars attached to them.”
While many of the special’s surviving creatives offer bemused and candid thoughts on crafting something they all thought would be quickly forgotten, one voice remains largely absent. “I can’t say we were hyper-aggressive with pursuing an interview with George Lucas, just because we knew the answer was going to be ‘no’,” admits Coon, before assuring me he would’ve certainly included Lucas’s input if he was up for it. Still, they had access to the next best thing: Seth Green – an actor who had worked closely with Lucas on Star Wars Detours, a Robot Chicken-esque animated comedy series with an afterlife similar to the Holiday Special.
In 2013, 39 full episodes of Green’s show were completed and ready to go (some of which included tongue-in-cheek appearances from Lucas himself) before Disney quietly stuck all of them in the vault after purchasing Lucasfilm a year earlier.
“Seth had talked to Lucas about [the Holiday Special] and the surprising thing is that he told me he has a very good sense of humour and isn’t as uptight as his reputation would have you believe,” reveals Coon. “Despite Lucasfilm’s position that this is a hot-button topic, I actually don’t think George cares that much about it anymore, because if they wanted to shut it down, they could,” he reasons. “It’s been on the internet for about 15 years and they merchandise and celebrate Life Day at Disneyland – so they’re still monetising the Holiday Special.”
Perhaps the special’s one saving grace is that it acts as our first official introduction to Boba Fett, the masked bounty hunter who became an unlikely fan favourite from Empire onwards. It’s even been directly referenced by current Star Wars big-wigs like director Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm’s new CCO Dave Filoni in The Mandalorian. But this hasn’t been powerful enough to convince Disney to release the full special on their streamer – or even schedule a one-off replay.
As a company that deals in transforming pop culture into elusive and valuable products, its rarity feels apt: “Part of the specials’ appeal is that it’s kind of irksome to Lucasfilm,” ponders Coon. “If they finally put it out there, it would probably lose a little of its mystique. Favreau’s talked about doing a Holiday Special sequel and hides Easter Eggs in his stuff. It makes it more fun because it feels like they’re not supposed to be doing it.” He smiles. “It’s a lose-lose situation: if they release it people will be like, ‘This is crap!’ but if they don’t, they’re like, ‘Why are you trying to hide this?’ Their best play is to just not shine a light on it.”
When it comes to the Holiday Special’s lasting legacy, Coon believes its true value lies in how it shows the risks that come with creating something truly game-changing. “It was the first and only time Lucas turned Star Wars characters over, and he quickly learned that he was never going to do that again. He didn’t want something like this to happen again without his involvement. I have way more empathy for Lucas and what he was doing at the time. Had he not succeeded with Empire, he would’ve gone bankrupt and lost everything – so in that context, the Holiday Special was not a high priority. He was taking massive swings and risks.
“Thankfully,” he adds, “it worked out, and we’re all better off for it.”
A Disturbance in the Force is out on digital and DVD on Tuesday
