The Star Wars Holiday Special

Kashyyk And Carrie

The Star Wars Holiday Special
Airdate: November 1978
Directed by Steve Binder
and David Acomba
USA DVD-R
20th Century Fox

"If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of that program and smash it."
George Lucas

Well, this was a bit of a tick box for me... I finally got around to watching my bootleg of The Star Wars Holiday Special which I bought, well, a number of years ago but it’s still easy to find. This special is notorious as it aired only once and then George Lucas tried to buy and destroy all the master copies (somewhat unsuccessfully although, I don’t think more than a few minutes of high quality footage from those masters have ever made it into a quality transfer). I can absolutely see why he wanted to do that and, frankly, I’m surprised this film didn’t do more damage to the franchise, airing briefly, as it did, a couple of years before the release of the second film in the series, The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed by me here).

The film is mostly set on Chewbacca’s home planet of Kashyyk while his family of wookies and a human friend tune into different programmes on their various media equipment, trying to find out what has delayed his return home for Life Day (which is Star Wars Christmas... although not the same thing as the Star Wars Christmas In The Stars music album, for sure). They tune into various sketches, songs and dances set in the Star Wars universe and... there is a kind of narrative thread to the story too, when the Imperial forces raid Chewie’s home.

The show features Mark Hamill as Luke Skywallker (recovering from his car accident and heavily made up to account for his recent injuries), Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, Anthony Daniels as C3PO and a remote controlled R2D2. Most of the cast tried to get out of it but it was originally George Lucas’ idea to do this show, to keep the franchise alive in people’s minds before the first sequel. Well, when he saw what had been made in his name, he realised straight away how terrible it was and, well, his comments at the start of this blog are pretty indicative of his stance on the special. Let me just iterate, the show aired only once in the US and not at all in most countries.

Now I was suckered in from the opening because... hey, that bit was pretty good. It involves Han and Chewie on board the Millennium Falcon, trying to get back to Chewie’s home world and, frankly, it’s just like watching a slice of the original Star Wars (with the effects footage from the first movie dropped in between their dialogue... if you kids these days want to get a taste of what the original special effects in the first Star Wars were like before all the CGI revisionism crap, this is one way to do it). Unfortunately, while Ford and Mayhew manage to enhance nearly all of their scenes and make them watchable, the same is not true for the whole show. Carrie Fisher even sings a song at the end and... yeah, it’s not good.

I think my biggest disappointment with this is, looking at it 46 years later, the show is failing at being both a good production and a bad production. I mean, it’s not good but, alas, it’s not so bad it's good either... it’s just dull and lifeless and the many comedy sketches, songs and dance routines are just drab and, not just unremarkable but deadly boring. Not to mention somewhat inappropriate... I mean, when Chewie’s mum hooks up to some kind of fantasy machine and we see a woman seductively singing and dancing in an erotic manner, it’s definitely a WTF? moment here (I didn’t know this when I was watching it but it was apparently trying to be as close to soft porn as the producers thought they could get away with on prime time television). And don’t get me started on the cooking programme ‘Bantha Surprise’ sequence... a lot of this thing is almost unwatchable.

It never really recovers from this. Now there are some weird things happening in terms of Star Wars continuity. For instance, cassette tapes to power the hologram machines and wookies using framed photos (always weirdly absent form the big screen Star Wars movies... not seen a flat, still used in that universe before, from what I can remember). Completely continuity busting stuff, for sure. But, here’s an interesting thing... a cartoon section, done in the style of the kind of thing you would see in the old Heavy Metal comics of the time, has the first official appearance as a character of Boba Fett. Now, it’s not stated he’s a bounty hunter, he’s just Darth Vader’s ‘right hand man’ but, he’s here all the same, looking pretty much like he would do in The Empire Strikes Back a couple of years later.

Now I watched a bonus version of The Star Wars Holiday Special with all the original American advertisements (plus a news bulletin) left in and, it’s sad to say that I was getting more entertainment value out of the trashy, 1970s American advertising than the actual special itself... which is, yeah... okay. But hey, due to this, at least I now know that the particular week in November in which this aired caused it to cancel episodes of both Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk... both of which I’m sure had more entertainment value than this. Honestly, it’s a wonder this show wasn’t a franchise killer in itself (as the recent Disney TV shows have somewhat become... they’re mostly not much better, I would say).

