Special Event: Late Seating: THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL
February 20, 2025 4:57 PM - Subscribe
MST Club presents! Word wound its way around to us that the podcast Late Seating has done riffs of a number of Christmas movies, and one of them is the dreaded (yet strangely entertaining) Star Wars Holiday Special. CHTucker mixed the video of the SWHS with Late Seating's audio, and tonight that's what we're watching! Do I have to describe the indescribable? The Star Wars Holiday Special is from a strange mixture of multiple pop culture phenomena: the height of Star Wars mania, the era of the TV variety show, and the careers of Harvey Korman, Art Carney and Bea Arthur. The results include a lengthy segments of Chewbacca's family talking to each other entirely in Wookese without subtitles, Carney playing a space trader, Korman doing three comedy segments, Arthur running a cantina on Tatooine, and a disturbing VR performance by Diahann Carroll for Chewie's pater. Riff dates to around 2020; the SWHS hails from 1978. Previously on Fanfare, far too many previousies on Metafilter to recount here.
This is the viewing equivalent of "Holy shit, this milk is spoiled. Come smell!"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:29 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:29 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]
Indeed, but isn't that largely the point of MST Club? We don't have many people (for some understandable reasons), but for those who want to regularly watch some weird things, we're here, for now at least.
Quality weirdness of the calibre of the Star Wars Holiday Special is very rare. Not only is stuff of its level of strangeness really hard to find, there isn't even much of it. A number of strange trends intersected to make this item both exist and be relatively accessible and be notable enough that it's even of interest, sometimes, by people who don't have our drive to seek out ridiculous video. It's got more concentrated WTF per minute than anything else, and I think it's awesome for it.
In this one video, you have:
* Notable comedy people doing their best with material that can only be described (because I've already used the easiest adjectives) as crazypants.
* A multiple minute sequence of what amounts to a family of bigfeet but in a fifties sitcom making barnyard animal noises at each other, with the audience expected to just understand them.
* A performance by circus people that might have been the most flamboyantly colorful thing ever to air on TV at the time. (And I don't mean that as a bad thing, the sequence is well performed, they got people with real physical skill to do it.)
* A furry old wookie with a distended jaw outright getting off to a VR performance, enabled by everyone's favorite porn pusher Ed Norton, va-va-va-voom! The jokes are that he's actually masturbating right there in the living room, and presumably that's not what we're supposed to think is happening, but if not, then what is happening? When a neighbor comes over and sees that hairy old drainclog grunting with an Oculus on his head, does Malla tell them, "Oh, that's just $SKINCONDITION$, being gratified by a hologram?"
* Whatever the hell those last segments are. Are Chewbacca's family cultists? Are they astral projecting themselves into the sun? How are they meeting with Luke and Leia and the droids, when they're still presumably many lightyears away, when they had to use radio transmission, or whatever faster-than-light version of it is in Star Wars, before? And how come none of the things I've read on the SWHS try to explain this sequence? I presume most people are just numb by that point, but no one tries to even joke about it.
And on top of all of that, it remains to this day the clearest example of what ordinary home life in the Star Wars universe might be like. Like its counterpart sci-fi franchise Star Trek, because Star Wars stories tend to be about important people doing important things, we don't often see what normal people's lives are like. This and Luke's home life are in large part it.
(Off-topic addendum: This is but one facet of the jewel that was Lower Decks, not just because it's a comedy series that's more true to the spirit of classic Star Trek than most of the other recent and current shows, but because in a few places the characters actually go to normal-life Star Trek locations and fill in the gaps of that universe in a way that serious shows don't have time for. You're going to Klingon to negotiate a space treaty with Binars and Borg doodads attack and tachyon Jefferies tube slingshot effect Picard maneuver Cardassian latinum tribbles! Yeah, but what are 25th-century job fairs like? The ordinary future life that presumably takes up 90% of these characters' brains, down on the surface of the Federation's many worlds, that we rarely get to see. There's an episode of Lower Decks where they go to a theme park erected on the site of the invention of warp travel. That's world building.)
posted by JHarris at 5:37 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]
Quality weirdness of the calibre of the Star Wars Holiday Special is very rare. Not only is stuff of its level of strangeness really hard to find, there isn't even much of it. A number of strange trends intersected to make this item both exist and be relatively accessible and be notable enough that it's even of interest, sometimes, by people who don't have our drive to seek out ridiculous video. It's got more concentrated WTF per minute than anything else, and I think it's awesome for it.
