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Happy Life Day from Kashyyyk

Posted by Benton Sartore | July 6, 2009 .

by Benton Sartore

Santa Wookie and Ewok Elf

The holiday season is often an unfortunate time of year for the Star Wars franchise, because it’s a time of year that the marketing ambitions of the Lucas empire are nakedly laid for all to see. It’s a season that marks some of Star Wars’ biggest blunders on the rush to profit, and whether by design or coincidence, some of the most groan-worthy Star Wars products came out in the holiday season. Let’s take a look:

The Holiday Special

Let’s just get this one out of the way right off the bat. Wookiees speaking to each other without subtitles (forcing the viewer to guess what they’re miming)? Check. A visibly stoned Carrie Fisher? Check. Awkward songs set to Star Wars tunes? Check. A strange Julia Child parody? Check. It’s a weird, wild variety show featuring Jefferson Starship and guest stars like Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and the late Harvey Korman. Even stranger, the Holiday Special has had a strong influence on the Star Wars mythos, introducing the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, establishing the holiday of Life Day, and introducing one of the most iconic characters in the entire franchise, Boba Fett.

George Lucas has said that he’d like to track down every individual copy and smash them with a hammer. It would be really easy to make fun of Lucas for this giant blunder. (Fun, too.) And yet I can’t help but feel bad for him on this one. LucasFilm was barely involved in the Holiday Special because they were busy working on The Empire Strikes Back. George Lucas agreed to a special and wrote up the first version of the script and attended a few meetings, but was otherwise uninvolved. CBS drastically changed his script aside, leaving only the bare bones outline of what Lucas had wanted, and fired the director Lucas had recommended in favor of someone who was not familiar with Star Wars. Upon seeing it, George Lucas was disgusted and got an agreement that it would air only once, then never again. Although the idea of a holiday special was OK’d by George Lucas, this seems much more like a case of network interference than Lucas having a genuinely bad idea.

Christmas in the Stars

What can you get a Wookiee for Christmas, when he already owns a comb? Well, if the song of the same name is to be believed, you get him love and understanding, good will to men, then wrap it all up in bright-colored ribbon and we give it to him all over again. Me, I think he’d prefer a bowcaster. Take C-3PO and R2-D2, a children’s choir, a whole lot of elves that sound like they’ve been huffing helium, have them sing weird songs about Christmas (like C-3PO fussing that “the odds against Christmas are 365 to 1″) and what do you get? About what you’d expect. It’s beyond weird, but it’s not really bad. Anthony Daniels does a good reading of “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and the choir sounds pretty good. It’s really more confusing than anything else.

Knights of the Old Republic 2

This wasn’t a flop so much as a mistake. The game is actually very good — in the aftermath of KOTOR 1, you are the last remaining Jedi in the galaxy in an era where the Republic teeters on the edge of collapse. The game increased the options available to players, dramatically overhauled the equipment modification system, and introduced a new “influence” system that let your actions affect your allies’ opinion of you. It was a fun experience…

…until the last few hours, when suddenly the plot went onto a railroad and none of your choices affected the ending. The quick ending dictated which allies you could take with you and limited the roleplaying element to a few superficial options that had no effect on the story. So what happened? The game had been rushed out for a Christmas release, leading the designers to cut an entire planet (a droid-controlled planet named M4-78) and almost everything in the ending. The plan had been for the small choices the player had been making all along to influence the ending: party member fights party member, party member fights Sith, some live, some die, some are maimed. To say nothing of the HK-50 factory, where HK-47 would’ve finally put the hurt on his chrome-plated counterparts. Many of these files are still present on the XBox discs, leading some intrepid programmers to retrieve them and work on restoring them into the game, but still, this is a game that could’ve used a few more months work. In cruel timing, Revenge of the Sith was released to theaters just a few months later, and if the game had waited until then for release, it probably would’ve been a hit.

Posted under Contributor Content, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Star Wars | Like this article? Subscribe to our RSS feed

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