And I think that’s me about done with The Star Wars Holiday Special. It would be true to say that, while I would welcome an unlikely, official release of this on high definition Blu Ray at some point, part of me is relieved that this will probably never happen. Watching through this felt like a bit of an endurance test, to be honest and, I’ve really no interest in repeating the experience.

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

Cool Han, Luke

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
1977 plus subsequent ruinations USA 
Directed by George Lucas
20th Century Fox BluRay Region A/B 

So this film was pretty much my life for 6 and a bit years.

When I first saw it, back at the very end of 1977 when it was released in the UK, I was two weeks shy of my tenth birthday. It was just called Star Wars back then. Lucas had no real thoughts of it making enough money to do a sequel and it wasn’t until the 1978 thetrical re-release that he retroactively redid the opening to reflect the Episode IV: A New Hope title (many people say it was later but I remember going to see it again in 1978 with that title). I went and saw the original version at the Dominion cinema in London (now a theatre which shows musicals) and the crowd scrabbling for entry beneath the massive, giant, illuminated signage poster artwork was a leviathan of chaos.

The Dominion cinema was pretty much one of the bigger cinemas, the likes of which you just don’t get in London today. It was an ideal venue for a film which pretty much blew away most people who went and saw it. It was the biggest cinematic event I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how much the hype and the pre-marketing of this film, after it had already premiered in the US, dwarfed pretty much any modern blockbuster to this day. The only thing which came near it was when I had to queue around the block for a midnight screening (at least a day after the release) of Tim Burton’s Batman back in 1989... but as big as that was in terms of media saturation, the original 1977 Star Wars was like a bomb going off in everyone’s collective consciousness. I don’t remember it playing for less than three months at my local cinema and this was in the days when cinemas had one screen only, remember.

The film is simplistic in theme and content while still retaining a gritty, lived in look for the setting. The effects were so groundbreaking that Lucas even had to set up Industrial Light and Magic part of the way into production and invent new ways of doing things, just to cope with the demands of what was required. It payed off big time... people had never seen anything as slick as this in the space opera genre on the big screen (or small, come to that) before. An homage to those old theatrical serials that Lucas loved as a kid (who doesn’t love those serials?), Star Wars was shopped around through a lot of studios before 20th Century Fox agreed to pick it up. This was after Lucas had already tried to acquire the screen rights to his beloved Flash Gordon, of course. Once he was refused, he made his own homage to Flash Gordon with his own characters... who later became Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa, Obi Wan Kenobi etc... after a fair few rewrites.

The way it affected me personally was to engulf almost the whole of my life at the time.

I read the Marvel Comics, listened to the double vinyl LP record on almost constant replay, collected and swapped the two sets of blue and red bubble gum cards that came out in the UK (not knowing that the Americans had three other sets released after these until over a decade later), played with the action figures when they, eventually, hit the shelves and kept two or three ring binders full of my own sketches, notes and articles based on the first two Star Wars films. It was all I, and many of my friends, ate, breathed and slept apart from when we were eating, breathing and sleeping the various bandwagon spin off movies that followed hot on the heels of Lucas’ magnum opus (Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Star Trek The Motion Picture etc.). It was a phenomenon which I don’t expect to see repeated in my lifetime.

On BluRay we have to live with the “revised through various versions to buggery” editions. So, I think it would be fair to say, the film has never looked as bad as it does now but, even with the annoying additions and alterations, you can still see a lot of the sheer genius and panache coming through which marked this film as the real deal back in the day. It’s a shame that it’s been so tinkered with on subsequent editions, where backdrops now come alive with moving CGI creatures and ships which kinda fill the screen more... but somehow leave you with less of an experience.

There are, of course, some big problems with the prequels to this film not tying up too well. I mentioned in my review of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (which you can read here) that there’s no way Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru wouldn’t recognise C3PO, who is effectively the mechanical son of Darth Vader, when they saw him because he’d been living with them for a long period of time not even two decades before. Similarly the ageing process of both Obi Wan Kenobi and Grand Moff Tarkin, not to mention the significant amount of time it takes to construct the first Death Star in relation to the time it takes to knock up the second one for Return Of The Jedi, really doesn’t hold water when you inspect it all closely.

