J Paul Johnson
There are two kinds of people in this world, some might say: those who have seen or stan the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special and those who haven’t or won’t. Everyone in the former group is certain to love the new documentary A Disturbance in the Force, a selection of the 2023 Twin Cities Film Festival. The documentary, something of a love letter to Star Wars fandom, offers both an in-depth history of the Holiday Special‘s convoluted origins and trouble production, employing a wide array of interviews and some fascinating archival documents—not to mention some footage from the long-rarely-seen special itself.
Those who haven’t seen that Holiday Special or don’t consider themselves a core part of the Star Wars fanbase might also find themselves enjoying A Disturbance in the Force, however, or at least a good portion of it. I’ll confess I am not particularly a Star Wars fan myself. I thought my girlfriend and her mother were simply a little nuts back in 1977 when they dragged me to and gushed over the silly space swashbuckler. And while I dutifully watched the sequels, even liked the first one a fair bit, then squirmed through the prequels and reboots while Disney grabbed at my wallet, whatever mysterious Force mobilized the franchise’s legions of fans always escaped me. So you might consider me something of a resistant viewer of a documentary about some aspect of its canon—or not-canon, depending upon whose side you’re on—and especially one even its own creator consistently disavowed.
You see, the Star Wars Holiday Special, the subject of A Disturbance in the Force, was just so notoriously awful it was aired only once, the Friday following Thanksgiving in 1978, and never again broadcast or released officially on home media. George Lucas tried to keep it from the public for decades. It was so terrible and so damned weird that it became something of a Holy Grail of Star Wars fandom: purloined copies were bought and sold on a black market of re-recorded VHS tapes and debated ad infinitum at comic-cons. Does that make it a topic worthy of documentary investigation?
What interested me most about Disturbance’s history of the ill-fated program was how it came at a time just after Hollywood’s biggest hit but before the revolution in marketing that Star Wars made necessary. No one, not even George Lucas, had imagined how wholly that film would capture the world’s imagination. He hadn’t plotted out sequels, much less prequels, or constructed a universe of related empires and storylines, and he hadn’t really even figured out how to market a film with no recognizable stars and a space-swashbuckling storyline. Part of the surprise came when Charles Lippincott, a member of his team began promoting the film with comic books and fan conventions, where word grew like wildfire, and in the wake of the film’s resounding commercial success, came new opportunities to market it.
One of those was in television, where, surprisingly, the film’s characters started showing up in parodies and tributes, like the Donny & Marie show. Then came the Holiday Special, a bizarre hybrid of some half-formed Lucas ideas about Chewbacca’s family and a Carol Burnett-style variety song-skit-and-dance show. Lucas joined in the planning for about a day before leaving to plot out The Empire Strikes Back, leaving the direction to David Acomba, who quit and the song-and-dance sketches to tv vets Ken and Mitzie Welch. The talent was strictly B-list tv stars a few years past their prime: Maude‘s Bea Arthur, The Carol Burnett Show‘s Harvey Korman, and Jackie Gleason sidekick Art Carney among them.
So, there is the appeal here of learning about a crazy moment in 1970s culture when the new pop phenomenon of Star Wars intersected with the old guard of television. The result was awful—just like much 1970s television—and A Disturbance in the Force leans in hard to the Holiday Special’s special brand of awfulness, which included, I am not kidding, a sequence where the Chewbacca family grandfather settles into a virtual reality chair and dials up a horny dream of Diahann Carroll enchanting and enticing him in song. He hits the rewind and repeat button with some frequency as he gurgles (in Shyriiwook, perhaps) in ecstasy.
While it’s more than a little prescient to see the Special’s imagination of a future where we have VR sets in our living rooms, tablet screens to entertain us, and the like, did anyone, anywhere, at any time really need to see an elderly Wookiee dial up VR softcore in the family living room—on a television variety special?
No.
(In case you were wondering.)
Anyway, that’s the kind of mirth that runs throughout A Disturbance in the Force. Its interviewees—among them Seth Green, Kevin Smith, Patton Oswalt, Paul Scheer, Weird Al Yankovic, Donny Osmond, Bruce Vilanch, and many more, including audio and video both of some directly involved in the Special’s creation—provide a comic, if kindhearted take on the entire affair, from its conception to its execution to its reception. It’s a treat to see some of the drawings inspiring the Wookiee storyline and footage from the reportedly excellent, Moebius-inspired Boba Fett cartoon it included. Star Wars fans will be very happy indeed.
There’s also a lot that’s been lost along the way. Lucas won’t speak to it; neither will Acomba. The film’s stars wouldn’t, much, either, and not for this project. Harvey Korman scarcely remembers participating. Bea Arthur, only a little. Art Carney, were he interviewed surely wouldn’t recall a moment, such was his reported on-set drinking at the time.
At times, especially in its last 20 minutes or so, the documentary descends into a long stream of interviewees just saying what they think, even non-Star Wars fans will find in A Disturbance in the Force a charming, at least occasionally quite funny recreation of a moment in time when Star Wars was neither a franchise nor a canon, just a hit film, one that took place a long time ago in a galaxy not really that far, far away.
