In the 1970s, blockbuster sequels were hard to come by. Studios used franchising to paper up holes in their release schedule, rushing follow-ups into production to cash in on valuable IP as soon as possible. Miniscule budgets and quick production turnarounds made movies like the James Bond series consistently popular, but big-budget franchises were nowhere to be found.

The release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975 changed things, but only slightly. Universal gave its 1978 successor a relatively sizeable budget, more than four times that of the original Jaws. And it seemed to work: For a brief period, Jaws 2 was the most financially successful sequel of all time, making almost $200 million worldwide on a $30 million dollar budget.

The relative success of Jaws 2 didn’t assuage any of George Lucas’ concerns. A year after Star Wars became an American phenomenon, he was already waist-deep into production on The Empire Strikes Back, and the pressure was building. Lucas wasn’t just hoping to launch the first true blockbuster franchise with Empire; he was financially dependent on the film outperforming just about every sequel that preceded it. Determined to keep his company independent of the studio system, Lucas funded Empire with his own money, and it cost him a pretty penny. During production, the film’s budget ballooned to more than 150% of the original Star Wars‘ budget, leaving Lucas struggling to negotiate with 20th Century Fox and his own bank, which was threatening to call in his loan.

On top of these financial concerns was Lucas’ fear that the characters he had created would not maintain a grip on the cultural consciousness long enough for Empire to make any money at all. The studio perception of American audiences was that they were flighty and easily distracted; a phenomenon one summer could become a costly bomb the next. With this in mind, CBS pitched Lucas a concept that could “sustain interest” in the budding franchise, as well as potentially goosing toy sales: an old-fashioned comedy variety hour, to be broadcast just before Thanksgiving.

Famous control freak George Lucas wasn’t a huge fan of handing his baby over to CBS executives, but his work on Empire took top priority. He gave the group of veteran TV writers working on the special a simple concept, handed them a mythology “bible” that would keep them from violating franchise canon, and went on his way. At the time, writer Lenny Ripps told Vanity Fair, it seemed like a slam dunk: “My God, this is an annuity—Star Wars! How could it lose?”

The creative team would quickly find out that the Star Wars brand wasn’t an automatic ticket to greatness. Part of the issue was the concept Lucas presented, which sounded good on paper but collapsed in practice. The creator wanted the Holiday Special to center on Chewbacca’s Wookiee family, specifically his wife Malla, his father Itchy, and his son Lumpy (Lucas himself named the latter two characters, according to another writer on the project, Bruce Vilanch). It would revolve around the Wookiee holiday of “Life Day,” and Chewbacca’s struggles to return to his home planet of Kashyyyk in time for the festivities. The idea kept the special from being a time commitment for returning cast members, replacing them largely with faceless Imperial officers, masked Wookiees, and a guest cast of television comedy staples.

Unfortunately, it also removed everything that made the original Star Wars appealing to audiences, leaving them trapped watching a group of warbling monkey people doing menial tasks in preparation for a bizarre space holiday. What quickly becomes apparent while watching the Holiday Special is that Star Wars occupies a very specific cultural space, and if you tread just a little bit outside of that space, the entire endeavor collapses. It’s a space that’s difficult to explain and a tone that’s even more difficult to nail, but the Holiday Special manages to exist entirely separate from any kind of Star Wars tone whatsoever. It’s clear within the first ten minutes that the writers were hopelessly out of their depth, and it’s hard to blame them because while we know it feels wrong to watch a Wookiee baby take out the garbage, we can’t quite explain why it feels wrong.

From Chewie’s family’s very retro, spacious 1970s tree-apartment to Chewie’s wife’s human-sized apron, it’s all just a tiny bit too familiar to our eye, missing that slight otherworldly atmosphere that distinguishes Star Wars from something closer to our world. There’s a scene in 2002’s Attack of the Clones where we discover that luggage in the Star Wars universe consists of pretty standard suitcases, complete with wheels and extendable handles. It shares the Special‘s peculiar tonal inconsistency with the rest of the universe, an unconsidered detail that just barely skews the entire charade.

It doesn’t help that the Holiday Special is almost entirely plotless. It’s far more Holiday Special than Star Wars, an extended hang-out montage that cuts between shoddy Wookiee costumes and bizarre cameos from our favorite characters, all of whom look like they’re performing with a DL-44 blaster pistol pointed at them from just off-camera. The best thing one can say about the meat of The Star Wars Holiday Special is that it does really capture the feeling of sitting around your house on a holiday waiting for family to show up; the only problem is that watching a family of Sasquatches do that is even more interminably boring than doing it yourself. Lumpy watches a bizarre circus-act hologram; Malla struggles to master “Bantha rump” with the help of a Julia Child-esque cooking show.