Now this is further nitpicking, I’m sure (nitpicking is the path to strong continuity decisions my friends) but in the scene where Obi Wan Kenobi is blatantly lying to Luke about his father... certain point of view my ass, lying is lying... he also compounds his lie with the completely unnecessary fib that his father wanted him to have his lightsabre when Luke was old enough to have it. Well excuse me but Vader assumes his one child (he doesn't know they are 'twins' in Revenge Of The Sith) died with his wife... presumably until he learns different somewhere in between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Also, although Lucas was smart enough to add a shot of Obi Wan retrieving Anakin's lightsabre, post duel, this could hardly be, by any stretch of the imagination, representative of the specific sentiment that Obi Wan expresses to Luke in this specific scene.

Another thing Obi Wan says, and you may want to attribute (aka stupidly retroactively attempt to justify) this to the effects of old age, is that he has 't gone by the name of Obi Wan since before Luke was born. Nope mate. Completely wrong. Just saw it in the last movie... you were still going by the name Obi Wan until shortly after Luke was born. So this really is not good attention to detail and both this and the previous problem of Anakin's lightsabre are both examples of many foolish mis-steps which the prequel trilogy has created where none existed before.

The film was, of course, not without it's problems when it first came out as a stand alone experience. Many of these, such as the stormtrooper who bumps his head on a door, are remembered affectionately by fans of the series but I, lunkheaded viewer that I am, only now noticed one particular one on this last viewing (even though I've probably seen the film close to 50 times since 1977). The particular case in point is when Luke and Han steal the stormtroopers' uniforms. One of the more spectacular things found in this first Star Wars movie was that "laser guns" had real, visible consequences. They were just like regular, bullet firing guns... only prettier. They ricocheted, they left scorch holes in their wake and the guns had a recoil to them. It was details like this that set Star Wars apart from many of its predecessors and, sadly, many of its successors. Why then, I ask you, after you hear the laser blasts as Luke and Han incapacitate two stormtroopers to steal their uniforms, are their costumes all squeaky clean and free from blast holes? This enquiring mind wants to know.

Asides from all the little niggling negatives, though, the original Star Wars still holds up as a really decent movie. The device that Lucas attributes as a steal from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, that of telling an extraordinary story from the viewpoint of the two lowliest characters (in this case the droids R2D2 and C3PO) works very well in dragging you right into the story straight away and engages you in a way that other films with a different starting point are not always able to do.  The plotting is simplistic but ferociously paced and doesn't let up until the end credits.  much like those old 1930s and 1940s serials that George Lucas was trying to emulate. Heck, even the opening title pyramid crawl was a particular gimmick used in a lot of the serials specific to the Universal studio... and in this particular instance it might be worth pointing out that this style of recap was used in the third of the Flash Gordon serials... Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe.

There's one last thing I want to properly mention before bringing this little review to a close because I think it's important in that this was another way in which the film has had, still to this day, a lasting impact on the way many films are made... and it was all down to John Williams', frankly, outstanding score.

Before this film, the age old way of scoring a Hollywood film with a lush, orchestral score the likes of which the Steiners, Korngolds and Newmans of this world used to provide, had gone way out of style somewhere around the late 1950s/early 1960s. Directors wanted more jazzy, funkier and transparent soundscapes for their films. The music had to be hip. It had to be cool and, mostly, it had to have a hit title song if at all possible. Now Johnny Williams (soon to be listed with the shortened, more respectable form of his first name) had already bucked that trend a little a couple of years before this movie... when he provided an absolutely brilliant score for Steven Spielberg's first film Jaws. For this film, rather than take the space aged, modernistic, computerised tones most associated with sci-fi pictures, Lucas wanted a proper, full Golden Aged Hollywood, wall to wall score for his movie and this is exactly what Williams gave him... he gave him "the full Korngold", so to speak. When the record sales for the film were in, not to mention John Williams winning his third Oscar for this score, the studios realised that, not only could romantic, classical music still work as a viable option for a film score... It was also still incredibly popular. Popular enough to get some serious cash back from the record sales. And that's why many film scores to this day still use this Golden Age approach to the scoring... because Johnny Williams proved it could still work wonders in support of a movie.

So that's all I have to say, in this particular kind of venue, about the first Star Wars movie. Still a good film and although it has many added revisions, on the Blu Ray version Lucas has at least softened the much criticised ( and rightly so) Greedo shoots first revision. On the Blu Ray the two gun shots happen faster, pretty much simultaneously, and you can kind of justify to yourself that Greedo’s blaster just went off as a muscle spasm reaction to Han's killing shot. It was kind of impossible for either of them to miss at that close range anyway.

