@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor They’re available on YouTube.
In fact, here’s the one I watched at the Star Trek convention in Chicago in 1975:
for some reason it wouldn’t let me embed the link normally but hopefully that works.
The series’ third season was particularly rife with bad episodes, and those two, specifically, are the ones that I think are the worst; if I had to pick a single worst one, it’d be “Spock’s Brain.”
Agreed – that is, without a doubt, the singularly stupidest Trek film.
We used to refer to that film as Star Trek: The Ship. 
“Brain and brain! What is brain?” is classically the worst, but I think “And the Children Shall Lead” beats it by a hair. Melvin Belli, who couldn’t act, was dressed in a shower curtain type of thing, and none of the children could act. And the chant…oh, the chant…
Yes, ST spread their suckitude around several shows, moves and episodes. There’s no one bad thing in total.
But Wookie porn, long set pieces of the show in Wookie-ese with no subtitles, Carrie Fisher stoned, Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, Jefferson freakin’ Starship! Oh the pain, the pain!
Starlog had a big write up on it (including the cover!) and oh how they thought it would be so great.
ST V is bad, but I would watch it ten times out of ten before I sat through the war crime of Nemesis again.
I learned my lesson from III, IV, V, VI, VII. I never watched it. And I never will.
Let’s not forget the one where Janeway and Paris turned into space lizards and had babies together.
Please. Let’s.
I’ll concur with that. Individual episodes like “Spock’s Brain” and “Code of Honor” and “Profit and Lace” and “Threshold” and “A Night In Sickbay” etc are pretty bad, but they don’t plumb the depths of the SWHS (even setting aside the fact that each of the former was just another episode while the latter was presented as an Event[tm]).
I don’t suppose this counts?
One distinction between the Holiday Special and the bottom-rung Trek episodes and movies is that the latter still had the active involvement of the franchise’s creators and executive producers.
George Lucas didn’t have much involvement in the Holiday Special, particularly in its latter stages of production (though he apparently came up with the main story idea about Chewie’s family, and wrote the cartoon segment with Boba Fett); the production was largely controlled and written by people with backgrounds in TV variety shows, and created with that style of program in mind – they likely saw the campiness and strange humor as a feature, not a bug.
RIght—the Star Wars Holiday Special was an epic fail. It was “Let’s bury this and forget it ever happened” level of bad. If you look up “bad” in the dictionary, you see a picture of the SWHS.
I can enjoy bad entertainment in the vein of it being so bad its good. I can sit down and enjoy a movie like Hell Comes to Frogtown. But the Holiday Special was simply devoid of any entertainment value. Perhaps if I was watching it with a group of people while we were drinking I could have had some fun with it. But sober? No way.
Maybe Nu Trek, which threw away subtlety, quieter character moments, and talking about issues through an SF lens for lens flares, noisy action, and non-mystery “mystery boxes.”
Who said I was sober at the time?
But really, I think it stands out as a supremely weird cultural artifact of its era. JRDelerious had a very nice capsule summary:
And all the cheesy 60s / 70s C-list TV and musical talent! Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Diahann Carroll, Harvey Korman, Jefferson Freakin’ Starship and more, all acting or singing in skits that seem to have been written by Carol Burnett Show writer rejects fired for excessive LSD usage.
Or you would, if Lucas hadn’t “Ministry of information”'d it out of existence.
“we have always been at war with Eastasia”
“The SWHS never existed.”
It exists now only in our memories.
(and pirated VHS)
Not to mention Nimoy’s WTF? video.
You hated the Whale Movie? Voyage Home was a great movie, except for time traveling special effect. But overall a great movie.
There’s also a RiffTrax version of it (for those who don’t know, RiffTrax is a spinoff of 3 actors / writers from the original MST3K who riff on bad movies, minus the interstitial space skits).
I enjoy RiffTrax, but…it’s been a little while since I watched the RT version of the SWHS, but I remember it being a bit of a disappointment. It’s like what’s often said about the trump admin-- you’d think it would be a gold mine for comedians, but it was such a parody of itself already, it’s hard to take it any further.
Yeah, I was going to say, you could splice together an ep of Trek:
"And our super band starring in a far-out place where no man has gone before, “Mick Fleetwood! Iggy Pop! Tom Morello! Songs written by Paul Williams and sung by America’s crooners Seth McFarlane and Ol Yellow Eyes!”
What movies have you seen that didn’t involve any editing?