There wasn't much on TV either, so you watched your favorite shows, which aired weekly on specific nights. There was one TV and four channels, so there were fights over who got to pick until bedtime, then the adults watched boring shows (Dynasty, Flamingo Road) followed by the news, until the TV went off overnight. I don't mean the TV got turned off...I'm saying the broadcast transmitter shut down its signal and went to static until morning.
In our house we loved Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Dukes of Hazzard, Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk. Up until they started to air commercials for the Star Wars Holiday Special, we thought Battle of the Network Stars was the absolute peak awesome sauce of "special" programming. I mean I assume we went apeshit over the idea of a Star Wars special, but I can't verify, because personally, somehow I have no memory of seeing The Star Wars Holiday Special. I might have blocked it out. We'll come back to that later.
Life Day
The Star Wars Holiday Special takes place in a vague point along the Star Wars timeline, opening with the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon—Han Solo and Chewbacca are attempting to evade a garbage scow in a tense scene. Evasive maneuvers! It's a promising start, but the excitement is woefully betrayed by the next million minutes. There's musical numbers, comedy skits, and at one point there is an un-related cartoon for no reason.
The whole thing hinges on Chewbacca's plight of making it back home for the Wookie holiday. Back on the Wookie home planet his family waits for his return. There's his son Lumpy, and his grizzled father whose name, cringeworthily, is Itchy. His wife Malla is anxiously awaiting Chewbacca and the family bickers because of the tense situation. There are long...surprisingly long...spans of angst-ridden Wookie howling, which is the loudest kind of Wookie howling. It just keeps going on, while Malla urgently seeks news of the Millennium Falcon's whereabouts.
The Guest Stars
Art Carney, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll. Put another way: who? Even my cool teenage cousins weren't old enough to know any of those people, which begs the question, "Who dafuq was this special for?" Kids, in theory, but in that case, they couldn't have gotten Wonder Woman or the Fonz at least so we'd have some joy of recognition? Performances include Bea Arthur (pre-Golden Girls!) as a bar owner who intones a ponderous ballad that lasts about a week. Harvey Korman does a few different skits, like one where Lumpy reads a technical manual and Korman appears to be acting out the instructions. What fun‒a dramatic reading...of instructions? Was this some sort of zany wacky fun for Grandpa? Although it could be suggested, with that skit, that Harvey Korman may have invented Max Headroom.
The Tech
Our shit was still analog in those days. Lest we forget. A Slinky is a coiled spring. Etch-a-Sketch let us scrape right-angles with magnets. And Lite Brite's entire operating system was a light bulb. In the Star Wars Holiday Special, there was great promise in the cool factor, like when Malla places video calls to Luke, Leia and Art Carney (okay?) to see if any of them had heard from Chewie or Han Solo, because they're still not home and it's almost Life Day. Kudos for the sci-fi, because video calls weren't a common thing yet. But those scenes, as it turned out, were the only appearances of our beloved Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and R2D2. I am sure my cool teenage cousins said "Aw maaaan! Rip off!" There's promise when we notice that Chewbacca's son Lumpy owns that cool hologram game table from Star Wars. You know, when they're heading to Alderaan and Chewie plays a game against R2D2, when C3P0 says "Let the Wookie win, R2!" But Lumpy uses the game table to call up a hologram dance troupe, and they jump around for about a month. Bor. Ing. There's even a Virtual Reality visor.
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As kids we saw more cool tech in sci-fi and fantasy and the world has a lot of people to thank for today's devices. Most of which are used for porn. And I don't even mean guys like Steve Jobs. I mean the nerd herd who popularized this stuff, artists and writers like Bruce Vilanche. The Star Wars special showed us VR on November 17, 1978, with a Wookiee head-mounted display. And yes, of course it was used for a wack segment of Wookie space porn. The company that would later become Sun Microsystems would put out the first virtual reality(VR) products almost a decade later, in 1987, including head-mounted displays (HMDs)and data gloves.
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The Space Porn
The award for Most Awkward guest performance goes to Diahann Carroll. Again, I looked it up to see where we kids might have known her from when the Star Wars special aired. According to my research, she was on Milton Berle. Again: WHO WAS THIS SPECIAL FOR? In her scene, Miz Carroll emerges from a kaleidoscopic field of light as a mermaid sex vixen, and all of this action appears inside the Virtual Reality visor worn by Chewbacca's dad while everyone waits for the Millennium Falcon to arrive for Life Day. What to say about this scene? It's
"This is our moment together in time that we might turn this moment into an eternity."
Dude, what.
The Mental Block
We would have given up our Reggie Bars for anything Star Wars-related, so I should remember the special. But I don't. Does anyone remember it? Maybe we were so sugar-torqued that we couldn't sit through all those loooong, boring guests. I know we definitely for suresville would not have sat through that softcore cyber booty scene with a mermaid lady and a old-ass Wookie. Our brains would have sent alarms and we'd be a streak of flammable pajamas racing away in a flurry of Hawaiian Punch and Cookie Crisp crumbs.
But now that we're older and we have more viewing options (and weed) the Star Wars Holiday Special is available on YouTube, and we'll probably stream it several times each and every holiday season. Have a Life Day party. Smoke it if it's legal, and have a happy Life Day! ⭐
Watch it on YouTube:
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Update: I have been informed that I've spelled "Wookiee" wrong this whole time. My apologies.
And by "this whole time" I mean my entire life.
Currently wondering what, hypothetically, might one serve for Life Day. Bantha burgers?
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