I've had this ripped onto a DVD for over a year now, but I hadn't ever just sat down to watch it. Apparently a lot of other horror movies got in the way. Anyway, I finally watched it all from beginning to end, and... well, words fail me.

With a plot like "han Solo has to get Chewbacca back home in time for Life Day," you can't be expecting much, really. Obviously, you can expect a run of the mill Christmas plot at most, but set in the Star Wars world, and yet...wow, again, words fail me.

To say it's cheesy is a compliment to all things cheesy. Evil Dead was cheesy. Scary Movie is cheesy. This is...I dunno. Campy? Well, not exactly. You see, sometimes campy yields some fascinating and even decent results. Cliche? No, I wouldn't go that far. No one would ever use this one again. A bad idea gone horribly wrong in execution and even worse when they actually put it together? Now we're getting somewhere.

On the one hand, you have a cheesy 70's TV show with Wookies. They live in trees with astroturf carpet and green plastic trash cans. That part of the show was passable. Sure, it was cheesy, but it was passable. I didn't really lose any brain cells there. Now, it WASN'T Star Wars by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't even good. It was more like a bad spin-off starring Chewbacca's family.

There was an excellent cartoon short that introduced the world to Boba Fett. I have no complaints there.

But... Where this show lost all sense of merit, direction, and even respect (not to mention sending poor Lucas into therapy to forget it and ban it from the SW canon, much less ever releasing an official video version) was the "variety hour" segments. I have no idea how else to term these over-long wastes of time tossed randomly throughout the program and giving us some really stupid representations of their idea of "future programming." There was a weird acrobatics act done on the classic "Millenium Falcon chessboard" but wet to weird music and had no direction at all. The Imperial Trooper who opted to sit down and watch Jefferson Starship do a song on Mala's "Life Day present" with a trippy color scheme and an opening image of the singer singing into the microphone in silhouette...but the microphone is a very, very phallic image so any stills of that shot would be banned from elementary schools across the nation. It seriously starts out looking like the guy is singing into a penis.

And the creme de la creme of "what the hell were you thinking?" moments: Wookie porn. Oh yeah. Chewie's daddy gets some kind of gift, and it's a video program of a human woman who talks sweet to him and then sings him another song that needed 3 minutes cut from it. I guess since its cross-species, it would be Wookie fetish porn. I laughed out loud, and thought to myself... Someday, I might be cool enough to have a big production company, and I might even have to hire a producer I trust to work on things I can't. If that producer signed off on this, he's fired.

Then they even wrote a couple songs using some of the original Star Wars music as backgrounds for it. And the ugly rumors are true: Princess Leia sings. But that's ok. Bea Arthur (may she rest in peace...and have been paid well for this) also blessed us with her singing voice.

If you claim to know Star Wars and you haven't seen this yet, watch it. Once. Then you'll be like me, and say you've seen it. If you're researching television from the 70's, check this one out form an academic perspective. It embodies everything that was horribly wrong with 70's variety TV shows. If you just want to watch a Star Wars movie. Watch Episode II. Compared to this, it's top notch.

After watching this, you can carry on this conversation:

Fanboy: Man, the prequels suck!
You: Well, they're awesome compared to the Holiday Special.
Fanboy: Word.

Yeah, once you mention Chewbacca's father, I ask for the check...