The infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special must be seen to be disbelieved. It was the answer to the question nobody was asking: What if Star Wars was a ’70s variety show with Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman (in drag), and Jefferson Starship, endless scenes of Wookiees speaking their native language to one another without subtitles, and Luke and Leia were on enough cocaine to blow up the Death Star without coming anywhere near the ventilation shaft?
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The Holiday Special aired once on November 17, 1978, on CBS and has never been given an official home video release. For years, the only way to see it was if you could get hold of a bootleg videotape, or had sufficiently annoyed Carrie Fisher. She claimed she’d put on her copy whenever she wanted party guests to go home already.
I’ve tried watching it on YouTube where it is — at long last? — freely available to anyone but I’ve never made it even close to all the way through the show’s hour and 20-minute runtime. Even this 32-second promo is more than anyone should watch but I’m going to ask you to watch it, anyway, because before I tell you what I must tell you, you must get a feel for just how bad the Star Wars Holiday Special is.
I’m sorry I had to make you do that.
To its credit, the Holiday Special was shot for about $14, and, judging by the phoned-in performances and illicit drugs required to get it made, everyone involved seems to have understood just how bad it was.
If only the big brains at Disney-owned Lucasfilm were so self-aware, they could have saved themselves a couple hundred million dollars, audiences’ time — and maybe even Star Wars, itself.
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Other PJ Media writers have already talked enough about why “The Acolyte” is so bad so I won’t bore you with a rehash. Although I would like to say that the odds of a show being good when it features lesbian space witches chanting a baby into existence to fight the patriarchy are approximately 3,720 to one.
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But I’m happy to report that it isn’t just the lifelong fanboys (like me) who are doing a Jedi force-run away from the show. Because “The Acolyte” has achieved the impossible — audiences hate it more than the Holiday Special.
What is wrong with you @Disney @StarWars? You beat “The Star Wars Holiday Special” as the worst Star Wars of all time.
I even double checked it. Yes, the Star Wars Holday Special is 150% better than the #Acolyte. That show barely deserves 10% rating. pic.twitter.com/TRDFmWf2V0
— 🇺🇸 🌹🎶🤟Reverend Lee 🤘🎶 ✝️ ☯️ (@Darrell02554398) June 19, 2024
But maybe even “Acolyte vs Holiday Special” isn’t the real story.
Critics and audiences rendered nearly identical verdicts on the Holiday Special, 25% rotten from critics and 23% from viewers. But look at those critics’ results for “The Acolyte.” A whopping 84% of them are lapping up the badly written, poorly acted, comically Woke, dumpster fire of an excuse for a TV show.
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“In this new and improved Star Wars,” I wrote last month, “the most popular weapon isn’t a blaster or a lightsaber. It’s a sledgehammer, wielded against the audience.”
Critics, whom I’ve long suspected of being masochists, seem to go for that kind of abuse.
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