How can you watch the Star Wars Holiday Special? Just like it was performed: on copious amounts of medication.
The great thing about the version I saw (a video recording from the original broadcast) was that it had all of the original commercials. While it’s not hard to top Art Carney mugging for an old wookie watching KC & the Sunshine Band or Bea Arthur pouring a drink through a guy’s head hole, the commercials were the best part.
Half the 13-year-old boys in America wanted to be alone with Carrie Fisher…whilst she was stoned. 
This thing is hard to find for an incredibly good reason. Don’t trust your instincts.
Plus the promos for the local affiliate’s news story “Fighting the frizzies” was the source of an incredibly obscure joke on South Park!
And how the heck does that site get away with selling a homemade DVD edition of it?
Can you imagine trying to sue to prevent it? You’d be held in contempt of court as soon as it was entered into evidence!
Enjoy,
Steven
Okay, I may be in the minority here-- hell, I may even be alone here-- but I’m glad I watched the five minute version, and I enjoyed it.
Now, don’t get me wrong: it was bad. Tremendously bad. Wretchedly bad. But at the same time, I LIKED it! For so long, people have universally said that this is so bad, it’s not even good for kitsch or cheese or historic or cultural value. Well, I for one, wholeheartedly 100% disagree.
The five minutes I saw were complete and utter shite, but it left me wanting more. Oh so very much more! More Maude singing and dancing, more of the random and tripped out appearance by Jefferson Starship, more virtual reality Wookie sex, more of Princess Leia singing about a day that “takes us through the darkness” sung to the tune of the Star Wars theme, and more Han Solo declaring his agapic love for Chewy’s annoying fucking family. More, more, MORE! Bring it on!
I wonder: could it be, that stating-- with greater and greater use of gusto and metaphor-- “It’s too bad to even watch” has just become the “thing to do”?
Could it be that we’ve simply turned the “Star Wars Holiday Special” into the Cthulhu of 20th Century pop culture? But really it’s no worse than “Police Academy 9” or “Right Said Fred,” IMHO.
So, Encore! Encore! Horrific! Enthralling! Staggeringly stupid! A rare gem! Yes, it’s all these things and more. Bricker, I salute your quest. Happy Life Day!
The most important thing to remember is: **at no time should you look directly at the Special. ** The safest method is to construct a pinhole camera from two pieces of white cardboard. Poke a tiny hole through one piece of cardboard, and hold it between the TV and the other piece of cardboard. Tape more cardboard over your ears and television speakers, in case someone should accidentally turn off the “mute” function while Bea Arthur is singing.
**Do not attempt ** to view the Special through dark glasses or welder’s goggles. Most protective eyewear is not designed to filter out the full range of harmful radiation emitted by the Special. Even brief exposure can result in damage to the retina and optic chiasma, lesions of the frontal lobe, and spontaneous herpes.
If the five-minute edit makes you want to see more of it, then the five-minute version is almost worse than the thing itself. If only for instilling this desire in a single person, whoever created that edit deserves to be hunted down, drawn and quartered. However, I happen to know they’ve already suffered enough, perhaps - they had to watch it enough to edit it down.
The version I found (using a protocol that shall not be named) also included some Star Wars music. For instance, “Christmas in the Stars”(with Jon Bongiovi singing on “R2D2 We Wish You a Merry Christmas”), and Meco’s Ewok Celebration song dance remix.
All these things should only be kept for the true Star Wars fan, because Star Wars fans hate Star Wars.
The version I saw was I think from a Witicha, Kansas channel, so I never got to see the “Fight the Frizzies” thing. Also, the commercials were edited out. But the tape DID have some special features. They played a few 70’s era action figure commercials and the SPECIAL EDITION of Hardware Wars. Did you know that Hardware Wars was also given the CGI treatment? Not by permission of the filmmaker, of course, but which was nevertheless sold at Suncoast.
Is that a joke? The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheesy-looking. You aren’t serious, are you?
It was brilliant. There’s a great scene of perfectly coordinated CG french corkscrews in formation for attack. It’s just as out-of-place and pointless as most of the CG stuff added to Star Wars.
You kids now-a-days. You think the Star Wars Christmas Special was bad? You little punks don’t know what bad is.
Bad is the Donny and Marie Star Wars Special.
There! :eek: Is! :eek: No! :eek: God! :eek:
(I was going to ask if Bricker was going to subject his kid to the various Ewok movies and the Droids cartoon, but that is so very, very, very worse.)
Dead serious. There’s one scene where they added a monolithic unspooling cassette tape in the desert.
Oh my goodness, I want to get in a time machine and hit that [Marie in the Princess Leia garb] so freaking hard. :mad: 
How can I watch "The Star Wars Holiday Special?"
I’m thinking lidlocks, a la “A Clockwork Orange”.
That should work.
You know you’ve watched too much of it when you start to understand what the wookies are saying. I’d send you my copy Bricker, but I’ve loaned it to someone and I haven’t seen them since. I think they either hate me that much, or they died while watching it.