If there is an event more synonymous with the folly of man than the Star Wars Holiday Special then no one has yet discovered it. The two-hour, 1978 TV show, which sent Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia to Kashyyyk (the home planet of the Wookiees) for something called “Life Day” is notoriously one of the most execrable pieces of entertainment ever committed to film. It has never been re-broadcast, and George Lucas once said he would have personally destroyed each and every bootleg copy if given the chance.
The costumes are cheap, the makeup even cheaper (Hamill has so much caked on he might as well have just stepped off the stage after playing a pantomime dame), nobody is in charge of the script, and in fact there is no script at all for the first 15 minutes or so as Chewbacca’s family mug around their Wookiee home, speaking entirely in impenetrable grunts with no subtitles. Everyone who actually has something to do with 1977’s Star Wars looks as if they would rather be sucked into a Sarlacc’s belly than spend another moment on set. It is a mercy for James Earl Jones that he only had to provide his voice as Darth Vader , but the only participants to really embrace the grating banality of it all are now long-forgotten variety show stars of the 70s such as Harvey Korman and Art Carney.
