“The Star Wars Holiday Special” in Context
Just some thoughts…
- Friday, November 17, 1978, 8 PM, (7 central and mountain)
In November 1978, the Special was preempting Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk on CBS. It was against Donnie & Marie, The Rockford Files, and Diff’rent Strokes — then only in its fourth episode, and quickly building an audience with an assist from Charlotte Rae/”Edna Garrett,” later of The Facts of Life. Conrad Bain himself was a refugee of the recently-cancelled Maude (of which more later). The Special was followed by Flying High at its normal time, and preceded by the (then hour-long) CBS Evening News.
Rachel McAdams was born the day the Special aired, in London, Ontario, one of the many babies produced in a mini baby-boom following the Great Blizzard of January 1978. The day after the Special, Congressman Leo Ryan and several of his entourage would be shot dead by followers of Jim Jones, while running to an airplane on a landing strip in Guyana. Harvey Milk and George Moscone were killed the following week on Thursday. The author of this post was born six months and a day after the Special aired.
Star Wars, the film itself, had been released on May 25, 1977, 18 months previous; it played until April 1978 in its first run. It was re-released on July 21st of ‘78 and was still playing in second-run houses when the Special aired, against films like Animal House and Heaven Can Wait. It would be released again in August of ‘79, April of ‘81, and August of 82’. In its ‘79 re-release it was trading the number one spot in weekend box-office with North Dallas Forty and Alien. Despite being several years old, Star Wars as a franchise still remained one of the most potent entertainment properties on Earth, at a time before “franchises” were even contemplated, and people were frantic to see anything with the Star Wars name.
- Who Was Mitzie Welch?
Firstly, the will of a single artist casts its indelible shadow over the entire proceedings of the Star Wars Holiday Special, but it isn’t George Lucas’s.
By Lucas’s own account, he had approved of the general concept of a Christmas special, and had either written or approved the story in the spring of 1978, and had left the production in the hands of a USC friend, David Acomba. (There aren’t really hard sources for this account, but that’s what we have from Wikipedia.)
Somewhere along the way, the production became something Acomba didn’t want to be associated with, and he left. The people who took over included:
Steve Binder: The replacement director, a director of several seasons of Hullabaloo, an associate of Elvis Presley, having produced several of his specials in the 70s, later Zoobilee Zoo (remember that one?) and The Chevy Chase Show
Ken and Mitzie Welch: Long time songwriters and composers of television variety shows.
Pat Proft: Wisconsin native and veteran of The Smothers Brothers, later to earn unique notoriety writing on Police Squad, The Naked Gun, Police Academy and Scary Movie movies.
Bruce Villanch: A now immortal Advocate columnist and ghostwriter of Oscar presenters’ speeches; at the time his resume included The Brady Bunch Variety Hour and Donnie & Marie.
Actors recruited for the show included Bea Arthur, Art Carney and Harvey Korman. Korman is famous today for playing Hedley Lamarr in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, but he was an established comedian in variety shows throughout the 1960s and 70s, and you might remember him from those weird “Masterpiece Theater” lead-ins to Mama’s Family.
The choreographer of the Special was David Winters, who had choreographed many such specials and had collaborated with Binder before. Winters would later direct the worst science fiction film of the 1980s.
Something a lot of these people had in common, and the person to whom I’d accredit the title of true “auteur” of the Special, was Carol Burnett. The Welches were key personnel on the Burnett show, as was Korman. The show follows the approximate contours of a Carol Burnett episode, with the flubby live-to-tape sketches, the hammy acting, the musical numbers. Burnett had played last season in about the same time-slot, saturday night instead of friday.
Something else almost all of these people have in common is they were recently out of work. Carol Burnett and Maude had both been cancelled earlier that spring. One can easily see how this gig may have been something of a sinecure to keep them busy, and keep them relevant.
- Goodnight but not Goodbye
My friend Craig watched the special for the first time two years ago. He remarked that the story of the Special is really one of a people under occupation, and that, in this way, the Special is very different from the movies. The cantina scene is explicitly redolent of Casablanca, and the imperials depicted in the Special owe as much (or more) to Colonel Klink or the Gauleiter from The Sound of Music than they do to Flash Gordon or the albeit fascist but still transcendently eerie Darth Vader.
Star Wars itself uses a lot of the tropes of a World War II movie in order to retell the old story in a new way. Rebels, fighter dogfights, an empire occupying vast territory, idealistic allies joining with a self-interested cynic who is won over, a “new weapon” of unimaginable force that tips the balance of power, all of these are elements of classic World War II narratives. Star Wars reinvigorates these stories by freeing them from the many cliches and the historical context and aftermath of World War II, and allows them to be retold. At the time Star Wars came out, the original World War II “greatest generation” was thirty years older, and all of parents in 1978 had no memory of the war. Star Wars was a way of retelling the World War II story and making the old beats relevant to a new generation.
Quite in contrast to the children watching the Star Wars Holiday Special are the people who made it. Most of them were older and were formed in the war and its aftermath, and were accustomed to the modes of narrative that had been developed for war. Where Lucas saw World War II as fighter battles, evil villains, and a race to blow up the train (er Death Star), someone like Art Carney probably saw World War II as people living behind enemies lines, being forced to witness horrible things, constantly risking betrayal, while hiding secret radios in bookcases and commandos in haylofts, and always having a dry comeback.
They’re both talking about the same events, but one set of stories, those told during the war and its aftermath, tended to emphasize individual human drama and tragedy, the experience of the private soldiers and the nameless; Lucas’s retelling is about kinetic action and larger-than-life heroes. Heroes who don’t have to risk being spied on, and who carry royal titles while having remarkably little family at risk— Everybody who has family in Star Wars loses it in reel 2 of the first movie. If you’re coming from a background of Casablanca and The Longest Day, Bridge on the River Kwai and The Magnificent Bastards, Star Wars must seem, as a war film, unimaginably stupid and childish, and I think this reaction to the material is the source of the Special’s particular awfulness. The cast and crew of the Special are trying to make a satire of Star Wars, but, aside from doing a terrible job, nobody is really in on the joke.
Something else at work is the underlying context of show business at the time. Between Jaws and Star Wars, something fundamentally changed in Hollywood: films began to skew more and more juvenile in appeal, and the consideration of things like toys, soundtracks, books, tie-ins and, most importantly, sequels became paramount. Star Wars was the future of entertainment, and it’s hard to believe that the people involved in the special wouldn’t feel a little threatened. Here they were, professional comedians, faced with something that had made more money in the last two years than any other film had ever made, and it was utterly without irony and cynicism, was “for kids” but managed to be so without a laugh track or talking animals (at least in the traditional sense).
