Let's talk about the Holiday Special.
Chewie's relatives are called "Itchy" and "Lumpy". That sounds like fucking chicken pox. They couldn't have found better names? Itchy and Lumpy?
The various acts. Harvey Korman comes on in drag and does a cookery show, while waving his hips around and saying "whip", "beat". Ooooookaaaay. There's an acrobat show that goes on too long. There's Itchy's fantasy. He watches this thing in which this woman with bad hair appears (judging by the weird hair I'd guess she was a member of the Jedi council) and she says she's his fantasy and that he should enjoy her. And she sings. And it goes on and on and it's fucking painful. And I was thinking "Why am I watching this? I hope nobody knows I'm watching this". Harvey Korman does an act where he's an android that keeps malfunctioning. This too goes on too long. Ok. A band appears and sings, for no apparent reason, and they sure don't seem very Star Wars. Oh god, there's the Tatooine segment. First we have deleted footage from ANH. Cool, interesting to see. But then we go inside the cantina and we have Harvey Korman trying to get into Bea Arthur's pants while pouring drinks into the top of his head. Until I saw the Holiday special I didn't know Harvey Korman could be so disturbing -three fucking roles. Then things get worse, because the empire declares a curfew and Bea Arthur starts singing. I was thinking "If she says 'friend' one more time I'll scream."
There's the cartoon, which is ok. Boba Fett's voice is done very well. But we also have Darth Vader telling us that Boba Fett is the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, which is like saying "Yeah kids, this guy is the coolest!" The beginning of the Boba Fett cult, obviously.
There's a cut clip from ANH of Vader and imperial officer Chief Bast in the death star, and it's cool to see ANH deleted scenes. It's long overdue Lucas put out a dvd with all ANH's deleted scenes. So many movies have tons of deleted scenes on the special features and ANH's deleted scenes include some very significant stuff. They should be on the dvd, not just some of them on a computer disc put out over a decade ago.
I don't mind the wookiees. It's fun to see them going around growling while acting like ordinary people. The little wookiee kid is cute. But the inside of their house is very 20th century American and they have a normal life with all mod cons, and this doesn't fit for wookiees. The films made an effort to make aliens alien, this is failing at that.
Finally we have the wookiees all walking through space (wtf?) to some magical place and Leia sings. What are wookiees wearing clothes for? Why are they walking through space? What's this whole magical thing? Is this Star Wars?
Does anybody have any idea how much Lucas originated the story? I've heard conflicting accounts -that he wrote the original story or that he just gave story ideas. Did he come up with the names Itchy and Lumpy? Was it his idea for the wookiee house interior and life to be so normal 20th century Earth? Who thought up the walking through space bit?
Anyway, it's bizarre and much of it is quite hard to watch. You wonder what they were thinking. I'd really like to hear from all the people behind it what their intentions were. One thing I read is that they thought they had to disguise the fact that they had a story about creatures who don't really talk so they thought they had to put in song and dance etc stuff to disguise it.