Occasionally, a hilariously coked-up Star Wars cast member will phone in, with the highlight being an appearance by a wild-eyed Mark Hamill, apparently auditioning for Cathy Rigby’s Peter Pan stage role. In the time between Star Wars and the Holiday Special, Luke has apparently found time to meet Chewie’s entire family, because they’re all very familiar with him and his malfunctioning R2-D2 impersonator. Interspersed with these original trilogy cameos are bit parts for sketch comedians of the era. Carol Burnett Show star Harvey Korman appears in no less than three roles, including the aforementioned TV chef and a patron at the classic Mos Eisley Cantina who drinks through a hole in his scalp. Here, the cantina’s bartender is Maude‘s Bea Arthur, and she stars in an in-universe Mos Eisley soap opera that climaxes in a strangely emotional musical number.

But the real star of the Holiday Special is Saun Dann (Honeymooners star Art Carney), the man who runs the “general store” on Kashyyyk. Initially, Dann was an Empire Strikes Back concept that eventually evolved into Lando Calrissian, but here he’s just a vehicle that guides the Special through its lackadaisical Imperial invasion “plot.” He’s also the trader who delivers Chewie’s father Itchy the coveted–and infamous–gift that defines the Holiday Special, a “Mind Evaporator” that delivers him a vision of Mermeia (Diahann Carroll), a “holographic fantasy woman who existed within virtual reality as an erotic entertainer.” And then Chewbacca’s ratty-looking father watches a holographic adult film, on a primetime network television holiday special.

In the end, not even a bizarrely out-of-place Jefferson Starship performance could save the Holiday Special. By the time Chewie and his family finally don their long red robes and wander into a psychedelic starscape, the special has stretched on for almost two hours, and exhaustion has set in. The final bumper of the Wookiee family saying…grace (?) is just as bizarre as everything that’s preceded it. Lucas himself was astonished at the Special‘s poor quality, supposedly saying of it, “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every copy of that show and smash it.” Ratings cratered roughly halfway through the program, and it was never broadcast again. Lucas has refused to give up the home video rights.

But a peculiar thing has happened since then: The Star Wars Holiday Special, like many similarly shoddy elements of Star Wars history, has become oddly iconic. The most popular element of the Special, a ten-minute cartoon segment, introduced fan-favorite character, Boba Fett. On top of that, Star Wars authors keep sneaking characters into current canon. A story by Kelly Sue Deconnick and Matt Fraction in last year’s A Certain Point of View anthology canonized Bea Arthur’s bartender Ackmena, and Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy brought Malla and Lumpy (now called “Waroo”) into the Disney fold. And if books aren’t enough for you, April’s trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story seemed to imply the presence of Chewie’s wife.

So what is it driving this resurgence in Holiday Special nostalgia? For one thing, there’s something oddly charming about its low-rent, incredibly boring presentation of the universe we’ve come to love for its bombast and big budgets. It’s like a Star Wars home movie, and for die-hard fans of the series, it’s also a fascinating artifact that speaks to just how specific a hold these movies have over our culture. Yes, there’s something just so slightly off about all of it, and in trying to figure out what, we gain a new appreciation for the times this formula works so well. And besides, it’s fun to watch garbage sometimes. Carrie Fisher herself owned a bootleg copy of the Special, and she delighted in playing her scenes at parties when she wanted people to leave. How could you not love that?

The post THE TORTURED HISTORY OF THE ‘STAR WARS’ HOLIDAY SPECIAL first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

1) Howard the Duck

Prominent in the pantheon of Lucas-related misfires is his 1986 pet project Howard the Duck. Scripted by his frequent collaborators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, it destroyed the considerable underground cred of Steve Gerber’s wisecracking creation and turned him into a running joke that endured at least until Jar Jar Binks could come along to take some of the heat. Huyck, Katz and executive producer Lucas somehow thought it wise to take a gonzo sendup of ‘funny animals’ cartoons and repackage the concept as two hours of strained quirk, inane duck jokes and bland adventuring that sees Howard teleported to Cleveland to hit on a hapless Lea Thompson and fight a possessed Jeffrey Jones.

