Just in case anyone forgot just how truly horrid this was.
I’d like to think there’s a special place in hell for anyone even remotely involved with this project, but I’ve grown old and jaded enough to realize there is truly no justice in this world.
Anyways…enjoy! (MST3King the whole thing, that is)
I remember seeing it when it was originally broadcast, God help me. As a teenage SW fan, I thought it was flawed but not too shabby. My biggest disappointment was that it used stock footage for the spaceships. Ha!
That was before we had a VCR, or I would surely have taped it. Probably just as well I didn’t… I can now see that it really was appallingly wretched. No wonder George Lucas has suppressed all evidence of its existence with Illuminati-like efficiency.
I saw it on TV when it was on. I must have been 10 or 11. I loved it at the time. For years I thought I must have imagined it until I read about it. Lucas needs to stop retconning his life and just release the damn thing. We can all have a good laugh and then get on with our lives.
Yeah, but it’s not one of those “bad like Plan 9 funny” but, as my e-mail buddy Neil says, “It’s bad in a painful, when-will-this-be-over way, like a root canal from a
dentist with hairy hands and garlic breath.”
No, it is a good thing that Lucas has tried to hide this from the world.
I avoided this when it first came out – from what I’d heard in advance, it sounded really awful. Years later, my curiousity overcame my better judgment. I have a bootleg DVD of this, which I still haven’t succeeded in watching all the way. It is amazingly awful, and is difficult to look straight at for long periods of time. Bear in mind that I like Bad Movies, and have held a Bad Movie Festival every year for over 20 years now. This is not in the Entertainingly Bad category. Maybe I’ll show excerpts from this one day, but there’s no way I’d inflict the whole awful glory of this on my friends.
StompTokyo’s lengthy review and gallery are here, and you can see for yourself exactly how stoned out of her mind Carrie Fisher was.
This thing is mind-shattering in its awfulness. You cannot understand until you have seen it – Bea Arthur as a singing cantina owner, Harvey Korman as an alien in drag, and Carrie Fisher singing a Wookiee holiday song set to the tune of the Star Wars theme. It’s wretched.
Ewoks were originally supposed to be Wookies until ol’ George thought that would have contradicted Chewie knowing about high-tech stuff. Or until he realized that his budget wasn’t big enough. Or he decided he needed something kid-friendly that could be mercandised (see also: Jar Jar Binks). Or whatever.