So, yes, a marred film now but still a classic. I still have the “untampered with” versions of the original trilogy on a special DVD release from around 6 or 7 years ago and I won't be parting with those versions anytime soon.  An elegant movie from a more civilised time... not as clumsy or random as a director's cut. The greatest Star Wars movie, however, was just three years away...


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones

Clone With The Windu

Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones
2002 USA 
Directed by George Lucas
20th Century Fox BluRay Region A/B 
Previous BBFC cuts waived

I have really mixed feelings about Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones. If you read my review of the The Phantom Menace (which I reviewed for the 3D cinematic re-release right here) you’ll know of the very strong bond I feel with the Star Wars universe since I first saw the very first movie play in the Dominion cinema in London at the tail end of 1977. You’ll also know from that review that, despite a lot of people being less impressed with Lucas’ first prequel, I actually rated it quite highly. I couldn’t understand why a film almost as dark as The Empire Strikes Back was not realised as such, just because it was wearing a happy face, so to speak. It wasn’t until I saw Revenge Of The Sith with some friends and had to explain it to them years later, that I realised a lot of people just didn’t have a very good idea of the back story to the original 1970s trilogy... so a lot of them didn’t realise just exactly what was going down in The Phantom Menace.

Now don’t get me wrong. I was losing a lot of love already for my childhood hero George Lucas, after the frankly disastrous “modifications” he made to the original trilogy on the late 1990s cinematic re-release of the movies... but The Phantom Menace was a triumph for me and I couldn’t wait to get to the next one. Well unfortunately, for me, Attack Of The Clones is the one Star Wars move I really don’t like all that much and it just doesn’t feel quite like a Star Wars movie to me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some nice stuff in there... the asteroid depth charge sound and visual effects, for example... but to me it all just seems a little flat.

Now I’ve got absolutely nothing against Hayden Christensen as an actor. I especially liked him in Jumper, but I don’t think his on-screen chemistry with Natalie Portman is that great here. It’s not as emotionless or wooden as people said back when the first reviews of this came out in 2002... but it’s not all that great either. There are some parts where the actor is saying hugely romantic things and not really getting away with it and, other times, when his emotions seem to be quite a bit repressed or non-existent when they shouldn’t have been, perhaps. Now I’m not going to blame the actor for this stuff because I suspect at least some of the reasons why certain of the scenes don’t work is because he may have been directed to deliberately dial things down or up due to the ultimate fate the character is heading towards. Also, it has to be said, a lot of the romantic, character building stuff is overly long and slows things down... and also that brings me straight into what I personally feel is another bad thing about this movie.

Pretty much all the other Star Wars films in the original trilogy are very pacey and you’re not very far off from entering or leaving an action sequence throughout their running times. The Phantom Menace follows in the footsteps of this beautifully and, Kurosawa comparisons aside, these were kinda supposed to be the modern equivalent of an old Universal or Republic style film serial of times gone by. Now I really don’t mind slowly marinating plots and action alone doesn’t do it for me in a movie, unless it’s deliberately setting itself up to be that kind of thing, but Attack Of The Clones has a delayed action chase about ten minutes in (after two assassination attempts which don’t really count as action sequences) where we get to see Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi in pursuit of Zam The Assassin... and then the film just goes dead in terms of action, to be honest. Some wonderous sequences fill this gap, to be sure, but frankly, over 35 minutes without an action sequence in a Star Wars movie seems a bit of a mis-step to me. I maybe would have liked my Lucas a little more Corman in this particular movie, perhaps, but maybe the weight of the story just drags it down too much for added action? I don’t know... but I thought this was an uncharacteristically empty gap for a Star Wars movie.
And talking about pacing...

Now I know this film had some problems when the first cut was reviewed by the director and I understand that a lot of the Anakin/Padme romance scenes were either re-shot or beefed up to try to get them to work better (at least that’s what was reported at the time) but... the timeline taking place between the film’s two main male protagonists, Anakin and Obi Wan, and the cross cutting between their separate exploits... don’t quite make sense when you compare them. See if you agree with me on this one...

