Lord Starfish said:
There might be plenty of bad Star Wars stuff, but that special is the only one where its very existence baffles me.
No doubt it’s baffling when seen 38 years later, but at the time it wasn’t. Star Wars wasn’t the grand visually Rhyming entity created by the genius Ring master Lucas * genuflect *. It was just a single story in a single film. There was no Original Vision™, so this was the third story written to expand the Star Wars universe. I’ll research, but Star Wars may have still been playing in the theaters at the time. It was that big of a deal.
Like millions of fans back then, I’d seen Star Wars countless times and had worn out the soundtrack. A year later we were all anxiously awaiting another look at the Star Wars universe. All we’d had until then was Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which I’d started to read but which didn’t stick with me until decades later. It’s now Personal Canon.
I was one of the millions who tuned in that evening in 1978 and I was one of the millions who felt let down. It was a weird mess. I haven’t seen it since. Come to think of it, it may have been baffling 38 minutes later. Maybe I’m ready for a second viewing after all these years. I can take it. Probably.