As you might have picked up on, I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I've got three older brothers, and I was sorta born into the fad, and it's never left me. In that time, I've watched just about every Star Wars related thing you could imagine. Hell, I even own both those god-awful Ewok movies. It's a pretty motley crew of a cast to have Wicket and the guy from the Quaker Oats commercials teaming up.

So yes, I've seen my fair share of Star Wars-related medias. But I've also seen something that only truly diehard fans have had the sheer displeasure of viewing...something so horrible and wretched...Lucasfilm paid every major broadcast network to be sure it was never shown again. Without further adieu, allow me to introduce to you...

The time: 1978.
The crime: Worst spin-off show in history.

Words can't put into words the atrocity that was the Star Wars Holiday Special. It's frightenly bad - and when you consider the fact that nearly the entire SW cast was present for it, that makes matters even worse. Basically, we had a really surreal and totally sucky Christmas special featuring the cast of Star Wars with some special guests thrown into some of the most inane storylines you could ever dream possible.

There's a few golden tidbits you must know about the SWHS:

1.- Whenever Luke appeared, he literally looked like a drag queen. He had just gotten into a car wreck prior to filming, and to make him look all svelt and Jedi-like, they put more make-up on his face than a 8-year old who just got her first Sears economy cosmetics kit.

2.- Chewbacca's grandfather, creatively titled 'Itchy', spent a 20 minute fantasy sequence watching that fucking wench Diahan Carroll dance around a little orb like a maniac. Now, the thing about this is, Diahan was being pretty seductive. The last thing you could ever want to watch is an 800 year old Wookie getting aroused by a sassy soul singer. It's just not right.

3.- The writing and dialogue were TERRIBLE. You could take out a dictionary, close your eyes, point at words at random....and you'd still come up with a better script that this load of crap. It's gotta be the most uninspired piece of television cinema in history. It makes the Harry and the Henderson's series look like Shakespeare In Love. Compile that with some of the most uninspired performances ever, and you've got one sloppy mess of a sci-fi Christmas special.

On the plus side, it had Bea Arthur as a guest star. If that's not a saving grace...then what the fuck is?

Plot Synopsis:

It's almost Life Day, a Wookiee holiday, and Chewbacca is supposed to go home to his family: his son Lumpy, his wife Mala, and his father Itchy. Han and Chewie try to go to Chewie's home planet Kashyyyk, in the Millennium Falcon, but they run into some trouble with an Imperial Star Destroyer. Han desides to turn back, but Chewie really wants to go to his family. Han agrees, but it may take a lot of time, and they would probably come late.

Meanwhile, the Wookiee family is waiting, and they are all worried. They call their friends Luke and Leia, and ask them if they have seen Chewie, but they haven't. While waiting, the Wookiees watch some stupid forms of entertainment, and Mala tries to cook, and Itchy goes into the fantasy machine.

But then, in a scene with Darth Vader, Vader puts an arrest on all planets, and the Wookiee family's house is taken over by a bunch of Stormtroopers and some funny looking Imperials. While the Imperials are there, they also view some stupid forms of entertainment: Lumpy secretly watches the animated segment, the head Imperial listens to some Jefferson Starship, and the Stormtroopers watch 'Life on Tatooine' with Bea Arthur.

Near the end, Chewie and Han arrive, and Han makes one of the Stormtroopers fall all the way down the long trees of Kashyyyk. Chewbacca gets the other Stormtroopers to leave, and then Han leaves. But before Han leaves, he calls the Wookiees 'a kind of family'. Then, all the Wookiees in the neighborhood get together for the Lifeday celebration, and to their surprise, they find Han, Luke, Leia, R2-D2, and C-3PO there.

Leia sings a horrible song set to STAR WARS: Main Theme. Then some scenes from Star Wars: A New Hope are shown (about 1 minute) set in chronology, so the whole movie is told in short. Commercials come, and then the credits role, with the original Star Wars end theme.

Blasphemy at it's finest. If you want to actually see the video, good luck...most people who are stupid enough to pay the 15-25 bucks for a bootleg copy burn it immediately afterwards. (myself included)

Of course, Star Wars isn't alone in the world of weird, inane Christmas specials. Remember the He-Man one? Where Skeletor got the Christmas spirit and delivered the classic line - 'I am not good...I am E-vil'. Stunning. Star Wars might've been the first, but they certainly weren't the last. To their credit, this show beat out the Perfect Strangers Christmas episode and Home Improvement Halloween, but those can be considered hollow victories at best.