The 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special

As a child of the 70's and 80's, the magic of Star Wars and the festivities of the holiday season certainly seemed a marriage bound up in saccharine superglue. Christmas meant a regular Hutt's bounty of Kenner merchandise, scores of figures representing characters with cameo-length screen time who would remain forever nameless save for the blessings of plastic immortality as "Ponda Baba" and "IG-88," and of course the larger toys otherwise forever unattainable on a child's allowance: the Ewok Village, the Millennium Falcon, and the Death Star complete with plastic foam "trash" and a little green rubber monster to devour those unlucky or unwise enough to plunge down the garbage chute.

Now, many years older and demonstrably wiser to the world, I can say that it would have been best had the holidays and Star Wars remained far, far away from each other, perhaps mandated by a court-issued restraining order. My entire nostalgic picture of the childhood wedding of Star Wars to the holiday season shattered at the revival of long-suppressed memories previously tinted rose by the glasses of youth. I made a cardinal mistake that may haunt me the rest of my living days and even prove an albatross of chains about my neck well into my days of Marley-esque purgatory. I sat down and watched the Star Wars Holiday Special for only the second time--and the first in nearly 27 years.

I'd thought the Star Wars Christmas Album to be the absolute nadir of the Star Wars-holiday season partnership, but soon after popping in the Spanish-labeled "THX" DVD of the Star Wars Holiday Special, I realized there exist depths of Hell where the song "What Do You Buy a Wookie For Christmas (When He Already Has a Comb)" is but the uppermost crust, a nascent and mostly benign evil on par with fibbing about one's age. I discovered that there are worse things in life than Greedo shooting first, the second Ewoks television movie, the Droids cartoon, and even, God help me, Howard the Duck.

Indeed, experiencing the film is quite reminiscent of descending through a darker, more sadistic version of Dante's Inferno whereupon the condemned viewer can but hope that each subsequent scene might at last be the coda to this accursed travesty, yet in the most perverse of injustices, each agonizing, eternities-long minute that passes across the television screen proves that there is indeed such a thing as a bottomless hole, and you the captive viewer are plunging headlong into its ever-worsening depths.

Lest you the reader feel I wax with an overdose of exaggeration, I dare you to accompany me on my journey through the scars upon my memory and into the nether realms of that which is the Star Wars Holiday Special. But be warned: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

Proceed to the Depths of Hell (read the review!)