In this one video, you have:
* Notable comedy people doing their best with material that can only be described (because I've already used the easiest adjectives) as crazypants.
* A multiple minute sequence of what amounts to a family of bigfeet but in a fifties sitcom making barnyard animal noises at each other, with the audience expected to just understand them.
* A performance by circus people that might have been the most flamboyantly colorful thing ever to air on TV at the time. (And I don't mean that as a bad thing, the sequence is well performed, they got people with real physical skill to do it.)
* A furry old wookie with a distended jaw outright getting off to a VR performance, enabled by everyone's favorite porn pusher Ed Norton, va-va-va-voom! The jokes are that he's actually masturbating right there in the living room, and presumably that's not what we're supposed to think is happening, but if not, then what is happening? When a neighbor comes over and sees that hairy old drainclog grunting with an Oculus on his head, does Malla tell them, "Oh, that's just $SKINCONDITION$, being gratified by a hologram?"
* Whatever the hell those last segments are. Are Chewbacca's family cultists? Are they astral projecting themselves into the sun? How are they meeting with Luke and Leia and the droids, when they're still presumably many lightyears away, when they had to use radio transmission, or whatever faster-than-light version of it is in Star Wars, before? And how come none of the things I've read on the SWHS try to explain this sequence? I presume most people are just numb by that point, but no one tries to even joke about it.
And on top of all of that, it remains to this day the clearest example of what ordinary home life in the Star Wars universe might be like. Like its counterpart sci-fi franchise Star Trek, because Star Wars stories tend to be about important people doing important things, we don't often see what normal people's lives are like. This and Luke's home life are in large part it.
(Off-topic addendum: This is but one facet of the jewel that was Lower Decks, not just because it's a comedy series that's more true to the spirit of classic Star Trek than most of the other recent and current shows, but because in a few places the characters actually go to normal-life Star Trek locations and fill in the gaps of that universe in a way that serious shows don't have time for. You're going to Klingon to negotiate a space treaty with Binars and Borg doodads attack and tachyon Jefferies tube slingshot effect Picard maneuver Cardassian latinum tribbles! Yeah, but what are 25th-century job fairs like? The ordinary future life that presumably takes up 90% of these characters' brains, down on the surface of the Federation's many worlds, that we rarely get to see. There's an episode of Lower Decks where they go to a theme park erected on the site of the invention of warp travel. That's world building.)
posted by JHarris at 5:37 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]
Oh it's top top weirdness and that was precisely my point.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:38 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:38 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]
Yeah, but in large part I just wanted to write that comment. $SKINCONDITION$!
posted by JHarris at 5:44 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 5:44 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]
And on top of all of that, it remains to this day the clearest example of what ordinary home life in the Star Wars universe might be like.
Andor did that pretty well, with Ferrix (aka JunkyardWorld) and its working-class inhabitants. But I'll give the SWHS credit for extending the worldbuilding of the first movie, although it also tried to combine that with a 70s-style variety show, which probably had its roots in vaudeville.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:04 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]
Andor did that pretty well, with Ferrix (aka JunkyardWorld) and its working-class inhabitants. But I'll give the SWHS credit for extending the worldbuilding of the first movie, although it also tried to combine that with a 70s-style variety show, which probably had its roots in vaudeville.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:04 AM on February 21 [3 favorites]
Have fun!
I watched the SWHS one time (without any MST3k commentary) and once was enough. Yep, it's bizarre. But it's also extremely slow and boring.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:21 PM on February 21
I watched the SWHS one time (without any MST3k commentary) and once was enough. Yep, it's bizarre. But it's also extremely slow and boring.
posted by SoberHighland at 12:21 PM on February 21
The Star Wars Holiday Special has long been my go-to for how sometimes, "so bad it's great" doesn't apply, and instead it's so bad it's terrible. For many years, I found it difficult to properly express to even the biggest Star Wars fans that they were richer for having never wasted their time watching this. Nowadays, though, I just tell people, "It's even worse than Rise of Skywalker," and that gets the point across well enough.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:14 PM on February 26
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:14 PM on February 26
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posted by JHarris at 4:59 PM on February 20