2) Captain EO

When Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were appointed to run Disney in 1984, one of their mandates was to revitalize the company’s theme parks. That year also saw Michael Jackson at the height of his popularity, prompting Eisner and Wells to engineer a collaboration between George Lucas and his moonwalking superfan to see what delirious excess could come of such an endeavor. The result was a 17 minute 3D film, co-written and produced by Lucas (and directed by Francis Ford Coppola), that starred Jackson as the titular commander of a ragtag starship crew tasked with delivering a gift to the evil Supreme Leader of a decrepit planet. Met with hostility, the Captain nevertheless decides to reform the locals and their Leader with the Power of Song. Exhibited in Disney’s theme parks, the film stunned audiences with then-cutting edge special effects and 3D technology. Less of a technological marvel today, Captain EO is more striking for its camp value, catchy musical hooks and the impressive design of Angelica Huston’s vaguely H.R. Giger-ish space queen.

3) Wolfman Jack‘s Cameo In American Graffiti

When Lucas was a young film student, one of his great heroes was disk jockey Wolfman Jack. So when Lucas made his big film, set in the early 1960s, he made sure to give Wolfman Jack a huge cameo — in which Wolfman Jack is sort of a disk jockey version of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He tries to pretend that he’s not actually Wolfman Jack, although he doesn’t actually say “Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.” And he’s sort of mysterious about his relationship with the reclusive Wolfman, while also dispensing strange wisdom. Wolfman Jack told New York Magazine he only took a flat fee to be in the film, and actually spent $10,000 of his own money to promote it. “We wanted this picture to take off,” Wolfman said, “It’s what I’m all about. Nonsensical, but loving.” (Related: See Wolfman Jack meet the Cylons in Galactica 1980.)
4) “Nuking the Fridge“

Actually, both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have tried to take the blame for the infamous sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where Indy shelters from a nuclear explosion inside a refrigerator. Lucas says Spielberg is lying about the fridge thing being his idea, because “he’s trying to protect me.” In fact, Lucas put together a whole “nuking the fridge” dossier to prove that it was plausible and quiet the concerns of Spielberg and star Harrison Ford. (And to bolster Lucas’ story, here’s an interview with the librarians at Skywalker Ranch, where they explain that they were assigned to call a nuclear physicist and get more information on how a fridge really could protect you from an atomic test.) Lucas also takes a certain amount of blame for Crystal Skull in general, since he nixed a previous script by Frank Darabont that might have been slightly better.

5) The Star Wars Holiday Special

We couldn’t possibly leave this one out, although Lucas has tried to have it suppressed. We only wanted to have one Star Wars item on this list, and there’s one clear candidate that stands out above everything else — the prequels, the Ewok cartoon, everything. To be fair, Lucas didn’t oversee the filming of the Holiday Special, but he does bear a significant amount of blame for its legendary awfulness.

This 2008 Vanity Fair article goes into insane detail — basically, Lucas had been convinced by various people that a holiday special would keep interest in Star Wars alive and sell some toys. And Lucas was originally quite involved — he ” knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script.” And that’s where things went wrong:

When [writer Bruce] Vilanch heard Lucas’s storyline at a development meeting at Smith and Hemion’s L.A. offices, he quickly realized that a “big challenge” lay ahead. Lucas was intent on building The Star Wars Holiday Special, as it would be called, around Wookiees—specifically, the family of Chewbacca, Han Solo’s shaggy sidekick, as they outwitted Imperial forces to come together on Life Day, the Wookiee equivalent of Christmas. Suddenly, Vilanch says, the special was in danger of looking like “one long episode of Lassie.”

“I said: ‘You’ve chosen to build a story around these characters who don’t speak. The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm,'” the 250-plus-pound Vilanch recalls. “In fact, I told Lucas he could just leave a tape recorder in my bedroom and I’d be happy to do all the looping and Foley work for him.”

Lucas met these comments with a “glacial” look. “This was his vision, and he could not be moved,” Vilanch says.
Lucas insisted on the Wookiee life day story, and then got swamped working on other stuff, letting the Holiday Special happen more or less unsupervised. And it “metastasized,” as the Vanity Fair article delicately puts it:

Onto the body of Lucas’s sentimental and irony-free Wookiee plotline, the producers and writers grafted a campy 70s variety show that makes suspension of disbelief impossible. In between minutes-long stretches of guttural, untranslated Wookiee dialogue that could almost pass for avant-garde cinema, Maude’s Bea Arthur sings and dances with the aliens from the movie’s cantina scene; The Honeymooners’ Art Carney consoles Chewbacca’s family with such comedy chestnuts as “Why all the long, hairy faces?”; Harvey Korman mugs shamelessly as a multi-limbed intergalactic Julia Child cooking “Bantha Surprise”; the Jefferson Starship pops up to play a number about U.F.O.’s; and original Star Wars cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill walk around looking cosmically miserable.
The whole Vanity Fair article is well worth reading.

