The Death Star Human Resources Department: January 5, 2024
That's a wrap on the Holiday Special and the Death Star HR Book Club has a new goal
Hello there
Good morning, or whenever you read this, and Happy New Year. Welcome to the first Death Star Human Resources Department newsletter for 2024. It’s going to be a shorter newsletter this week, I’m still recovering from not feeling great over the last couple weeks. I’ll be back up and running with a full newsletter and all the usual nonsense next week. This week we’ve got a follow up on the Star Wars Holiday Special. I watched A Disturbance in the Force, a documentary about said Holiday Special. It’s a fun watch and a lot less weird than the original.
As always, thanks for reading. If you’re not a subscriber, why not make subscribing to an email newsletter of Star Wars hot takes your New Years Resolution? Then all you need to do is smash that subscribe button and bam, you’ve already kept a resolution less than a week into the new year. Now, let’s get to it.
This Is Where The Fun Begins
A few weeks I wrote about the original, non-Special Edition soundtrack for Return of the Jedi. A couple hours after we went to press, a friend sent me this text:
I mean, he’s not wrong.
The Star Wars Holiday Special Gave Me Rebound Covid
I can’t prove it. But the timeline matches up. Consider the facts:
Thursday, December 28th. Feeling fine. Recovering from being sick. Went ahead and watched the Star Wars Holiday Special and recorded my thoughts in real time.
Friday, December 29th through Monday, January 1st. Felt like I was mauled by a Wampa and tossed in the Sarlacc Pit.
There needs to be a surgeon general warning about watching the Star Wars Holiday Special while having a compromised immune system.
Who Allowed This to Happen is a Legit Question
So last week I finally watched the Star Wars Holiday Special and recorded my thoughts. I had a lot more screenshots I wanted to include but it would have made the email too large. Substack doesn’t cut off emails due to length or size, but once you hit the size limit for Gmail, Substack will warn you. Anyway. That’s not important. What is important is that I got a text from a friend wondering if they were hallucinating while watching it. Thankfully, some people had the idea to ask how the Star Wars Holiday Special managed to happen, and make a documentary out of it.
“If I had a hammer and time, I would destroy every copy of the Star Wars Holiday Special.” Per Paul Scheer, that’s what it said on the back of his bootleg copy.
The documentary, A Disturbance in the Force, itself pretty much is a straight forward telling of just how the Holiday Special came to be. You hear from original writers and directors, along with some celebrity Star Wars fans that you’ll recognize. My biggest takeaway was just that this is something that would never happen today. It’s just too weird. It’s just too off brand. For as much as maybe we joke that Star Wars will slap its name on anything, it’s still such a tightly controlled brand. One person interviewed noted that this was a really strange time in the Star Wars timeline. It was before Star Wars really became STAR WARS. You don’t have the lore and the backstories and there is very little Expanded Universe. As far as I know, at the time of the Holiday Special, the only thing outside the movie was the book “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye”1, which came out in the spring of 1978. You had a fanbase starved for anything new about Star Wars and basically a blank slate to work with. So why not do a variety show, which as I’ve gathered as a popular format at the time.
Like I often say when I’ve suggested that Star Wars take a little break on new tv shows and movies, the brand itself is a never-ending content devouring monster. Or maybe we the fans are the monsters. The mentality of Lucas in 1977 versus the mentality of Disney now hasn’t changed. The Star Wars Holiday Special was created because they needed to keep Star Wars in the minds of the fans. I’m not sure what Lucas thought would attract fans attention. There were basically 3 channels. A quick search suggests only 15% of households in America had cable TV at that time. Obviously there’s no internet or streaming or anything like that. Versus today, we have too many choices and Disney is terrified if there’s not something new, fans will jump to one of the dozens of other streaming services. Time is a flat circle.
A Disturbance in the Force really is a love letter. It would be really easy to just make a documentary dunking on the Holiday Special. I mean, really, really easy to just dunk on it. It’s something so strange and so out there, but it was made to give the fans more of something they love. Don’t get me wrong, the Star Wars Holiday Special is not good. However, 90 minutes talking about how bad it was just wouldn’t be that interesting. I mean, maybe if they did it as a roast. But that would just feel like punching down. A look into the “why” and “how” it came together is much more interesting than just saying “this thing sucks.”
Some bullet points I wrote down as I watched.
I love that they start off which the fact it goes 8:00 - 9:00 minutes of nothing but Wookiee-speak.
There are some really interesting parts about talking about an OG Lucasfilm guy who basically took the movie directly to the fans. At the cons and stuff like that. Showed the art and explained the plot. I imagine this guy at a con telling the audience what’s going to happen like he’s 3PO telling a story to the Ewoks. He was out doing this over a year before the movie was out.
I also didn’t know the novelization was released 9 months before the movie came out. Same with the comics. That could never happen in today’s spoiler alert culture.
Seth Green said, “the Star Wars Holiday Special may well have been created out of spite.” And to sell toys. It’s always about the toys.