These are the two timelines which are equally cross cut together across the running time at a certain point in Attack Of The Clones:

Obi Wan, pops into a diner to get a quick bit of info, drops in on Yoda, goes to the planet where a Clone Army is being built (posing as a customer) and has a quick look at them, gets into a scrap and then goes to another planet where he sends a message and gets captured. That’s.... what? Two days at the most?

Meanwhile, cross cut with this is...

Annakin escorts Padme back to Naboo, they spend some days/nights romancing, then they hotfoot it to Tatooine, Anakin spends at least an evening, possibly a day, tracking down his dying mother, then he slaughters a whole tribe of Tusken Raiders and, only then, after all that, do we get the message cross cut into things.

So, what’s that? About a week? And these two timelines are simultaneously cross-cut to give them a sense of happening in the same time? It doesn’t quite gel with the way it’s been cut together I think.

So I’m guessing what’s happened here is they reshot and added some extra bits into the Annakin/Padme timeline but... there was nowhere else to insert them into the movie which made any sense unless you made the, aesthetically not great choice, of not continually cross cutting between Obi-Wan and Anakin’s timelines. Which must have been really irritating to the people sitting in the editing room, I’ll bet. Now, to be honest, what they’ve gone with in the finished product is probably the lesser of the two evils and I think they made the best choice they had... but it still leaves your mind playing catch up with the temporal space in a few areas during the course of the movie and it does pop you out of it a few times.

Okay... that’s most of the negative stuff. What about the good stuff?

Well, the fight between Obi Wan and Django Fett is pretty good and brutal (it was originally cut at both British cinemas and all British home release versions until a head butt cut was finally waived for this Blu Ray release... which meant I had to pay out for an import copy of the DVD when it was first released to get it the first time around). The idea of the poisonous centipedes which infiltrate Padme Amidala’s room at the start is something which reads straight out of a pulp Sherlock Holmes or Fu Manchu story and perfectly captures the tone of what this film series is about. The action sequence in the arena at the end is like it’s been plucked straight out of one of Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter novels... so that’s kinda cool (if a little plagiaristic, perhaps) and the incredibly hard to even imagine until you see it dual between Yoda and Count Dooku is pretty amazing. Oh, that reminds me... Sir Christopher Lee doesn’t have a huge amount of screen time in this film but what he does get he really makes count. He’s just really phenomenal in this movie and his screen presence uplifts certain scenes tremendously.

But... back to the negatives again, I’m afraid.

The conveyor belt battle looks and feels just like something out of a platform game... which makes me cynical about why it was even included in the movie... and the comedy shenanigans of C3PO are just beyond irritating in this one. Great gags in themselves but, seriously, inappropriate in the context of the scenes they are in, in my humble opinion. Also, there’s a real false note where Natalie Portman falls out of a transport and looks like she’s been really hurt and then, when someone asks if she’s okay, she just gets up and gets on with things... it doesn’t quite scan right. You have a watch and let me know if you agree with me please.

And then there’s the music. The beloved John Williams scores another epic Star Wars movie but... this one doesn’t seem quite right in a lot of places. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some memorable scoring in this one but, throughout the movie, it just felt like a load of action cues from The Phantom Menace were literally being chopped up and then just needle-dropped onto the soundtrack rather than have a new score composed in several places. I’m wondering if Williams wrote some stuff which was rejected and then replaced with temp or, possibly, if the action sequences in certain areas kept getting recut to buggery and he just didn’t have time to keep changing them. Either way, certain musical sequences just seem a bit choppy and clumsy to me. Still, you can’t top Johnny Williams scoring a Star Wars movie so maybe the story will come out on this one in a few decades... who knows?

And that’s about it for this one. There’s a certain something which really doesn’t make sense in the whole Star Wars timeline in this one, due to C3PO and R2D2 being present on Owen and Beru Lars moisture farm on Tatooine, but I’ll point that out in the next two reviews, when I rewatch them. For now, let me just say that, any Star Wars film is going to be something you’re probably going to get something out of. For me, Attack Of The Clones is my least favourite of the lot and I think newcomers to the trilogy should never try and start on this series with this as a jumping on point. Make sure you watch them in the chronological order on which they were released or, if you want to do it the other way round, make sure you start with The Phantom Menace first... just cut Attack Of The Clones some slack when you watch it. They’re not all like this one.

Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker