The Star Wars Holiday Special!

I would love to see what covers people have created specifically for The Star Wars Holiday Special.

I've collected far too many things related to the Special and, while I've found a handful or two of covers, there are probably more that I haven't dreamed of.

HISTORY:

Years ago, long before I discovered this amazing community, I bought a copy of the Special via eBay. The cover proclaimed at its top "Every saga has a bastard son", a fun play off the first trailer for Episode I. The transfer is kind of muddy but I love that cover.

I bought one other, sans cover, although for another ten dollars I could have had one. Since then I've learned better: that the Special is out there and that one should never pay for it or any other fan edit or preservation.

(Trivia: I much later learned that the second person from whom I bought a copy had already been banned from OT for, you'll never believe this, selling his and others' work.)

I like this idea.  I've collected up a number of images of dodgy covers from over the years...though unfortunately not all of them are full resolution.  When I'm at home I'll try to post some of them.

Here's a bit of trivia: the covers used for the majority of the Holiday Special DVDs sold on eBay (generally a couple of basic designs with occasional variations and alterations) were actually created by our very own JediSluggo, based on some brainstorming we did about what we thought an idea cover design would be.  We never thought they'd be so widely used for pirate profit once they got out in the wild, but I suppose it's not too surprising.  It's both flattering and disgusting at the same time.

--SKot

Sluggo said:

Ditto.

Jedisluggo.  There's a name I haven't gone by in a pretty long while.  A pretty long while.

But you're not dead.  Not yet. 

Some of my HS covers are here at the bottom of the page.  This is how they likely got picked up for ebay.

SKot, I still have that one cover I never finished that featured that unauthorized photo you got from that one friend.  Is that vague enough?

Oh, I remember the one!  How far did you get with that?

--SKot

I don't know if I've asked this before. Memory grows weak, and I've been working on this for quite a long time.

Would any of you creative types be willing and able to create a cover for a collection of videos I've gathered from around the 'net? It's a compilation that doesn't include the SWHS at all, but a variety of things related to it.

Blu-ray is unlikely at best. (Unless Lucasfilm loses its mind and releases it.)

I know that it's been on Usenet. If you have a good provider, then a DVD was posted to a.b.sw almost 600 days ago.

I don't see any point in putting a broadcast copy of the Holiday Special on recordable Blu-ray: the media is more expensive, more complicated to deal with, and there's no real benefit in terms of quality gain (it's 34-year-old TV-to-VHS quality; like you said, you can't polish a turd!).  A dual-layer DVD would offer only minimal improvement in bitrate, but would be good if the source material was transferred well.  It's just simpler to have the broadcast Special on DVD media, which plays on all DVD and Blu-ray players.

If you search for the KCCI version of the Special out there, there is a DVD of it with full menus...and the KCCI is the best all-around copy currently available.  It's actually quite decent.  Unless/until something better becomes available, that's the best we've got.

As far as Lucasfilm releasing the Special on BD (or ever releasing it at all), don't hold your breath waiting.  However, at least a *portion* of the Special is now on BD: the Boba Fett cartoon is part of the special features on the 6-film boxed set.

--SKot

Zion's "hybrid edition" is known to be one of the better copies of the movie.

nfo file said:

This DVD is mainly a cleaned-up version of the original WBBM transfer,
taken from a 2nd-generation VHS copy. I added the commercials from the
WMAR version posted on Google Video in order to sync up with the RiffTrax
audio. This is far and away the best quality version of the Holiday
Special currently in circulation, IMHO.

The Holiday Special could be put on Blu ray if it was shot on film.  From what i have been told it was shot on low resolution video.

The Nelvana cartoon was shot on film however.

Very cool