The Holiday Special wasn’t even the first variety show. The footage from Star Wars on Donny and Marie Osmond’s show is bonkers. Dancing stormtroopers, with the music as Get Ready by the Four Tops. For some reason Kris Kristofferson is Han. It’s like watching a SNL sketch. Donny, at least at this point has a pretty good sense of humor about how nuts it was. Show gave the movie a ticket sales boost.
Really want to see the Richard Pryor cantina scene sketch.
Darth Vader Meets the Wolfman?? I had to rewind to make sure I saw that correctly.
One of the writers thought this was going to make them a ton of money running every year. Charlie Brown, the Grinch, etc. They also were not Star Wars people, they were variety show writers. He said he did not think it would be such a traditional variety show with the “older” guest stars. They could have even had Robin Williams.
Truly amazed someone bought a costume from the circus scene. That’s a huge nerd flex.
The Jefferson Starship guy seems somewhat amused thinking about it. Photographs of the band and Darth Vader are something. “I figured they had their stuff together, you know”
The Wookiee family was an old Lucas idea. You know, the man just wanted to tell a story about really tall, fur-covered aliens. We should have just let him.
I did think it was awfully convenient to blame this on Ken and Mitzie Welch, who are no longer alive. Although there is an interview with Mitzie who says she has no idea what they were doing in terms of making it Star Wars.
At the end of the film as they’re doing the wrap-ups, Kevin Smith says Lucas should just embrace the Holiday Special. I think he’s pretty spot on about that. It’s been over 40 years. Some things are so bad they’re good2. Not everything can be Empire Strikes Back or Andor. George, it’s time to let go3. Hate leads to suffering. Your favorite little green guy said that. Hell, it was from Phantom Menace, you probably wrote it. Sure, it wasn’t what you had in mind. Scholars will not talk about Han and Chewie trying to make it home to Life Day in the context of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. But it is what it is. And what it is, is completely bonkers.
Death Star HR Book Club: 2024
I read a lot of Star Wars books. I’ve mentioned here previous that I have a spreadsheet I keep on my phone so that when I’m at the bookstore, I don’t accidentally buy a book I already have, again. At one point I ended up with two copies one of the Bounty Hunters Wars books. Oops. It’s a mistake anyone can make.
So the goal this year, so I’m going to read all of the New Jedi Order series from Legends. I thought I had all the books, but as it turned out when I went to get a picture I realized I was missing the last book. Oh well, it’s not like needed an excuse to go to the bookstore, but I’ll take it.
I never read the NJO books when they came out. My understanding was basically Star Wars decided to up the ante in the Expanded Universe. There could only so many times the remnants of the Empire could threaten the New Republic, so they needed a new enemy. Enter the Yuuzhan Vong. A new bunch of aliens from beyond the edge of the galaxy (I think) who are hell bent on taking over the galaxy and being the new Big Bad guys. I don’t know much more than that. There is a major character death I know about, but we’ll talk about that when it happens.
Up first is “Vector Prime” by R.A. Salvatore. We’re going to meet the Vong. I’ll report back with my first recap once I’m done.
From the Depths of Wookieepedia
Out of all the Wookieepedia articles that I wish had a picture, this might take the cake, or the donut as it were. Donuts are part of the Star Wars universe. More specifically, an iced Trammistan chocolate donut.
It was iced with Trammistan chocolate and was served at the restaurant Dex's Diner on the planet Coruscant. There, the donuts were made in a traditional Adarian style by a genuine Crisp-E-O donut droid every morning. They cost 1.5 credits. According to the diner's owner, Dexter Jettster, the iced Trammistan chocolate donuts were a crowd-pleasing favorite.
I love when Star Wars does this and just takes something normal and makes it all STAR WARS. You can’t just make up a word and say it’s a circle of fried dough with a hole in the middle but it’s what the Adarians call it. Well, you can. However it’s just a lot easier to call it a donut. But you can’t just call it an ice chocolate donut, because again, we’re in the Star Wars universe. So now it’s not just an iced chocolate donut, but it’s an iced Trammistan chocolate donut.
News From the HoloNet
Disney/Lucasfilm Plans Ojibwe Dub for ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’
This is cool. Planning on writing a little more about it soon.
Keri Russell's Star Wars Role Kept Her Behind A Mask & That's The Way She Liked It
I guess I can remove “wasting Keri Russell” from my list of Rise of Skywalker grievances.
Natalie Portman Debunks Major Padme Rumor
Honestly, a Revenge of the Sith ending where Padme tries to kill Anakin would have been pretty good.
That’s it for this week. If you like what I’m doing, please subscribe. I’ll catch you next week, and may the Force be with you.
It’s been a while since I’ve read the book but I do plan to re-read and write about it this year. Like the Holiday Special, it’s definitely a product of its time.
Like Death Star HR. Hey oh!
Decent chance there’s some reverse psychology or something by Lucas. If he acts like he hates it, people are going to seek it out. Disney doesn’t seem to care that much, there’s plenty of copies on YouTube and they’re not having them taken down.