6) Willow

Lucas dreamed up the idea for Willow as early as 1972 and, during production on Return of the Jedi, approached Warwick Davis (who also played Wicket the Ewok) about playing the lead role. But it wasn’t till the mid-80s – by which point FX technology was sufficiently advanced – that the film was finally shepherded into production with Ron Howard as director and Lucas as EP. Davis plays the hobbit-like lead, tasked by a wizard to safeguard a magical child from a witch queen. Somewhat of an ersatz Lord of the Rings, the film’s archetypal characters and narrative broad strokes also bear more than a passing resemblance to Star Wars. That said, a few lively performances and action set-pieces redeem the tired story beats to some extent. Extra points for (perhaps not so) affectionate swipes at movie critics Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel and Pauline Kael.

7) Chronicles of the Shadow War

Lucas, apparently, wasn’t quite done with the Willow universe. He hired famed X-Men comics writer Chris Claremont to collaborate with him on a trio of novels – starting with 1995’s Shadow Moon – that continued the story begun in the 1988 movie. Lucas clearly wanted the novels to stand on their own merits, repainting what was once a straightforward, almost childlike fictional universe in much darker tones. He and Claremont go Alien 3 on the story from the very beginning, killing off half the old cast in brutal fashion, then going on to detail — via some ornate and sometimes explicitly violent prose — a deeply troubled world in which the film’s characters appear almost incongruous.

8) Twice Upon A Time

Lucas has made more than a few contributions to the animation industry over the years but the first animated film he ever produced was 1983’s all but forgotten Twice Upon A Time. A marvel of surreal stop-motion animation, it follows shapeshifter Ralph the All Purpose Animal and his mime sidekick Mumford as they try to save their world from nightmare-creator Synonamess Botch. The film sank unfairly from trace after a brief theatrical release that was mishandled by the floundering Ladd Company. That commercial failure, however, does nothing to negate the value of its distinctive aesthetic, unique ‘Lumage’ animating technique and imaginative worldbuilding.

9) The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

One of Lucas’ more successful (creatively speaking anyway) forays into television, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles brought the epic historical sweep of the films to the small screen. Following a teenage Indy as he traveled the world and encountered numerous historical figures, the show was intended in part as educational programming but still managed to pack enough action to draw accusations of being too violent. Despite the inclusion of many clunky dialogue exchanges that are basically thinly disguised classroom lectures, the show was buoyed by its production values and a colorful supporting cast featuring franchise veterans like Harrison Ford, Roshan Seth and John Rhys-Davies as well as stars-to-be like Daniel Craig and Catherine Zeta Jones. Among other things, Young Indiana Jones goes to India and meets Krishnamurti, who was being groomed as the young World Teacher by the Theosophical Society, and also befriends a young slave named Omar in Tangiers, getting captured himself by slavers. Alongside producing, Lucas also came up with the blueprints for many of the stories and, once ABC cancelled the show, was invested enough in the end-product to finagle a deal with the Family Channel for four additional TV movies.

10) The George Lucas Museum

This massive development, which will dominate Chicago’s lakefront, is “going to look like a tent monster that’s slowly devouring the city,” as the AV Club put it. This collection of Lucas’ art and movie memorabilia is being described as a “vanity museum,” and has been challenged by environmentalists among others. The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic called it the Temple of George, adding:

Our First Look at the Radical Design of George Lucas’ Art Museum
A few months ago, noted traditionalist George Lucas surprised everyone by announcing he had chosen…
Read more gizmodo.?com
The plan represents a fumbled essay in “blob architecture,” a school of design that uses computer modeling to achieve amorphous, amoebalike buildings that defy conventional, right-angled geometry. In its present state, it lacks the visual excitement of a blob masterpiece like the billowy Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England. Overly abstract and under-detailed, it looks, from some angles, like a giant lump…

The real problem is that Lucas has saddled Ma with an overly ambitious program that calls for the museum to house everything but a re-creation of the fictional “Star Wars” bar habituated by freight pilots and other dangerous characters.

In addition to galleries for Lucas’ eclectic collection of paintings by artists like Norman Rockwell, “Star Wars” memorabilia and digital art, the museum would contain archives, an education center, four movie theaters and, atop all that, a circular restaurant and a halo-shaped observation deck. At 400,000 square feet, it would be more than four times the size of the one that Lucas unsuccessfully tried to build in San Francisco.

The post The Ten Weirdest Projects That George Lucas Has Been Involved With first appeared on We Got Bruce!.