ChainsawAsh said:
Yeah, but the Making Of didn't have Jefferson Starship playing a song in the middle of it. They probably got the rights to broadcast it, but never got the rights for other types of distribution - that's why so many TV-DVD releases today have the music replaced with generic, royalty-free music, and why many haven't been released at all. Look at any DVD release of That '70s Show, season 1 of Scrubs, and older shows like Mission: Impossible or WKRP in Cincinnati. They even had to replace the theme song for one season of Married ... with Children, for Christ's sake.

So when you have something that's played live during the program, the studio might very well think it's not worth it to pay the royalties for home video distribution (which, for Jefferson Starship, would probably be fairly high) if they don't think they'll make their money back.

Yeah, I'm aware of all that. But the fact remains that there's a good chance the idea of bringing out the special on video occurred to them before Lucas decided he wanted it gone, so they may have had some idea what to do about the Jefferson Starship bit. Maybe they would have simply cut the song (hardly a great loss -the Starship bit was probably the most un-Star Warsy part of the special out of a whole lot of un-Star Warsy things, and I found it even more annoying than the wookiee porn and the cantina musical number).

Of course, I don't think that's why the Holiday Special hasn't been released - I just think George hates it and never wants it to see the light of day. Once he's dead, and he isn't personally responsible for these decisions, we'll probably get awesome Blu-Ray releases of the 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, and 1997 versions of all the films, and a very nice DVD of the Holiday Special. But that might be a while ...

As long as he doesn't put it in his will that they should never be brought out.