A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 124: The Star Wars Holiday Special

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

When I went to post this episode, I went through all the motions necessary to post it as a Patreon bonus before remembering: "Oh no, wait, did we actually watch this chaotic mess for the main feed?"  That's how bonkers this 1978 variety show is. So get ready to have your mind evaporated by this neutron bomb of content as we head to the Wookiee Planet on this very special Life Day.  Next Time: Matthew Stover's Revenge of the Sith Novelization, Part One: Victory (Chapters 1 - 7) Support the show by going to Patreon.com/civilized! Show Notes   The Star Wars Holiday Special Commercials     Hosted by Rob Zacny (robzacny.bsky.social) Featuring Alicia Acampora (ali-online.bsky.social), Austin Walker (austinwalker.bsky.social), and Natalie Watson (nataliewatson.bsky.social) Produced by Chia Contreras (cado.bsky.social) Music by Jack de Quidt (notquitereal.bsky.social Cover art by Xeecee (xeecee.bsky.social)    

Let us return once more to a more civilized age of television variety shows, the Star Wars Holiday Special podcast. I'm Rob Zathney, joined by Friends at the Tables, Ali Akampura, beloved giant bomb personality, Austin Walker, and the joyous gamer herself, Natalie Watson. We are, as always, supported by you, our listeners by Patreon. So head over there if you'd like to support the show and get access to all our Q&A episodes. This week, it's finally happened. We're watching the Star Wars holiday special, the legendary 1978 television misfire.

There's a lot to get into and yet also very little. Let's just discuss the things that happen in this story. Thank you. Hold on. Solos. Yes. Okay. Okay.

I'm ready. Excellent. Sarvesa Crystal. It would have improved it. It would have improved my watching experience. It's so much. Like just having, just having that shit insert into this. Would it would have made it great.

Anyway. Either way. I do have to, I do have to say getting, watching the version with the original commercials was unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yeah. It's important.

And I'm going to, I have things to talk about. You know those commercials. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We need to talk about it. Not just commercials.

Also a news break that we'll have to get to. News reports. News reports. The news was delivered in the middle of the holiday special. We have to talk about it. Okay. Okay. Sorry, Rob.

The story. Han Solo is trying to bring Chewbacca to Kashik so he can celebrate life day with his family, but they are intercepted by an insert shot of Star Destroyers from episode but four. Meanwhile, his family, Chui's family, consisting of his son, Lumpy, wife Mala, and father itchy, is awaiting his overdue arrival with increasing angst. They contact Luke Skywalker, who is working on his X-Wing, as one would imagine him doing, and he tells them that Han and Chui should have arrived there by now. The family is pretty worried, but fortunately, they have Holo TV to keep them occupied with grading acrobatic acts and Star Wars Julia Child.

They are reassured by friendly local store owner, San Don, that Han and Chewy should be on their way. And we know to trust him because he's played by Art Carney. Now, Natalie, Art Carney was a TV comedy actor, co-starred in The Honeymooners, which was an incredibly popular early sitcom starring Jackie Gleason. Every episode, Jackie would play Ralph Cramden, a narrative well who was always hatching schemes over the objections and skepticism of his wife, Alice, who he humorously threatened the physical violence every episode. You probably wouldn't go that direction today,

but it was all in good fun back then. Probably because Audrey Meadows Alice could beat the shit out of Ralph the second he stepped out of line. That was always sort of palpable in the show. Anyway, his sidekick was Carney's character, his idiot, savant neighbor Norton. Now, there is another connection of Star Wars hero via Lucas's buddy Spielberg, who of course produced

animaniacs, which did a loving tribute to the honeymooners via a pinky and the brain parody of a famous honeymooners. episode. Anyway, all of us before our time, too, except for animaniacs,

just to be clear. We were not raised. Honeymothers didn't get a big Nick at night splash in the mid-90s. Okay, that makes me feel a lot better. This is just Rob knowing, knowing about it.

I know about it too. Yeah, of course I have. I'm a student of the game. But, you know. Also, syndication was still a thing. Like,

they were reaching deep into the TV archives back then. Yes, Allie. For Tanami heads, who can take that knowledge to Nick at Night, which is like, the channel is different now in showing older cartoons. Oh, right. Honeymooners had like the Inuyasha slot, where it was like

maybe one or two a.m. And you're like up way too late. You're up later than you usually are. There's this like other thing that's odd that's older than all of the old stuff. That is right. Yes, that is exactly right. It was not prime time. Nick at night.

You know. Honey mooners in the Inuyasha slide is going to live in my brain. It's so true though. For such a long time. Anyway, Art Carney Sondon runs a, or sometimes he says Sean Don, just like in it, it sort of moves moves around. I'm not sure Art was prepped for this particularly carefully.

Anyway, Sondon runs a kind of radio shack Hudson News on Kishik, where he has to trick Imperial goons with steady sales pattern that feels like it was written on set about five minutes before shooting. Also, most of the Imperials throughout the special speak in nothing but ADR dialogue, which is a remarkable choice. Later, we learned that Sondon is a friend of the rebellion and a member of the Alliance on a hollow call with Princess Leia who reaches out to Mala after Itchy is finished masturbating to VR music videos of Dehan Carroll in a breakthrough role for black artists in Star Wars that in retrospect. In retrospect, respect, blaze the trail for JJ Abrams to follow years later.

This is the first black character in Star Wars. I hadn't made this considerate. I hadn't considered, at least the first one with speaking roles. There might be a black person in a new hope somewhere, but fuck. And a guy in a puppet suit is getting off to her. Han and Chewy seemed to reach Kashik safely and Lumpy thinks he hears their spaceship pulling up. But instead, it's the Imperial Patrol conducting house-to-house searches. Fortunately, Sondon is able to distract them with a video boombox filled with Jefferson Starship,

which is, of course, what Jefferson Airplane became in the Star Wars universe. The Imperial soldiers fucking love this band, despite the fact that Grace Slick isn't performing with them anymore, which is frankly on brand for the consistent letdown that defines the holiday special. The Imperials conduct a search of Chewy's sick, sort of organic mid-century house, but Lumpy is so angry, he needs something to settle him down. So they put on a cartoon where Luke rescues Chewy and Han with the help of cartoon Boba Fett. In an episode that looks like Aon Flux for Children, Boba Fet chats up the gang but is revealed to be secretly in cahoots with Vader. Then, sorry, Natalie, Aon Flux is a surreal sci-fart cartoon series that ran on MTV's Liquid Television,

which is something we had when I was young because we didn't have live service games and we weren't old enough to get access to good drugs. but we like TV shows that felt like we imagined good dorks felt like. Anyway, they revealed that Boba Feth's... I'm familiar with Charlize Theron's work, okay? See, this is why I have to do... That's why I have to explain things to you because you think... You think Aeon Fugs was Charlize Theron original,

and this is why we have to share the sacred knowledge. You have to know. It's really important to pass on, you know, generational histories. Anyway, in this cartoon, Chewy foils Boba fat by figuring out that he's in cahoots with Vader and then

the Imperials get really mad at Lumpy and they go into his bedroom and they throw his toys everywhere. And then like the sadistic sons of bitches they are, they tell him to clean it up. Anyway, you may think a lot of this is filler. You haven't seen filler. Because we're about to watch Lumpy

watched an infomercial for an electronics kit for like 10 minutes. Then the Imperial Patrol has to watch an Imperial propaganda broadcast about Tatooine and Giz Whaling. We see B. Arthur being hit on in her bar by a customer before the Declaration of Imperial Curfew moves

her to shut down the bar. Rob, who plays the customer? Oh, shit. You've already said his name. Oh, fuck. It's Harvey Corman, isn't it? This is the sorry, you've not said his name yet. It's just that he does do, yes, it is.

It is in fact, it is in fact Harvey Corman, who you slid past earlier already playing the Julia Child's. Yeah, playing, playing what if Julia Child was a four-armed alien and also maybe in blackface. Maybe in blackface? Like, could, brownface for certain. Something's going on. And we saw him at a time. We saw him as the. instructor for Lumpy's

electronics kit. He's just doing it all. Okay. Okay. Triple threat. And at very least a double threat is B. Arthur, who sings a song to calm her angry patrons. And then the Imperials are summoned back to base and they're all filing out of the house. But then one stormtrooper realizes that Lumpy has been spoofing the message from his electronics kit.

he's about to really hurt Lumpy. But fortunately, Han Solo shows up and judo chops the Stormtrooper off the patio into the depths of Kishik. By this point, are you tired of hearing these fucking wookie wines and growls and stuff as well, frankly, tough shit. Because they're going to emote like crazy at Han in a fit of gratitude for saving Lumpy. Han bids them for well. Frankly, I want to get the fuck out of there too by this point. telling them they're like his family and they embrace Chui while sexual tension builds and builds between Chui and Mala.

But then Sondon interrupts in the nick of time both to stop wampy and itchy from watching Mala get bread but also to get local imperial commander off their backs with a convincing excuse for the disappearance of that one dead stormtrooper. Anyway, with that, it's time for what we really came here, the meaning of life day. the wookies go to their hutch and they get their life day ornaments and then they uplift them toward

toward the light beaming down on the set somehow this dissolves and they're dressed like magi and they're walking in a procession a wiki procession toward the sun somehow this brings them to the base of like a tiny artificial redwood where they are greeted by leah han chewy luke r two and three pio Three of you explains how Life Day makes him and our two wish they were alive rather than the soulless dead things whose existence is an affront to the force. Leah senses the vibe is a bit off with that speech, so she puts things back on the rails with a Life Day song. Having made Life Day entirely about herself, Leah cedes the stage to a montage of Star Wars clips from Star Wars, 1977, later called A New Hope. With that, we've reached the end of the summary, right? Like, they cut back.

They cut back to them at the like, they go to commercial after the montage, which is booked up because then they have to come back and it's the four wukies, it's the wookie family holding hands and bowing their heads in prayer as if to cut off anyone who might say, no, where was Jesus and all of that? Chewy lowers his head. No words are said because, of course, they can't speak English. But I get the impression that they were sent. and went up to the big guy.

The end. Star Wars. Star Wars has it all. Wow. Wow. Thank you for a very comprehensive summary here in which you said everything that happens because nothing happens.

That is exactly. That is exactly everything that happened. But also there's so much more because of how torturous this is. I just need to be very clear to people. There is this show, this variety show starts. We get a little tiny, bit of like intro. We get Han and Chewy in space being, oh, no, we're being chased.

We get human English voice being like, and B. Arthur's going to be here later. And then we get eight unbroken minutes of wookie sounds. And then what rakes the wookie sounds? Lumpy and itchy sit down to watch a holographic burlesque cirque to salet show. And that's not human. But humans, because they're dressed up as they're being. You know, there's humanoid aliens, but there's still no, there's still no English in this show. Mm-mm.

In this, in this variety show. It takes, I think it might take it until the first commercial break before I heard English again. And after that, it was Luke Skyping in while repairing R2, or R2 and he repairing the engine or whatever. Maybe it's secretly avant-garde. So funny you say this, Rob. This is, this is like, I don't know, like, like, like, tree of life, you know, where it's like something. And there's dinosaurs and shit. And it's like,

there are dinosaurs about, that's, that's true. Like, Boba Fed's dinosaur. Yeah. Yeah,

he kills one. He rides another one. Allie, what are you going to say before I go back to Rob's avant-garde thing? I just, the mention of the Luke thing

and the like, the amount of times that like, it is just someone talking into a camera and it's like they're looking at you because 40% of this is Skype.

It was a real like, I got high, I went to CBS and everyone there was trying to kill me by it. Like, when Mark Kimmel is staring at me in the worst makeup that I've ever seen, he looks like Tim Heidecker playing a woman with a butch haircut. Like he looks like he's never looked ever. And he's talking directly to me. I was like, I feel fear right now. Like I am uncomfortable.

Okay, hang on. Would you feel now having said that, you put yourself on record saying you think Mark Hamill looks fucked up here. What if I told you he was recent? in an accident when this was what if I told you that that was that's a misconcern that's that's wrong what if I told you that Rob he is but a year before it was a year before fuck and he'd been on other stuff the makeup artist just had a very heavy hand that's correct very very very

okay so I would be clear Natalie are you quoting the same thing I'm quoting here because we should send up there's a really great podcast about this called going rogue going rogue is a podcast and it doesn't they did an episode on Star's Holiday Special. Wait, didn't we do something with them? Different, different going rogue. Not just from Online's Going Rogue, the tabletop game, Going Rogue, a podcast about behind-the-thing stuff.

I was so confused. I was listening to that audio because I was like, that didn't sound like that. This isn't sound right at all. But in that episode, the host, Tancy Gardham, pulls from her own research, I think her research team's research, the documentary that Natalie Eulinked right before we started, which was like a disturbance in the force, which is a documentary about. about this, about the Star Wars Holiday Special, and an oral history, I believe the one written by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross about this. And also debunk certain things. And one of the common, like, I grew up hearing this, Rob, I think you probably heard up, grew up hearing this

too, which was he had the accident right before this. And so they covered it up with makeup. But in fact, as Natalie was saying, just to. It was, it was the year before. He, so it had been It had been a year he had already been on TV and other like Star Wars related appearances. But the two big things that Tansy cites as probably what has led people to think that, you know, Mark looked a bit strange, was the extremely heavy-handed makeup. And also, his hair is very different. It's so different.

It's like, it's. He's trying something. It's too short or something. I think R2D2 tried to cut it for him and didn't turn out. Yeah. Yeah. Something happened there. He was soft launching a new haircut.

It didn't stick. You know? So if he'd stuck with it, they were going to have the wampa and Empire Strikes back cut his hair too. And stick with it. But yeah, it's bizarre. It's so strange. People should go listen to that episode. I want to do my best that we don't just repeat things we all heard from that episode.

because, but I will, I think we should answer questions if they come up naturally. You know, I don't want to be like, well, we don't know why he looks like that. But at the same time, I mean, actually, here's one like that. Rob, you said this looked avant-garde. You didn't say it looked avant-garde. You in fact said, now, wait a second, could this be? And one of the things that is true about this is that the original director of the special was David Accomba, who was Natalie, correct me if I'm wrong here, a, it went to the same.

under one of the same film school as George, didn't know George, but was making like early music videos and music documentaries as pre-music videos, music like films. And so was in a sort of more experimental film space, single cam operated, you know, single cam sets, not the sort of multi-cam sitcom TV, variety show TV stuff, didn't have that background, did want to do big, explosive avant-garde things, did not finish directing this movie. left the production. But maybe

the extensive wiki silent film is a fingerprint. It could be. It could be. It's just them, the camera, a shag carpet,

and your imagination. George apparently did say you're not allowed to have the wookie speak any English. That's my one rule. Otherwise, I don't want to be involved

with this. Do you think? think that's with hey you know what luc is within his rights to lay down a rule like that but i am curious if you have that rule why you would go this direction with your holiday special given that i i think i think the final result shows this was a difficult thing to work around yeah it's about like it's rob it does seem to be difficult and it and you know typically you would just you would have another, you have Han there. You have somebody that

is the voice of what's going on in the room. But unfortunately, Han is stuck on the spaceship, is stuck on the Millennium Falcon with Chewy, so he can't be there to translate. So the first time we get a translator in, isn't even really when Luke calls in? Because when Luke calls in, he kind of just tells

Mala, I don't know what the You're saying? Yeah. Yeah. It was like, it's so hot. It was weird. It was so weird.

Hey, you hear a noise? Hey, Molly, you hear a noise? What? You don't like? You hear something you don't like? So there is an early draft of this script available at Star Wars Holiday Special. com. Wait, this is the rewritten script?

Oh, yeah. Yes. There's an early script version and there's also a treatment that was recovered from Ralph McQuarrie's. Macquarie. Yeah, Ralph Macquarie. That's also available. I've read through that also.

I'll link this to y'all. Maybe we'll put it in the description. It's all on Star Wars Holiday Special.com. And the original version of that is even more, it's even more clear that he does not understand what Mala is saying at all. It's not good. It's just not like, I get what the bit is trying to be. The bit is trying to be, hey, I'm Luke.

I'm working on my spaceship. Like, I'm working on my, you know, X-wing and, oh, no, something's going wrong. Shoot. You know, I'm trying to communicate with you, Mala. But like, don't worry. Don't worry. Han and Chui are going to be there, you know, in just a jiff.

And he's like, turn that. Can you give me a smile, Mala? Oh, my God, I forgot. Show me one of those, those, you know, know, wookie smiles I've come to love. Okay, something about this that's so wild to me is it suggests that after, so Empire hasn't happened yet. We don't know where any of this goes.

This is the first thing, this insoliner of the minds eye, which we haven't read yet, are the things that you get if you're Star Wars fan in 1978. This suggests that all sorts of shit happened after that first movie. They are talking about, like, I guess Luke and Chewy were chopping it up about Life Day a bunch because he's like, Chewy would never miss a life day. How the fuck do you know if Chewy would ever miss a life day?

He said Chewy has never missed a life day. And I was like, what? You're telling me Chewy's going home every life day. Every life day. Really? He's a wookie who left his family to travel the galaxy with the degenerate. But he makes it back every year.

And that's just so he can tell himself he's a good dad. That's just like, but I never missed. just sucking down a beer, but I never missed a life day. I'm always there for Lumpy when it matters. It's fucked. I don't, Han doesn't do this. Han isn't, you know what I mean? Like, they're both smugglers.

Maybe it's sort of like a goofish and gallant situation. We're supposed to take away that like Chewy is the family man smuggler and Han is the scumbag smuggler. And we should have left this being like, I wish Han would take some advice from from Chewy and really settle down. and start a family and have a nice mid-century living room. With the fireplace in the middle. With a fire.

I got a saying. I got a thing. The stone fireplace is sick. It is. I like the shelves. I'm fucking with that. I like the stairs. You know, honestly, like the woodworking to create the windows, like it looks pretty

that was probably all itchy. That was probably all itchy. You're right family home. You know what I don't like is when Lumpy is like, I don't want to take out the trash. He wants to play with the X-Wing, the wooden X-Wing fighter. His mom, Mala finally gets him to take out the trash. And he takes it out and he's like grumpy, but he's a big green plastic bin, which I guess they have collection service on Kishik. That's cool.

And then he gets up and starts like tightrope walking on the side of the, like the banister that like separates the house from the deep pits of Kishik. Bro, get down from there. I didn't like that. It's life day. He's chilling. He's chilling. Hang on. So I think those walkways are in affordance for non-Wookie.

You know what I mean? I see. That's just, he's just, he's just, like, for him, he's just, like, scurrying around like cat on a tree. Right. You know? Wookies aren't monkeys, Rob. Are they? Well, we read.

But they could be like big squirrels. We read the Thron trilogy, and they were kind of like monkeys. They're kind of. Yeah. But in a, in a climbing way? Or just, I. live in the tree way. They have the claws and can climb, right?

Remember, Leah was just like, she was like a baby bjorn on chewy and just getting like rocking it all around the underside of the great, the roachier tree? No, I didn't, I didn't get to read the books. Remember I was, I was ill. That was ill. That was, I see. Yeah. I did.

I think I came in for the last one, right? You did. That's what happened. It's been so long. It's been a long time. So much. So much has happened. I think maybe that was, was that during the fires, actually.

Actually. So much has happened. It was either when I was ill or during the fire. Or during the fires. One or the other. The fires are kind of illness. Those are. It's a kind of illness.

Well, they are sort of like monkeys, it turns out. I don't like the AstroTurf carpet. I think it looks bad. I wouldn't want the green. That's a period detail that like a lot of people now are going to pull those out. You're right. But if you find, if you find a place on Kashik that still has one of these. Like now everyone loves it, right?

But like for 20 years, people are like, what the fuck were they thinking with these astroturf green like carpets in their little wookie houses? But now it's like a detail that's really quite prized. Do they still have the hollow tables where I can watch some little freaks

flip around and do gymnastics and whatnot? Okay, so the thing is when the little fucker with the horn blows the horn and then the lady comes out doing cartwheel and then like a floor gymnastics routine. We get the cut to Lumpy who repeatedly gets sort of,

I think just because the way the mask and the sort of puppet mask kind of works, but like it's kind of a crazed gleam in his eye that I just can't, I just can't see it and not think like this wiki's really into the shit. And at first I was like, maybe I'm just reading into it. Like this is like, that we're not like, Maybe I'm being cynical and thinking that like the show doesn't the show is just trying to have him like have a child's wonder at like acrobatics and juggling and all that.

But then, you know, once you got itchy going to the VR thing to get turned on by the lady. Yeah. It's like, oh, no, these these wookies are sexual beings. Hold on, hold on. They love, they love humanoids like of all stripes. I want to separate the experience that Itchy goes into from the from the Cirque du Solee moment that Lumpy watches because the Cirque du Soleil moment that Lumpy watches one, I have to shout out that the make life size one character feature. Oh, that's wild. That was sick.

Sorry, you're saying that makes this less horny? Yes, because here's a second. second thing. I, too, when I was very young, had a hyper fixation on one music video for a long time. And sometimes you just become obsessed with like one music video and you just watch that a lot in a way that like isn't, doesn't really make a lot of sense. But it is kind of your comfort music video. Yes. So which was it? Tell us what it was. For me? Yeah, that was, you set it up. You pitched it across the plate.

Anyway, nothing sexual about DeAngelo. Okay. RIP. Mine was the music video for one arm scissors by At the Drive-In. Oh, that's so funny. Okay. I don't know why. But I had it, but.

The song is great. And I had it on DVD and I'd watch it in my. my mom's minivan like every single day on the way to and from school on repeat. That was it. Also, yeah, no, that's the one that I'll go with. We don't have to talk about the other ones. I think we also just like so, and this is a problem throughout this. The stuff that is entertaining these characters fucking sucks.

Yeah, they don't have any good, they have terrible taste. like this act. Do you remember on Letterman there was the Is This Anything bit where like an inscrutable entertainment act that all feel like they were things that would have appeared in the background of like Broadway Danny Rose like all these weird acts would show up and the question was is this anything?

Is it some sort of like act that like you can you recognize as like that's performance? This is like sub that tier of, Like this would be a that's not anything. Like Paul, Paul would look at Dave and be like, I don't know, I don't think it's anything.

And here, it's like, it feels like this was a juggling or acrobatic troop that your middle school could have booked on short notice because like a speaker canceled or something.

And it's on TV. So you think, you know, the thing you can do that you can't do with state, with a stage production is you can shoot these things from any direction. And like, you know, you can go, you can break the proscenia march and sort of go in. But now what we have here is just, it looks like somebody just fired up a camcorder

at the most like mid-acrobatics troop you've ever seen coming out, throwing a couple sticks and calling it a day. Now, we have seen this recently. Does anybody remember? Because this is re-canonized. This is one of the things about this, this, like, a special that, you know, the special has been completely turned away by Lucas and then by Lucas film. Like everyone, this doesn't, this isn't canon, right? This is part of the Disney canon.

But this is, this dancing troupe is because they showed up in skeleton crew. Neil's little siblings are watching them in skeleton crew. Oh my God. And it's them, which actually raises an interesting thing because it means. It's not actually interesting. Remember that if I'm remembering right in Skeleton Crew, that place was pre-fall of the Republic. Like that planet predates the fall of the Republic, right? Am I right about that?

Like the Jedi still exist. They are all they are raised to believe the Jedi are heroes. So Order 66 hasn't happened yet. That means that this special, this circus performance was old by the, was old by the, the time the life this life day they're watching like retro it's out of fashion in the universe by the time it's happening on life day it predates lumpy's birth probably you know lumpy is watching the honeymooners that's exactly right and she puts this on let me show you real entertainment that's what's happening you kids these days with your winning x wings this what we had 400 years ago when I was a youth

now I got a chat GPT go singer. Oh, get me off with her words. He had med a goggles for the I can't see it.

It's too much. Why does he, why is that a gift first of all? Why is that an item that is brought? Because Sean Don is like, look, we all love

masturbating. And I'm bringing you a gift. I'm going to bring you a masturbatorium that you can like just climb And he like puts a point on it.

He's like happy life die. Really enjoy yourself. Yeah. And I do mean life day. As if like, what are you getting at? What do you mean by that? It's. I really, I really, like when this sequence first started and itchy is going into the goonverse, I.

He's the gooniverse. The gooniverse. Enter the gooniverse. Yeah. I said to myself, Natalie, you are so. sick in the head for thinking this is going to be horny. Look at these kaleidoscopic, uh,

uh, beautiful images. We're just seeing twinkling lights. We're seeing cool, cool, uh, graphic kind of, uh, just,

just kaleidoscopic, wow. Yeah. You are so fucked up for thinking that they would put something horny in this, in this holiday special for children, for, for toys to sell toys for children.

Yeah. Important context. worth saying. This was all about Kenner selling toys because they didn't because they didn't have enough the previous Christmas and this Christmas they did. But Star Wars had been out of, I mean, it was still in theaters in some places, but it was out of the public consciousness

in the way that it was the year before. And Empire was still two years away. So they had to get something on TV to make people remember Star Wars and go buy toys. And like the 20 minute cartoon wasn't enough? They were like, we had to put a bunch of dressing over this. We can't

just introduce Boba Fett and that's enough. was going to be an hour and then something happened. Right. Also, it's like, you got to sell toys to the kids and the kids love B. Arthur in our party. Or was the idea that you had to give the adults something. That's just TV in this era. That's just the variety show format, you know? I think, yeah, I think if you're a variety show producer or you're on, this was on CBS, I think, right?

Yeah, that's right. So if you're, if you're the CBS. By the way, if you're, there's another version of. this that we didn't watch. Maybe some of us watch nice copy. The one on YouTube. The nice copy says, The Incredible Hulk will not be shown today in its slot.

Please enjoy the Star Wars holiday special. That's a tough day. That's a tough day. If you're an Incredible Hulk guy and you turn this shit on and it's itchy entering the universe, I'm done with Star Wars. I sort of like that movie. Get the fuck out of here. I'm trying to watch a guy go from town to town and become the,

become leuferigno and beat people up. Painted all in green. Yeah. But yeah, Rob. But yeah, if I'm CBS, you probably just have a roster of people you call in for this kind of stuff. Like, you just have your rotating. I think according to Tansy's research, the podcast and some other stuff I read, there were some other names that had been thrown around in the development that were certainly bigger names.

and still not necessarily names that I would consider, you know, the use faves. But there were other bigger names. Share being one of them. Share was meant to be the musical act at one point, one of the musical acts, I should say. But we ended up here.

with this crew. Yeah. It's a shame. Raquel Welsh was going to be, I think, somebody else in here. Oh, man. Oh, right.

The other version of this story is like, the other version of what this was going to be was going to be. He could not have handled that. No, 100%. Raquel Welsh was going to be like an imperial, like, spy, basically. It seems like some of the stuff that became

the animated story would have been in that. version of it. You can go read that treatment and see what that is about. But boy, not what we got was not up to date, but it was partly to sell toys. And I do just think it was partly to fill slot because the other thing that happened is they ran out of budget for the one hour, so they push it to two hours and just stretched. So you could sell more ads. They could sell more ads. They ran out of budget after three days of filming, reportedly, which is Absolutely nuts. The gang does the TV variety show.

Exactly. Like that's the vibe. 100%. Well, the original director had never worked with a multi-cam set up before. So, like, there's just so many fascinating details. I really do. If you want to get into like the production of it all, I so recommend getting into a bunch of these extra materials that we've already shouted out because it's, it is unbelievably fascinating. But yeah.

So. Well, I was just going to say it's. it's a weird thing because, and I think this comes up in sort of the intro to the Going Rogue episode, but like the variety shows, so like variety shows end up getting progressively demoted across the history of TV. Like post-war early TV, variety shows are fully like, you know, a third of evening program, basically. And you have the news. You have maybe a couple sitcoms, and then you have like a lot of variety shows, usually headlined by someone. And, then a lot of these acts. And so the talk show is a vestigial remnant of the variety show.

The late night talk show is kind of what survives of the variety show. But basically those were like, they went a little bluer than the primetime variety shows. But like those kind of have stopped being as much a thing. You start seeing them more as like in this era. I feel like my parents fucking love Christmasy shit. So like they taped to VHS tons of, like Christmas specials usually featuring a band and friends or something like that where you the variety show now is like

oh god it would be like a Willie Nelson Christmas or something like that a lot of it's Christmas like there was the Sabrina Carpenter Christmas um there's a there's a

Jimmy Fallon one um no thanks most of it is really centered around Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of what's left of. Dick Clark's New Year's Rock and Eve with Ryan Seacrest.

That's a great comparison. That's a, yeah. That or like the Macy's Day parade. These obviously have live real location and event slash holiday connections. But like you take one of those and just put it on a Thursday night and be like, yeah, Dick Clark is presenting this just whenever. And there will be some live music, but also there will be like a comedy skit or two or three.

There might be, you know what else is very similar? If you grew up in this era, if there was ever a telethon that you watched, like a grandparent had on where it was like, we're going back to the phones. Yes, Jerry Lewis's telethon is a variety show. I got way less good when he stopped doing drugs. Yes, 100%. Obviously. Also, this is a reach.

But do you remember the first Trump campaign that would bring out these bizarre, like Middle America? like, oh, here comes, like, these three 15-year-old girls to sing an American pledge or whatever. That sort of has the energy of a lot of mid-century variety shows, you know. Totally. There is a real, this is for Middle America. This is for as wide an audience as possible. This is inoffensive as possible.

And a lot of the move away from them had to do with changing demographics, a move towards, you know, more dense urban demographics for, for advertising purposes. That's whose money had power. And so you're starting to advertise for those folks. And so they did just slowly get chipped away at until, like you said, late shows. SNL is kind of an inheritor of this stuff, too, you might say. Stuff like that. So you could imagine.

I guess you trace a lot of that back to like vaudeville traditions. 100% and such too. And so like what does vaudeville turn into? It turns into sketch comedy. It turns into like musical reviews. views, things like that. But all of that is just a highlight. By 1978, this form is kind of in a weird place.

Like, you don't have a ton of variety shows that are in that old school, like, taking that old school approach. The ones that are left are kind of like musical focused. Donnie Marie is a huge one. Such and so in friends. Yeah. Yeah. But this thing that it's doing where, like, we're going to have, we're going to

try to tell a story in this other universe. This is kind of unprecedented as far as I can tell, like that we're going to try to have a meaningful continuation of a story being told in a universe with its own continuity that's really popular. But then we are going to drop variety show stuff into the middle of it. It's a tough brief to begin with. I don't, I struggle to imagine any creative team pulling it off and like landing this plane. but the plane is is going down like it's just nosing into the ocean within minutes of this thing.

Like the millennium fawking into that water planet. I think you know you're in deep shit the second like you're like, these wikis just keep yelling. They just keep like fucking seal talking at each other. Well, and again, part of the thing there is like you can imagine a version of this that was 40 minutes instead of an hour and a half or, you know, one hour of television time instead of two hours. But they just stretched it. We'll just stretch the worky motioning it lumpy. Yeah. Just like Phil.

Have him take out the trash. I don't give a fuck. Right? No, we don't have more budget. Have him take out the trash and then have him walk up on the banister looking down at the bad mat painting of Kishik below. You know? No, don't cut away from the hollow dancers.

Just stay on them. Just stay on them. It's fine. Let's see lumpy clap for them twice. Hey, Harvey, what do you got for us? You got something else for us? You got, I know you got another bit.

Lord. So yeah, that's the first little bit. I guess, again, there's a section where we get a mala cooking. Again, like the first 30 minutes of this really is,

what's it like to be a wookie? What do you do? You watch the hologram. You cook a little bit. You turn on the fake Julia Child. Slash, I actually think, and I've seen no one say this.

I know Julia Child is like the go-to for this. I know this. In my heart of hearts, It's probably Julia Child. Julie Child does not have a British accent. She does have a strange accent. She doesn't have a distinct Atlantic accent. But it's not what this character is.

I kind of think that this is Fanny Craddock, a mid-century British, kind of like the proto Julia Child. I'm going to link to you all this. She was really beloved until she was extremely mean on one thing. to someone else on one of her, one of her cooking events, and like the whole country turned on her.

And also the country was turning because she's like, she's like a just post-war figure who then lives through the 60s in British television kind of history. But like the way she slaps around the meat, the like British, this particular version of British affect,

really, I really think she's in the mix somewhere. It's probably unlikely. because, again, Julie Child is just that big. But, well, yeah, but you do make a good point, though, because Julia Child is not actually known for, like, making cooking seem impossible. Like, she does have chaotic energy on some of her, especially early productions.

But the notion that you'd just be sitting there getting pissed at Julia Child because you can't cook what she's cooking is kind of like, the whole point was that she kind of rendered a lot of tricky stuff and made it approachable and, like, less, less, less, less overwhelming. So, yeah, I can buy that because like it's not, it doesn't fully scan as, as Julia Child, because it is a meaningfully different reaction relationship to Mala sitting there in her, in her kitchen, trying to go along with it. But I truly have nothing to go on this except for vibes. And I actually think there's plenty of evidence of people saying, yeah,

we were doing Julia Child. But I just, it's like, I can see, I can tell the spices in there. Maybe someone in the kitchen put some spice in that no one else understood what the spice was. I also just want to say, it's funny to see Mala's flat screen TV because she just straight up has. Dude. It's a good TV. Here's the thing. Quality of life on Kashik is nuts. Like they have, okay, so we talked about like sort of this cool mid-century, organic, open plan, like house. We already talked about the fucking fireplace sort of in the middle of the room. You might think, okay, that's the last like that. So that's the fireplay. No, no, no. Also, she's got a cooking island. in the middle of the room with a huge vent hood. Yeah. And then like an extensive like,

uh, prep area with the, with the flat screen TV and, you know, sinks. Like she's, man, like,

she's got it all. Yeah. I don't know a smuggler salary. Yeah. Chewy's out there. You are going to do two or run some Coke. Spice. Yeah.

You can't quit this. You can't quit this life of crime. That's why. He's got a key. He's got a key. Mala in the cool house. Oh, you like the flat screen Mala? Yeah, you like the second floor?

Yeah, you like being able to get Lumpy the electronics kit for Life Day? Well, then I got to keep going to work. Okay. And it's not a life debt. We just say that so that Lumpy doesn't get scared. It's debt, debt, Mala. Dett debt.

Do you want to see the fucking bills? Do you want to see the bells? This is what I'm trying to stay ahead of. You want to go to the shadow land? We can move to the shadow it. That's what we can afford. Oh, you want to send Lumpy to Jolie? You want to send Lumpy to Jolie Bindo?

Have him, have him teach Lumpy a few things. Oh. Shirley Bindo, you would have loved Life Day. You would have loved the Master Bader 2000. You would have loved him. Oh, that's for fucking sure. That's certified Gooner, if I've ever seen one. 100%.

Is it around now that we cut away to Darth Vader? You've heard that already happened. When that happened, I realized there's another thing that this is exactly like to me. It's the galactic star cruiser. Oh, no. Oh, my gosh. Sure. Right?

Yeah. We ran out of the budget. Your access to canon characters is so limited and specialized. And then so much of your time is just filled with this bullshit. Yeah. Is this on the Star Wars story? I don't know. After the original trilogy,

like, does this not just kind of become what Star Wars is? It's kind of all here. It's kind of like, this is it. Darth Vader will, like, show up for five minutes or like,

not even for 20 seconds, and it's really just a different, it's just an old footage, but new dub over top of it. They basically had cameo money for Ging. That's right. He gets one line. It's old footage.

It's footage from a new hope. There's also the, Imperial guy who goes to the, like, general store, goes to the Radio Shack, who goes to the Zerker facility on Kishik. And, and he has like the back part of Vader's helmet on so that from the back, it kind of looks like Darth Vader. I, and that's all over Star Wars, you know? Also, the, the overdub on that guy is so sinister. I'll be, I'll be, I'll be on. I'll be, I'll be on. I'll be, I'll be on. But then you get the reverse shot. And it's just a little dude.

It's just, it looks like a sales manager. Hey, you know what? Maybe this is making an avant-garde statement about, or at least a foreshadowing of, like, this is what fashion isn't going to look like. It's going to look like a regional sales manager. Yeah. Showing up to your store. Maybe that's what it's driving at.

But either way, man, Arkarnie, what are you doing here? I'm a saja. Dude, exactly the energy. Like, it really is. You know? selling you a groomer. What the fuck was that? What, what?

It's guaranteed to lift stains off clothing, faces and hands, cleans teeth, fingers, and toenails, washes, eyes, pierces, ears, calculates, modulates, and syncopates like rhythms, and can repeat the entire Imperial Penal Code, all 17 volumes and half the time, the old XP21. Just the thing you need to keep squeaky clean.

Okay. Cool. Look like a toothbrush. I thought the, I thought the, um, the aquarium in a cube was way cooler, agreed. Agreed. The aquarium. I don't know why he was like, he was just so dismissive of it. He, he, he, he doesn't fuck with fish, I guess. No. I just, I thought that was the coolest, the coolest item for sure. I don't like. And again, like, I think this, this answer is a much of questions for us,

this holiday special. We've a lot, we've had a lot of questions about over the years, about Star Wars communications, about Star Wars media. It seems like in Star Wars world, you can just do a one-way video call to anybody, and it just picks up, and you just get to look around in there or whatever. They hop on the call with Art Carney's guy, Sean, John, or whatever, and it's just like... That's a different guy. That's a different guy. Sorry, at Art Carney. Not that guy.

And it just like instantly picks up, and it takes, like, a whole scene before he... He looks up and says, oh, hey, hi, sorry, I didn't see you there, Mala. What do you need? Also, don't talk because the cops are here. This phone call that just started itself could now be incriminating. So he has to, like, do a little bit. It's a speaking code. Do you remember what his code is?

It's like, I got the, the furry rug is going to come over later. It's going to get delivered. And it's made by hand. It was made by hand, solo. Cursed. At least, at least, no. No one in this in this Godforsaken special said they had a bad feeling about this. At least for that we can be grateful.

Did he not say that at the beginning? He doesn't say I have a bad feeling about this. It hasn't become enough of a thing yet. Wow. I don't think so. I didn't write it down. Wow. And I always write it down.

I mean, that is the other thing that's fascinating. It's like nothing's happened yet. They don't know. No one who made this knows who Darth Vader is. No, including George Lucas. No one who's made this knows that Luke and Leia aren't or are siblings

yet you know so there's like Luke and Leia are still being presented as like not together they're not like holding hands in this right but like that's still the pairing

that's the hero and the heroine of this that empire hasn't happened yet it's all very weird yeah there there aren't the Star Wars isms aren't here which is Which is exceedingly bizarre for a Star Wars thing because they're always there. After Empire Strikes Back, they are always there. You are always going to hear someone say the thing that you've heard before or see the thing or there's the Easter egg or that's the reference.

That's the planet that was in that thing. Oh, those said there. this is like one of the only pure properties one of the only pure pieces of Star Wars content that isn't marred by having to like do Star Wars Do Star Wars, yeah But it's also trying so hard to do Star Wars

It's just it doesn't know what it is yet You know? It's like it's picking up the costume off the rack At Spirit Halloween and being like, okay, I'm Star Wars now, and I don't know anything else about it, nothing else. All I know is like I'm wearing a vest with a lot of pockets on it, and I've got a belt with some doodads,

and there are a few very furry figures around me. And I got to go off that. Like, what's Star Wars? You brought an alien to Earth, and you dress them up, and you put them on the Star Wars set, and you're like, okay, do Star Wars now and they're like, okay. And this is what they got.

This is what they came up with. Alien is Arcarni. Yeah. It's just like, because none of these bits are funny. It's like, funny. Because it is a well-known comedy actor, it's like, this is going to read is funny, right? And it feels like bad improv. We're just blindly groping forward, trying to find.

a joke or something humorous and just can't get there. Just there's nothing. Arc Carney like bribing this guy with a smart hairbrush thing. Who gives a shit? It's interminable because everything is interminable because they're stretching. And then he keeps showing up because I guess, you know, they could afford to use their character. He is their character.

He's going to show up. No sooner has he gotten rid of the Imperial than he's going to show up at their door with the Gooniverse. Yeah. First, we do get our first long GM ad about being a good American, which is like the three line of all.

Like GM is running for Senate or something. Truly. Like, it is 20 minutes of this dude talking about how much it means to him to work at GM. And to be fair, the filmmaking, compared to what we're watching in this like, Oh my God.

I was like, this is a motherfucking documentary. Hey, sorry, shut the fuck up. You're interrupting GM at. My show was on. My show was on.

Brother, the ad for the little car that drives around on the cram drawing. You mean the trail tracker? The trail tracker? That looked good. That should look cool.

I want one. That look cool as hell. I don't know how it works. How did they do that in 1978? Yeah, what the hell? That's damn cool. I think.

It is cool. And then we're gonna go fucking back to the cooking scene. So I, uh, the cooking scene is fun. I love how much Malga gets into it. I love how beautiful her hair looks. When she like flips her hair back, there's a moment where she's like,

she like puts like something in her bowl and she like with both hands flips her hair back. And I'm like, Mala is so fucking real. Mala, she is so real. is me. I do that. I do that. I love her so much. My understanding is the faces on these masks are like better

than the chewy face. They're like extra, like extra expressive compared to the classic Chewbacca. Maybe too expressive in Lumpy's case. Yeah. It's a little Lumpy is rough. I don't like looking at him. I'll be honest. It's like I almost prefer that if they just

gone full clutch cargo and just like superimposed a moving mouth over a wiki face because like he just looks he's kind of freaking me out. And again, the eyes, too much eye, like too much white on his eyes. Right. I see. Where he's always a little bit, like, bugged out.

Yeah. Also, so, yeah, so itchy, you know, he has needs. And those needs are apparently, and this is, so again, this thing, this thing sort of sees the future. We see, we see him doing the, like, scroll back and forth over the part. of the video he really likes, which is the lady saying, you're adorable. But beyond that, it does, I mean, it is, it is, the thing that is, it responds to him. Seemingly. It's like a new age, it's like a new age influencer, like self-help thing crossed with a

phone sex hotline. Yeah. But then, and then it sings a little song. which is again very Star Cruiser. For those, and now, and now musical theater. Yeah, and then like three minutes later, Vader, in our case, Kyla Ren is going to show up and say, like, I'm going to kill all of you people.

You know, it's like, whoa, big vibes to shift. We were just singing a second ago, man. What were the people, for the people who didn't, who'd never seen this before, when the singing started, what was your impression? What did you know there was, there were songs in this already? I assumed because it's a,

variety show and it's the late 70s that there would be music. I feel like that was that was to be expected. Okay. The song itself was I thought impressive. I didn't mind the song. I mean, I didn't like who the song was being sung to and that it was being created out of Itchy's mind palace. I didn't like that part of it.

But I have to say, like, Dionne Carroll looks amazing. Yeah. I think Bob Mackey did all of the costumes for the special, which is wild. Which is wild. Because Bob Mackey is an absolute fucking legend and is best known for being shares, like, right-hand man in dressing and designing for her costumes. He designed the Marilyn Monroe dress. Oh, shit. Because this was giving Maryland seeing the Kennedy.

Totally. That's the dress. That's the dress that Bob Mackey made. Also Tina Turner and Diana Ross. He's a legendary designer and costumer. And he did this, which is just... So you're on board with the hair thing. I love the hair thing

I thought the hair thing was a sleigh He described the hair thing for the person Who did not track this down to watch it Yes So the hair thing is Essentially Imagine Okay

You skin to feather boa Okay Yeah like imagine You have Like you know how a jester Has like the little the little like pieces that come off the jester's hat

okay now imagine that there's okay just imagine like a shag carpet but each of the pieces of the shag are like little tentacles and so there's like hundreds of tentacles kind of coming out of okay imagine you know those mops that

are like the mops that have like the little pieces that come out of course Like, okay, just imagine like a mop, basically. And so imagine a mop that is like, has been like, like, like, slay effect has been applied to it. Like, it's been like the yossified mop. And there's like little pieces of crystal on it. It's this beautiful lilac color. And it's kind of coming down.

And it kind of blends into a body piece. sort of thing. Oh shit. I just saw itchy again. That shot? Isn't the shot where his mouth looked like a sock puppet? And it's going like,

yum, yum, yum. Is it that shot? No, it's this shot, which is a full body shot of him in which he starts like shivering down after the first image of seeing

Dion. Yeah, uh-huh. Great. Good. So, you know. But she, I think really looks incredible. If you just draw what Natalie described. If you're not seen this thing.

Yeah. Just draw what Natalie described. Just send us your work. If you sort of, you have a vibe now of what this character looks like and what the costume looks like. Just send us a little drawing of what you think this looks like based on Natalie's description of the Yassified mom. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Send me.

I think I did a good job explaining it. Yeah. And she is saying over and over again, like, I am yours. I am yours. I am pleasure. I am pleasure. Yeah, forever. I am here because you made me and other things of that nature.

Like, it's, I don't like it. I don't feel good being a part of it. I don't mind that he's watching it. I don't need to be watching it. I don't need to see him watching it. All I have your credit card clipped in half at the supermarket because all the money got used on only fans. Oh, no. Anyway, Princess Leia's calling.

Oh, yeah, got to hold on. Well, we don't even like, Lumpy doesn't exit. Itchy. Princess Leia, I mean, itchy. Sorry, Lumpy is not allowed to watch this. Lumpy's in there, and then we just get a transmission from Leia. all of a sudden where Leah's like, hey, hey, y'all. Where's Han and Luke?

I mean, Han and Chewy, can you put them on? And the answer is no, because they're not there yet, as has been explained multiple times. They're not there yet. Leah is, I mean, Carrie Fisher is not here. Carrie Fisher is somewhere else in the galaxy this whole time she is staring off her to the middle distance No no I cannot blame her

She does her absolute best with With what she has been given I cannot believe they would They would Maintain the continuity of the of a new hope And force her to be brawless once again I thought that was shameful unless it was her choice.

It was her choice. Then I supported, obviously. But yeah, this was not the best read from here. But I'm not one to speak to speak. No, but I think we do. In a special full of bad performances, she's actually kind of like, oh, boy, she really, really mailed this one in.

She doesn't want to be there. She don't, she don't want to be here. You know, and I don't, it's tough because it's like, they're years out from Empire and they're years out

from filming Star Wars. So like, I don't know. If George called me and was like, all right, we got to suit you back up, get your hair back in them buns. I guess I would also be checked out

end or high, you know? I mean, yeah. I did see a very funny anecdote from when she, I think she was on like a talk show at some point, where she said, uh,

she said that she asked George Lucas to send her, um, the, oh no, this was for a New York Times, like a TV thing. Um, that she asked Lucas give her a copy of the special so that she could, um,

play it at parties when she wanted everyone to, leave, which I thought was just incredible. And it is like very in the kind of humor of Carrie Fisher that I have, that I adore. There's a great clip with Harrison Ford of Conan O'Brien forcing Harrison Ford to watch himself on this. And he just sort of like cringes into the seat. And it's just great. They all, they know, they know, they know what they were doing. I mean, Harrison barely had to do anything that cringe.

to be honest. I agree. Yeah. Like most of his stuff was pretty tame. He was just with Chewy the whole time. Yeah, he's just like, oh, I love my boy and chewy. Yeah, he's just in the cockpit with his bro. I'm going to get you home.

I'm going to, you know, say hey to Mala for me. Peace. He's so, I guess I'm getting ahead of this, but he's so sweet and tender with Chubong's family when he finally meets him at the end that it was a real high moment of this special. But what I do want to say is like. there was something wrong with the Millennium Falcon set, right? Because they are so zoomed in and like a low light.

You can't see where they are or what's happening. None of the sets from the movie are available. Those are all either in the UK or overseas elsewhere. They rebuilt everything. In Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, which means it was more expensive. And it was smaller. My understanding is the Millennium Falcon was too small.

for Chubacca's actor to sit correctly. Or he couldn't stand up inside. It was so small. Peter Mayhew, is that right? Am I getting the name right? Yeah, okay. It's in there. Thank God.

Yeah. Anyway, then the Lending Falcon flies overhead, and then it's like, oh, Chooey must be home. This movie, this special must be coming to an end. No, it's Stormtroopers with guns. Stormtroopers look nice. Good job. That stormtrooper.

armor. Yep. They're looking for rebel activity and they know that a male wookie lives here so they're trying to figure out where this male wookie could have gone. How about out

to buy presents for life day? Why does he have to be home right now? He's doing something else. I don't know. And these stormtroopers, they're just they're looking around, trying to see, you know, are there any nefarious things here?

Are there any, is there any evidence of rebel activity? And Lumpy, Lumpy is getting really upset. So, so Don, Don Sahn turns on the actual music video box. We had the circus box earlier, the circus hollow. Why do we have three devices for this? We have four devices. We have television. We've kitchen TV, recipe TV.

We have the chess table that also does the holographic circus. We have the GunaTron 3,000. And we have the music video box. Listen, Black Friday was only like three weeks ago. And Chui cleaned it out on a run. They got all the new, don't worry about it. They got all the new devices. Everything that hits the market is going to.

is coming home to the Chubaca household. How many devices are in your apartment right now? So many devices. We're not going to pocket watch on Chubakka here. I am absolutely going to pocket watch on Chubaka,

actually. But I have one other piece of news because I think this is important context. This is before Black Friday. This came out on, not before Black Friday. It's like, oh, actually, it might be,

I don't know when the first Black Friday shopping deals were. Someone should look that up. God. This is November 17th. This did not come on on Christmas. This came on before Thanksgiving. What?

Yeah. Wow. Thanksgiving in 1978 was, let's find it. Let's figure out when it actually is. I'm not going to click on November 23rd. This was the Friday before Thanksgiving. What are you doing? The family's not even, I mean, like a full week.

before Thanksgiving. Yeah, full week before Black Friday. You can ruin people's Thanksgiving with this. But it's like, in the 1970s, I don't know that they had the whole,

I'm going to the mall on October, on Halloween and the Christmas tree is already up. So this is like the first, this is the first offense in terms of I have not eaten turkey yet. And I have to deal with this fucking Christmas shit. That's right.

Like, let me watch a Vintill Hulk. You're so sorry. That's horrible. Looks like Black Friday gained popularity sometime in the mid-70s, especially early 80s. Interesting. There's lots of mentions earlier in time, but not really with the context that it has today. Anyway. So to lower the temperature during this search, Sondon busts out.

the music video device, distinct from the other devices. Yes. And it's Jefferson Starship time. And the Imperial grunt is just losing his mind for this. He's just utterly riveted. Like he is pacified the way Lumpy is pacified

by like a lady getting on the parallel bars. Like, and you know it's, but the Star Wars have fired it because they, they put like a purple lightsaber beam of pure light over all the instruments and the microphones in this video

so that it looks like futuristic but we're gonna get this full performance and we're gonna see we're gonna see an Imperial Trooper bopping along to it this is this is great what's better than this he loves it it's really funny this is an original song by them

this was not like a hot single that they came to play. This was original, like the sky on fire. Apparently they also had a bonus song that was put on the eventual compilation album that this was also available called Hyperdrive. They should have done Hyperdrive. Hyper drives are the thing that is... I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I have nothing to say about this performance. Yeah, it's nothing. It's just... it's not my favorite musical number in this series of musical numbers. Interesting. Oh, we have to rate them. We'll have to rank them at the end once we've talked about four of them, five of them?

This is solidly at the bottom, I think, for me, though. Interesting. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay. And then is it cartoon time? Do we get to the... Lumpy?

Wait, I have to make a correction. Because... Because Sean Don does say, um, these, these aren't the rebels you're looking for at one point. Star Wars is here. So,

so I have to, I have to, I have to eat my sock or whatever and say that, um, that there, there is, it's here. Star Wars is here.

Yeah. Okay. Star Wars is here. Great. What if Arc Carney was willing to figure it out? He was like, you know what would slap is if in every single thing you make from now on, you just say something from like the last one or the first, just say something that's already been said.

We call it a callback in comedy. I think it's going to go great. Lucas is like, like it rhymes. Structure your entire franchise like a stand-up set. They're going to love it. What's funny is we actually get an alternative. alternative to there's a bad, I got a bad feeling about this in the Boba Fett cartoon. After it's all done, we get Chewy saying he just didn't smell right, which is sort of Chewy's version of I've got a bad feeling about this.

Totally. You know? But yeah, in the middle of all of this, Lumpy goes to the cartoon machine? Well, Lumpy gets very upset when they say that they're going to go in Lumpy's room upstairs. So Sean Don puts Lumpy in front of the cartoon machine to calm him down and to also bias 10 minutes of cartoon time. Do we think? We also need to calm down as viewers. So I think it was really for everyone that we watched a cartoon.

Because the Imperial officer is like, my men might just start hurting you. You know, I wouldn't do it, but sometimes stormtroopers, they hurt people. which is fucked up. My men are going to kill your kid if you don't shut him the fuck up. But the problem is the kid is annoying. He's lumpy. He's a kid.

I'm saying the kid can be the kid, but I'm saying in the context of this like two hours special it's like this kid can shut the fuck up. Like when the Stormtrooper CEO comes back down and says Mala, that'll keep him occupied. I think Mala suddenly

has a glimpse of what it would be like to have a supportive partner. He's like checked in and like actually trying to help you keep your sanity. Sometimes a child has bad vibes. You know, what did no one ever asked. That's right.

Maybe Lumpie had bad vibes. Maybe that's why Chui doesn't come home. Yeah. He's now watching a cartoon that looks like Mobius drew it. It looks like it's straight out of the ink all or straight out of like heavy metal or something. Except everyone's proportions are as fucked up

as they possibly could be. Luke's eyes in this cartoon are like bright blue dots. The home looks like a horse. 100%. Yeah. 100%. They also age them up in a cart.

Like I don't know how you make a cartoon character look older than the human version of the person. But like Luke is like in his 30s and Han looks like a like a cartoon wizard. Han, are you okay, man? Look at your face. You're not the way faces go. On the other hand, I think the planets and space and shit

looks sick as hell in this cartoon. Everything with the people looks great. And the people look like, I wouldn't. I kind of like it. I'm into it. They're stylized in a way. Yeah. I love the droids.

I love how R2 and C3PO look and move. Boba Fett is here. Chewy looks good, actually. Boba Fett's here. Boba Fett is here for the... Okay, actually, this cartoon is wild. Because, like, we theoretically do a show about Star Wars cartoon. And we've watched a lot of Star Wars cartoons.

This is the first Star Wars cartoon. And it's sort of all here. You have your main characters. Something happens. One of them gets in trouble. A new character gets introduced who you go either... Well, this guy fucking sucks. I can't wait for this episode to be over.

Or this guy's great. They should make him his own show because he's so cool. And then nothing ever happens with that character because that's how it goes until 40 years later when suddenly that character gets their run. And now we just are like in a hyper time compressed version of that because we all live in the time of like, oh, that character from Clone Wars is cool. I wish that they had their own thing. And then like a decade later they get their own thing.

I have to be vague about who we're talking about because there's still things. that are spoilers to the people on this cast that I can't say. So anyway, but it's here already. Like, that format is here already because I want to make sure this is, we get this right. Because this is some stuff that maybe Star Wars was not yet. The thing it is, Han and Chewy have a talisman, correct? Yeah. And there is a...

The talisman does something, it makes. things invisible? Says Captain Kazan in the intro to this? There's a guy who's like, Starlog, 321, from the Bridge of the Revenge, Han Solo and his first mate Chewy

recovered the mystical talisman. And C-3PO is like, I believe the talisman makes things invisible. And I'm like, what are you fucking talking about, dude? And so Luke and Thripio go off to get him to a water planet, but the water is all like, red and there's dinosaurs everywhere and fan favorite boba fett shows up on the back of a dinosaur

and shoots a different dinosaur with the mandoloreans double-pronged gun because that's one of the other things they brought back into canon was boba fett's gun in this i don't know man well this has got to sit it was very large for uh philone i'm sure like this is this is sort of ground zero of the Kennerverse of Star Wars products and so you got on to this do we have has Faloni talked about the Star Wars holiday special before no because he's trying to get the gig so he's he's got a key he can't he can't be too arch he's got to be I do believe though in my heart of hearts that that Dave Faloni Dave Faloni age oh he had to watch at the at the age of four years was sitting there

was sitting there on Thanksgiving, not Thanksgiving, a week before Thanksgiving, November 17th, 1978, four-year-old Dave Filoni was like, holy shit. This is the best.

Fuck the Incredible Hulk. I love this shit. I do think it's funny to be like, you know, Boba Fett shows up eventually in Empire Fakes back. But the whole thing with Boba Fett is,

Everyone loved the toy, and everyone thought he was cool. And this show is part of why. This variety show, this appearance, he shows up. He is badass and evil. He has cool armor. We've never seen Mandalorian armor before. It's not called Mandalorian Armor, by the way. He's just like a weirdo mercenary bounty hunter.

At this point in the fiction, no one recognizes him. Luke and Han both see him later. And neither of them were like, you're Boba Fett. You are trying to get Han. So this is, this is why it starts with them. So the cartoon is so weird because it's like lumpy, you need to calm down. You're about to start, like, you're about to start screaming like, fuck the police while police here overturning the place. Go watch your cartoon.

But the cartoon is a Star Wars cartoon about his dad. That's why I was like, I don't understand. Is he watching a cartoon? Or is he watching a real world recording that we are seeing rendered as a cartoon? Who would have shot it? No, it's a cartoon. Who would have shot it? Who animated?

Isn't the River Alliance to have a propaganda department? Yeah. They're making cartoons? I think Chui commissioned someone. I think last year's life day, this was like a commission that Chui got for Lumpy. for Life Day. I'm going to look at the original script and see if I can get some clear, or not the original script, but the early script to see if there's some clarity on what it is.

But I bet you're right. I bet it just says he sits down to watch a cartoon. Don't, I mean, please talk about the cartoon. Kids love cartoons. They do. I mean, at this point in time, I have to say, my brain was in a, was in a strange place to now be transported from the world of live action wookie households to

slightly psychedelic cartoon vibes so in terms of like what happened what I understand is Boba Fett tricked Han and Luke into thinking he was going to help them and go get a with Hans hanging upside

down disease. Right. Han has hanging upside down disease. And so there's a special serum that you can get in town that undoes the hanging upside down disease and Boba Fett knows right where to get it. And he's like, don't worry, I'll go get it for you. And Chui's like, I'm coming with you because I don't trust you. But of course, he's a wookie. So we can't understand that really. But we infer it from from Chui's honorable and loyal just vibe in general

so Chui goes with BobaFet to town and BobaFet calls Darth Vader in plain view of Chui and Chui's like oh my God you are talking to Darth Vader but then doesn't say anything

and then lets him buy the serum and then they come back to the ship and he administers the serum and then C3PO's like, by the way Chuby says that this guy is working for Darth Vader and then Boba Fett flies out of the shoot them. Just shoot them. You have the drop on them.

This is why people like Bocafet. There's two more movies. It's because it felt like he won and he should have gotten to win and he didn't get to win because I don't know if the Booker decided to push Han and Luke instead of Boba Fed. I don't know.

But like he gets the drop on them. He out maneuvers them the whole way, except for Chooey, who claims he knows. But here's the thing. People didn't love BobaFed because of this cartoon. This entire holiday special was essentially destroyed after one airing and never aired ever again. And I think the cartoon was at one point, and dropped in like a Star Wars DVD.

Right, yeah. Because people, into a Blu-ray sometime recently, like within the past 10 years or so, 10, 15 years. I don't know. But so presumably kids everywhere and Star Wars and Joyers and BobaFet fans might not have had the chance to see this. Maybe they're busy that night.

I don't know. Maybe it was an early bedtime. I don't know. But theoretically, a lot of people wouldn't have seen this holiday special, right? And then would have never known this epic, epic story of BobaFet? I think you're right. But I also, like, the first BobaFat action figure is from 1978, I believe. And we're specific. So it's from, it's from this year, or maybe it can. came out the next year, but it came out pre-empshire. And it was specifically the trait, like, you had to send in four cardbacks to four other Boba, to four other non-Boba-Fet figures to get your free fifth figure.

So he was like, they understood immediately from this that he was something that was like special and collectible and cool and unique. Now, maybe because I thought they were going to push him in Empire, which wasn't out yet. But by 79, Kenner was already like, he gets a special action figure that you only get if you buy four other action figures. And this is the only thing he's in at that point. So I don't know. I feel like yes and no. You know what I mean?

I don't know. We need to do a deeper dive on the Boba Fett fandom, obviously. That'll serve us all very well. We do need to do that. You know? We need to do that. I do have an answer, by the way, about what this thing is based on the original, or not the original, but again, this is the May 31st, 19718 story treatment document, which is a summary. It's like a five-page summary of the story of this, except it's a previous version.

So some important differences right away, Chewy's home already in the May version of this. So very different. Chewy's home. I know what you're thinking. So then where's the action come from? page two. I'm just going to read you all of page two, straight through. In the Wookiee House, the trader arrives with lots of merchandise.

Mala and Chewy ordered on his last visit, and he also brings along a brand new device. The video book. Lumpy is fascinated by the book and wants a demonstration. Part one of the animation through the point where Darth Vader is revealed on the screen. Please. B. Lumpy begs for a video book. Chui, distracted in his thoughts about the festival, seems to be abrupt with his child. pointing out that the other family necessities prevent the purchase of the book right now.

C. Lumpy rather petulantly goes away, and as soon as he is out of the room, Chewy gets a video book from The Trader as a surprise present for his son at the festival. D. The Trader, though Folkian Kind, is quite disinterested in the festival. First of all, he doesn't have a family, so he has no one to spend the day with. And secondly, commercialism is prohibited as part of the event, so there's nothing in it for him. He turns down an invitation to stay and celebrate with Chui's family,

preferring instead to keep a sense of distance from, I'm going to just read this as it's written here, a sense of distance from the Indians, not getting personally involved with his customers. The traitor leaves. E, to relax his mind, Chewy puts on the mind evaporator. We follow it as it takes him through the impressionistic dream images

of what a wookie feels is important to his life experience. Wookies enjoy the beat of rock and roll, and the sequence might feature that kind of group. Soon, however, the experience becomes less joyful. And more of a nightmare, his chewy senses his child Lumpy to be lost and in danger. Pulling himself out of the mind evaporator, he finds that his son is indeed missing from the house.

Okay, that sounds epic. Lumpy has stoned away on the traitor's ship because he wants the video book. And that's when we get the second part of the animation. Wow. That's why you shouldn't lie to your fucking kids. Exactly. The ship ends up getting caught up in an imperial tractor.

It's like a whole other thing for the rest of it. It's completely different. There's a thing called the Starship Musica. It's a whole thing. It's even more like the galactic Star Cruiser, in my opinion. Do you remember the Willy Wonka experience? Oh, yeah. Yes.

And how it turned out the- script for it was AI generated. Yes. And they tried to produce it off an AI generated script. It was just like, and then we pull off the most amazing shit you've ever seen. That's kind of how some of this stuff feels. Yeah. Insert awesome scene here. Insert really, insert really cool sequence here. It's so much of that.

Bad ass rock and roll music shows up here. So that artist TBD. So yes, it's a video book. I think it's just supposed to be like a book for kids to watch cartoons on. So I'm giving it to you. It's a cartoon. It's not some sort of, I don't know, maybe the mind evaporator can produce car. I don't know.

I love that it's called the mind evaporator. I need one. Thank you. Ooh, yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, that's the cartoon. And then we get maybe the most important ad break. Maybe we get the most important ad break of the night. The Hungry Jack Biscuits ad.

Oh, that's where that was your one. That was the one you wanted to call. You were talking about the Hungry Jack, please. Yeah, she just, you know, an old, a Mi-Maw type figure just shows up with a big canister full of biscuit batter. Yeah. And then she feeds it to her hungry Jack. We don't see because he's so big that we just have to kind of imagine this towering

hulking figure we glimpse briefly. how stacked he must be thanks to these hungry jack biscuits. Done in only 11 minutes. And then we get a news break. This was stressful to watch. If I wasn't already in a slightly agitated state of being from watching the special itself,

this news break was fucking stressful. CBS News reports. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So Soviet President Breznev has told 12 U.S. senators that they are testing a neutron bomb. Yeah. Of course, a neutron bomb famously kills people but not buildings. And he says, we figured out how to make it, but we decided not to put them into production.

So that's the state of the Cold War that we're in at the moment. Also, they're sentencing a guy who was being sentenced for selling for giving secrets to the Soviets from the CIA. So basically it's a news break like, hey, folks, called war. Not going well. We're in it, man. We are actually, we're kind of losing. We're kind of losing. Yeah.

And there's a blizzard coming. So watch out for that. But Ronald Reagan's going to show up and fix all of this. Back to Lumpy. Wait, my favorite bill actually wasn't that it was a. a blizzard coming. It was actually that the winter from last year that was

so snowstormed in that people predicted you know statisticians predicted that this would be a giant baby boom that people would be just babies being

born all the time. It's been nine months since the last winter and wow we should have had a lot of babies by now. Turns out not that many babies being born right now. Weird. They must have been out out shoveling snow or something. It's so funny. I love that we

get the ad for the Donnie and Marie variety show in the middle of this. And this Star Wars variety show was so bad. I'm like, now wait a second. Donnie Marie, they seem like they got its lights, it's cameras, it's action over there. They got people dance stocker chanting.

We got choreography. Yeah, dude. They're bringing it. Bobby Vinton's rock and rollers are here. It's so funny. Other frequent commercials from this from just this general segment there was a couple commercials for

Comtrecks, the cure-all cold medicine that will do the trick takes care of cough, cold, sneezing, everything. Yeah. And it's and it's gentle and safe. So you know, it's good. Anyone want a Chevy for 99 bucks a month?

Sounds a good to me. I especially loved the union commercial with all of the presumably seamstresses singing to please buy union-made garments because there was a real fear of overseas manufacturing thing going on in a lot of these commercials. a lot of emphasis on American-made manufacturing in a few of these, I got to say. Also, we had an incredible World Series transition to Reggie Candy Bar commercial. Yeah, what the fuck is that? Reggie, the World Series baseball player,

I didn't do the due diligence of looking up which baseball player this was, apologies, but he did so good in the World Series they made him a candy bar and named it after him and it looked pretty good. Reggie Jackson, Mr. October. But I have never heard of this guy. I guess you could just, you know, I guess

that makes sense to me. It makes sense, I guess, that there, if you were a star athlete, you got some sort of candy named after you. Yeah. I didn't know that he was big like that is I guess the thing. But I guess so.

There was also two different panty hose commercials. One that was, oh, I'm forgetting the names. I thought I wrote them down. But two different panty hose. Panty hose are big at this point, obviously. We had a commercial for The Whiz, a commercial for Woolite, naturally. And Pillsbury Plus Yellow Cake. Oh, this one is a good one.

one. The Pillsbury. That's added really good. The Pillsbury Plus, it has pudding in it. Pillsbury plus yellow cake with pudding in it. Sounds really good. It's more moist. It's more moist than Duncan Hines.

So take that. It says, yeah, it says on the box, there's pudding in the mix. And pudding is underlined. So I thought that was funny. There was also a commercial for a toy called Tenbor and the slogan for that, the slogan for that one was, Tenbor's robot spelled backwards. They just say it out loud.

They're not playing coin about that thing. Tobor. That's robot spelled backwards. Oh yeah, Tobor. Sorry, it auto-corrected.

Tobor. Yeah. And then there was a bald eagle commercial, which I was certain was about conservation of bald eagles. This fucked me up.

But in fact, it was not a commercial about conserving you know, conservation efforts to help and endangered bald eagles, but was actually about home appliances, specifically Whirlpool. And again, another sort of foreign manufacturing anxiety showing up here where there was a

big emphasis that in order to save the bald eagles, aka America, we really need to be focusing on buying American-made products. If we don't buy Whirlpool, we don't deserve to live as a species. Basically. the end of that ad. You're basically shooting bald eagles out of the sky if you're not buying World Pool. So live with that.

I've just shout out, Babes. Cannot be overstated how bad American cars were. Oh, yeah. That is the thing. It's like the calls coming from inside the house, folks. Yeah. We are the endangered species, they say, about us if we can't keep American

products moving. I just want to shout out the Revlog ad. Which just looked like a Revlon ad. Yeah, they still make those. I mean, I guess, okay, it looked like a 90s Revlon ad, but it looked like a 90s Revlon ad. And like, I don't know, like the lighting was good. People look like the people.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I was like, Revlon, that's a brand I still pick up at the drugstore. There it is. I need a new lip liner or something. I purchased Revlon, so I'm happy to see a familiar face there, I guess. Yeah. You can see all of these ads by the. themselves if you do a search for

1978 Star Wars Holiday Special commercials, all 19 minutes of them. Wow. The thumbnail, I believe, is the screen cap of the newscaster with the neutron bomb

graphic next to her. Oh, wow. What a time. That was really something. Anyway, how's that cartoon lumpy? And then we get the rest of the cartoon. We go back for break and get that which is very funny um and somehow they're still okay i just want to be clear we've been going for an hour and 40 minutes we are about halfway done the holiday special we're a little more we're a little more than halfway done and plot's going to start happening i bet better you just it just doesn't

feel like plot is happening but it turns out so lumpy they're like hey clean up your room you little shit. And Lumpy trumps up the stairs. And he's sad and he's upset. But then he doesn't just get mad. He starts working and getting even. He egos to Wiki YouTube. And it's like, I'm going to have this little robot man teach me to crack

Imperial Military Encryption so that I can broadcast return to base orders from my child for my play set. And it works. Like, like this is the, this, again, this, this, this thing is so ahead of the curve. It knows that someday you're going to go to your computer and be like, teach me how to make my grandma's napalm. And it'll be like, here's your grandma's napalm recipe. And you just get napalm. Yeah. Yeah. It, the robot guy is like an amorphotry, I forget exactly what he's called, is creepy. It's like the thing he knows with the screwdriver. Is it 79?

It's 70. Wait, what year is what? Alien. Oh, good question. You're saying, because this is giving Ian Holm.

79. 79. Yeah. So this is ahead of the curve. You know what? Ian Holm saw this and was like, look, I know,

he's showing it to Ridley Scott. And he's like, look, there's not a lot that's good in here. Yeah. But I think this is going to make the movie. What if I just slowly fall apart? The movie's alien.

And it's like, no, the real evil is the embodiment of the corporation. It's good. Anyway, time to go to Tattooine. Okay, we have to explain this because I think it's really important to understand again. We've said we've had a lot of conversations about what is media in the Star Wars world. And now we can say definitively, in the imperial era, a thing that the empire did was they said, all right everybody listen up come to the tv we got to show you how good you have it here under imperial control because we have to show you the the sloppy terrible messy life in the outer

rim where where they live like you know scummy evil bad life it is like explicitly propaganda like imperial propaganda that cuts to the Tatooine can'tina to be like, look at all these, like, I guess aliens? Is that the, is that rude aliens? Is that the lesson that we're supposed to take away? They won't believe when they're told it's closing time. Yeah, it's like, hey, gather your troops around. Show the men why we fight.

Exactly. And it's, I'll be honest, this feels like, a bar and grill more than a bar, right? Like, this, this is a, it looks pretty tame. Like, it might be an automat. It might have just been converted from an automat. It's supposed to be the canteena. Well, that's just ain't true.

It's all the aliens in the canteen. It's, it's, that's Mozaisley. They really, okay, I found the exact text here. Time now for Life on Tatouine brought to viewers everywhere in the hope that our own lives may be uplifted by the comparison. and enriched with the gratitude of relief. This transmission is unrehearsed and unedited and is hereby begun without further comment

as to its lack of moral value. What the fuck are you talking about, lady? The following, this actually was before, the following live broadcast is recommended by the Imperial Council and the belief that your commitment to remain upstanding citizens will be reinforced. It is required viewing for all members of the Imperial forces.

What are they doing over there? She, why? Get your people, whoever the gerbils is of the Imperial Corps is messing up. Why is this being broadcast? If it's for Imperial forces, how do they, like, why is it on Mala's TV? Mala's living under occupation, Natalie. But she's not Imperial Forces. I thought this was like being sent to like the troops to be like.

But the troops are in her house. Maybe that TV is pinging up. They're like, we know. It like gets Bluetooth hijacked. where it's just like turn on TV and then it like goes from little communicators to like share display to all this TV and Yeah, they when we were watching we were watching lumpy upstairs the cartoon machine the storm troopers were downstairs pairing all their devices Hey what is a sir? What's Gunaverse six? Why are there why are there six guineverses? What's the what's the Gunaverse device?

Can I be on Universe 2.4 gigahertz or five gigahertz? Which one am I supposed to? It's a device, so it's 2.4. It's 2.4. Okay, I got it. Great. Wait, now there's a Gooniverse 7, sir. Something's happening.

Lumpy strapping himself in. No, I don't let Luffy in there. Itchy. Itchy. It's different. Sorry, itchy. The story of what happens. So, again, what we're about to see is now being told to us. He's the wookie with a social disease.

What? We're being told that this is being broadcast. to all imperial troopers. Everywhere. Everywhere. On the death star. Just get really seen the most fucked up shit you've ever seen in your lives. And what it is is just people in the canteena.

It's B. Arthur as the bartender. And it's a guy named Krellman who shows up with a flower. I do hate him. I hate him. I hate him. Fuck off. I hate him. He shows up to be like.

I didn't have anything to live for until you told me come back soon the other night. And she's like, yeah, but, okay. That's very sweet. And this goes on. Also drinks from the top of his head. And it's like, get the fuck out of here. I forgot about the thing. Yeah.

She pours him a drink and he pours it into the top of his head. Like it's an open volcano. I didn't like that. I didn't like when she did it for him. No. With the whole pitcher? First of all, that's a big, that's a lot of drink. That is, I mean, right to the brain?

You can't be giving away drink like that. That's true. Are you the manager? Do you own this place? I think she owns it. You don't think she owns it? You don't think this is her spot? She's the canon owner of Mosisly.

Really? No, I'm asking. Oh. Well, of this cantina. But this is not the canteen. She's canon again. It is supposed to. She's been made canon again.

What? Yeah. How? Wait. Her first mention in Canada was a 2016 reference book, Star Wars Complete locations. She eventually made an appearance in the short story. The Cluehorn can'tina caper from the 2017 short story anthology from a certain point of view. Hey.

This is not the one I was in. This is the new Hope one, not the Empire one. You sure you didn't steal that? I'm sure I didn't. I am sure I didn't. So the suggestion of who she is is raising an interesting thing for me, because Part of my confusion of which there are many was like, what's the real danger here? Like, are you supposed to be, I'm an imperial agent, and society will break down such that people go to bars and they hit on bartenders and they don't leave when they're supposed to.

Or it's like, I'm a citizen and I do not want to be a person who goes to the bar and hits on people and I don't leave what I'm supposed to. But now this like, who is she? Why is she pouring this drink? Is there like a bar rescue? Like, line into this year where it's like she's stealing company time. She's not measuring her poor. She's one of the evil ones too. Maybe.

Wow. Maybe. Okay. I think you're right. This is not her bar because the name of the bar is Chalman's spaceport can'tina. Chalman is a different guy Can I show you Tell me everybody what you think Chalman looks like

I'm not Alien or humanoid C-H-A-L-M-U-N Chal-Moon Alien I'll tell you alien Sorry I was late I had to process Looking at the thing I'm looking at Chal-moon

Chal-moon Don't look it up I'm not I'm thinking I'm using my mind I'm going into the mind eviscerator, evaporator, and picturing Chal Moon. I'm seeing kind of an eggish, an eggish presentation. I see. Yeah.

Okay. Allie, Rob, you said you're not guessing. You're not doing it. And Ali, what did you say? With a swirly beard. That's interesting. Ooh. I think he looks like a roach.

That's a great guess. Rob, no guesses, huh? Well, no, I was Chalmun. Chalmoon. Or Chalman. Chalman? I don't know.

He's not a dexter. He's not, but he has that energy a little. Hmm. Rob, I think maybe you're not able to tell us about him. because you're a little too close to old Chalman. Chalman's a wookie wearing an outfit I think I've seen Rob wear. Rob, this is what you're wearing when we checked into the Galactic Star Cruiser. You had this vest on.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Chalman is wookie rob. Chalman is wookie rob. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is your wuky, your wuky sona. Oh, my God.

He seems cool. He seems like the fucking. best. He said, I don't care who those guys are. Kick them out. Last time they were in here, they roughed up some of my regulars. That seems like a cool guy. Yeah. Is that a Ralph McCoy? I think it is, yeah. Or it's been

showing Chalman hungover as fuck. RMQ in the corner there. Apparently it's based on, that is a completed version by another, a different person. Tony D. T. T. Lizzy was illustrating it

oh no it was it was it it is original biquari art yeah uh huh yeah that's right I cannot incredible wow incredible

I love him that's him so B works for him so B works for him that's correct so yeah it's important that she's like all right listen

we gotta get out of here we're for Chelman's back we kind of blew past us the Imperials show up and say we have to shut down. There's a curfew in this sector now. Everyone

go home and B. Arthur is like, all right, everybody, you heard of them, go home. And no one goes home. They're like throwing food at her and shit. Rude as hell. Well, why is that her problem? This is what I'm saying. The scripturer should be out after them. They're the ones

who are out. Yeah. Like, why is it her responsibility to get all these people out of her bar? That's what I didn't really understand. And, yeah, but yeah, no one listens to her and they're all, I really, ugh, I just got, I just clicked through to the, to the, to the frame of, of, of, Krellman, is that his name? Krellman. Krellman. Krellman, just like, literally his body up against B. Arthur's backside.

Like, hmm, get the fuck away from her. her. Yeah. Ew. I hate it. Thankfully, she sings a version of closing time set to a slow version of the canteena theme. I actually, this is high on my list.

On my list. This is, this slapped. I was like, it was working. It was working for me. She does it. She does a good job.

She has a Tony, you know? It's just fucked up that she's like, okay, everybody leave. Okay, everybody, you're not leaving. I'm going to borrow you a drink. Okay. Everybody gets a free drink and then you have to go. Yeah. And then she has to sing them a song. Yeah, including the big rat that she cuddles up with for a moment. I don't know that. I love that big rat. Rat good. Rat good.

Well, here's the thing. What I think is what I think is B. Arthur was going to deny them her classic closing song moment, which he does every night. And she was kicking every night. And she was kicking everyone out without giving everyone a song. And this is why they were so up in arms. And that's why they began clanking their glasses down in a rhythmic pattern to incite B. Arthur to sing us the song. Sing us the song. Sing us out of here.

Sing us the song. Sing us out of here. That's how it goes. That's how it goes. anyway, that's 12 minutes of this special is. Also, I feel like the propaganda purposes are lost. Somewhere of life. It's just like the stormtroopers are sweating bullets inside their helmets.

Like after this mission, they're going back. So what are we getting, what were we supposed to take away? Are we getting quizzed on this? Are we supposed to like, so is it our job to shut down bars or the bars? Or the bars are the bars bad or the bars? Like, are the bar's bad or the bar's good, but we have to keep their out. Like, what, what was the problem there? It's like, I don't, I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Why was she singing? I don't know. Is singing good or is singing bad? Anyway, we should leave these rookies alone. You stay here. The rest of us are leaving to try to figure out her to talk through what we just watched.

So do you think in the end that dude with the hole in his head got with her? I don't know, man. Like, it doesn't seem likely. I don't know. It kind of vultures way in there at the end. But then the feet cut out. I can't tell. It's so funny.

And then it feels like, well, then surely that's the end because they all leave. They leave behind one stormtrooper. The storm trooper walks in on Lumpy trying to send a message out to space. Why is this kid so dumb? No, wait. Lumpy is the one who got them out of there. He sent the fake message. Oh, you're right.

Lumpy's upstairs. That's why they know it's up to no good because they hear the broadcast they just heard coming from his he unplugged his headphones just started blasting it from the from the laptop. First of all,

why aren't you doing this with your headphones on? Yeah. You're just the headphones we know you have. We've seen you put on headphones like two or three times over the course of this

over the course of this video. We did when he was watching the cartoon. Okay, no, wait a second. What if Lumpy also sent the canteena video out? What if Lumpby? lumpy hacked into the feed and was like, there's a,

everybody has to watch this. It just played some archival footage that his dad brought home of the bartender he knows, you know? Maybe the whole thing is a lumpy maneuver. It could be, by the way, that both propaganda departments for the alliance and the imperials are just out

there completely, like just misusing funds. Like the imperial propaganda department, theater kids, who were just like, uh, yeah, I know how to get the troops on side, sir.

All right. So the conceit here is that a lovable curmudgeonly canteen owner has to sing her customers asleep to get them out of the bar. Yeah, I love it. And then meanwhile, the Rebel Alliance is like, so I got some artist friends. They're a little underemployed. Can use some work? Yep. Maybe we can put something together for them.

What do you think? Stupid. Why don't we have them tell the story of the Republic's greatest heroes? Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca. And I think it'll be really, it'll be a compelling story. I don't know anything about who they are. I don't think my artist friends have no idea what they look like. We just don't have pictures.

Luke doesn't even have a lightsaber in that story. Because that has, because he's, he just is a blaster. Is he wearing the yellow jacket from the end of the movie? Is he? I don't, I don't remember that, but maybe. He is. He is in the yellow. He is.

He is. I'm telling you. The oft-mocked yellow jacket. Yeah. There it is. That's the most recent Luke we'd seen, you know? So I guess he keeps wearing that jacket. Storm Trooper goes to shoot Lumpy, but don't worry.

Lumpy out maneuvers him, leads him outside, and Han. Ha! Gets him. Han does what feels like. uses the force. You can't be opening this again. We cannot be saying that Hans a crypto Jedi. He's a crypto Jedi.

He does it. What he actually does is he goes like he like jukes him out. He like he's like I'm going to go for the gun that is just your gun that has just fallen on the ground. And then he kind of like makes the move and then the stormtrooper just dives off the banister.

And die. So what he's doing is Han has noticed, because he's so perceptive, that there is some cut up firewood at the stormtrooper's feet that the stormtrooper can't see because the helmet prevents him from seeing

with all of his vision, presumably. And so he knows that if he can get this guy to turn in a rush or try to grab the gun, he's going to stumble over the firewood and then fall to his death. Oh, that's what that is. Now all of that is shown on a tiny TV in all of three seconds.

That, I think, is what has been choreographed to happen here. I think you're right. I think that's exactly what happens now that I'm watching the playback. Yeah. It's very, on your video book. It's very silly. Mm-hmm. And then Lumpy jumps into Han's arms.

He does. In a tender way. It is, it is, it is like, it's like his real dad showed up. It's like he's one of the Cirque de Soleil performers. and they just have this, you know, moment of graceful collision. And then Han passes them back to Chewy. And then Renzi and hugs the family. Yeah.

Like he hugs Mala and Itchy before Chewy does. Yeah, what the fuck, Chewy? Whose family is this? Chewy. Well, yeah. maybe it's I mean maybe it's Hans

Han's spending a lot of time like reconvening with the family here while Chewy's just standing at the top of the stairs Now maybe it's because the special finally has a person in the room who can speak

because the traitor's been gone for a little while so but yeah I need to conclude about something Yes. I want to explain how off-putting and confusing the moment of tenderness between Mal and Chubaka is if you spent the entire special, assuming that those were Chubaka's parents. Oh, my God.

It says up top it says, and Chubacca's wife. You thought, hang on, so you thought that she was married to itchy? you thought you thought like he was her sugar daddy that he was like some sort of aging billionaire Oh you thought it was like

all in the family and it she was like the Archie Bunker type of like grosso dad I thought he just had the worst like outfit of the three of them I see I'm because none of the best are good

Chew was coming home and it was like a Bill Balochick Jordan situation I just thought they were at home Waiting for Chubaga and their son who will leave his For the holiday Lumpy was

He's a little brother Wow Little bro Lumpy It's It's oh that's different I guess he does kind of have like annoying little bro vibes More than like annoying my kid vibes

You know I guess Yeah I guess. That really changes how the scene plays out, Allie. Did you have to go look it up? Yeah, what did you feel when you saw them embrace? I feel like a long passionate glance.

Hot Solo was like, this is your son or this is your dad or something. And I was like, wait a minute. They like look loving until you into each other's eyes. And I was like, it's like, Mom, what's going? It's messed up, Alice. They sort of kiss, but they don't because I guess the mess don't have lips. And I was like, okay, I guess. Oh, no, wait a second.

The masks definitely have lips because we've seen Lumpy's lips non-stop. Oh, but they do look longingly at each other for sure. And Han is like, like you said this in your summary rob, all right, guys, love you, got to go. Have a nice life day. Have a nice life day is a banger. Have a nice life day Leave get out of here Gone

You know he knows when it's time He's like he's gotten all the credit Like literally saved their kid All this And now he's like I can't stay I would love to You guys are like family to me

But I have other things I would rather do And by all counts Or by all rights This should be the end of the movie The end of the special there's still like 15 minutes left okay so what happens now is there's another imperial transmission

I wish you were kidding I thought the traitor had left he came back no he's still somehow in the house like where the fuck were you this past like I can't I can't the imperial the imperial chief commander calls in

and is like, where's the homie that we left behind? Where's where is the stormtrooper we left behind? Report in. We'll report in. Turn on your com link. And everyone's like, oh, shit, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? The guy is dead on the floor of Kashik.

How are we going to solve this? And the trader's like, I got this one. And what does he do? He's like, yeah, your guy. Your guy was a deadbeat. Well, and he's like, doesn't he, isn't he like, he tried to, like, rob us and hurt us, and then he, and he defected, he ran into the woods. Like, and the imperial guy has to be like, oh, well, that's not good.

No further questions. Yeah. Yeah. He robbed me. Sounds about right. Yeah. I guess we'll search for him. Okay, cool.

Anyway, everybody pick up these weird candles and walk into the stars Do you think this is where Dave Filoni got the idea for the race? Oh my God, the world in between? Yes. Oh, maybe. Oh, no. It's kind of here. It's close.

Like certain beings can access it. The wookies can access the world between worlds. Wow. They should have done that when the battle droids showed up to kill them. Oh, was this in the original? I have to see, I have to see it, no, because the original is all about the starship music. I had to look at the treatment, the five-page treatment. None of this is there.

There's none of the walking through the stars to it, which is a shame. But, but yeah, they walk through a star field to a big, blue lightball. We cut to commercial and when we come back, it's, uh, it's life day. It's the big,

it's a big tree. It's dozens of wookies in robes. I don't know where the ropes came from, but they all have robes and they all have like a weird. Big gang. Let's join a cult. That's the energy. It's very culty.

Uh, C3PO and R2 are there to provide translation for the first bit before the the humans arrive. Yeah, if you thought that Han was like saying goodbye, that wasn't actually, it was I'll see you in 15 minutes when you get through the star. And Leah, Luke, and Han show up to take us out of here. Leah has never been so happy to see Chewy. I have to say, her, she is like,

so happy to be in Chui's arms. There is something really, really sentimental and deep happening between Leah and just her embrace of Chui. It's like... It's powerful. It's powerful. Ever before.

No. Like smiling with her eyes type energy, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And then she sings us a song. Yeah. And it's also slowed down version of John Williams' score. Yep, it's like the Star Wars theme.

Wait, what? So I did not. Go listen to it again. It doesn't start that way, but it becomes it a couple of lines in. Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's also weird because her vocals here are like church singing, not good church singing, like Catholic church singing or like, you know what I mean? Like there's like, it's just like, I don't. Very articulated. Yeah. Yeah. She's seen talking a little, but she's like, I don't know.

is not at least the rock band and the disco were like somewhat timely this just feels like this feels like 1950s variety show singing totally totally totally which is I feel like if you're not a singer but you are an actress you had to just know how to sing that makes sense in a way and so like every actress just had to be able to kind of sing in like a very technical way. Like she's technically singing and it sounds fine. It's going with the music and stuff. It's not like Carrie Fisher is not. She's not.

Yeah. It's all fine. It's a very like, yeah, when you think of actresses from this point in time, they had to know how to dance, sing. like they just had to have end to act obviously and they had to have like vocal training I'm sure she had vocal coaches throughout her kind of early career

and that kind of thing and like let's be clear you know uh uh Carrie Fisher's mother was Debbie Reynolds famous for singing in the rain

obviously could sing I think there's a little bit of just yeah that makes sense just get it from her mom type vibe but in any case and then and then it's

it's still not over because while Carrie's kind of wrapping up then we have Chewy is off the shit and is just like vibing and thinking about things that happened before

including just like occasionally like an image of Lumpy but often stuff you saw in Star Wars just like remember that time I was in the Millennium Falcon Do you remember that time I walked down the aisle with my friends and we got awards? Not me, though, just them.

Remember Obi-Wan Kenobi? Obi-Wi-Novi just shows up here. What made him think of Obi-Wan in this moment? Was he like that old man would have really liked being here? You would have loved Life Day. You would have loved Life Day. R-I-P. Obi-Wan Kenobi.

You would have loved Life Day. Not him remembering when he lost Hollow Chess. It's so funny. He's like, fuck that game. They should have shot a bunch of new, very mundane things with him just to slip in there. There was other things that he was remembering. Like him filling up gas on the Millennium Falcon. Exactly.

Yeah. I think one of the things that's interesting about this is like today, if they did this, which they're not, they wouldn't do. But if they did, there'd be something forward looking here besides Boba Fett. Boba Fett is forward looking, I guess. But like, we don't get a shot of Hoth. We don't get, like, a check-in with someone in Snow Trooper armor. There's not an asteroid field. You know, Han doesn't say, like, well, as long as we'll have to go through any sort of asteroid fields or anything.

You know what I mean? Like, Dagaba doesn't, isn't mentioned, Yoda does not exist yet, so Yoda can't possibly show up, obviously. But there's nothing that would connect this forward to the next film, which I feel like today there would be some connection to something else. There just doesn't exist. The only thing that this connection is the toys, because we get the big Kenner, like, action figure and vehicle commercial at the end of this with a cool tie fighter that has its wings pop off,

like the battle damage one. And that's cool, but... I wonder how much of Empire Strikebacks was even written at this point. Like, I wonder how much had been outlined. Because I think at the time, Lucas was really focused on Raiders of the Lost Art. with Spielberg and that was a big reason why he was so distracted from this is a bit that Tansy talks about in her podcast so he was kind of like you know just I I imagine that he had

he might not have had too much on Empire Strikes Back yeah um I Lawrence Kazden had been just started on uh Empire in June so Empire's early early Apparently fourth draft of Empire was submitted in October October 24th Oh okay So there could have been

theoretically Fifth draft completed in February 1979 so you know There's still ongoing stuff You know It takes a long time to write a script It sure does Revisions take a while

And then we go back to Chubakas house after he has his memory montage. And there's, yes, as Austin described at the beginning of this episode, sitting around the table, Chibbacca caresses. It's like, please love God drink California red wine. Please stop treating it like swill. You know?

Yeah, I mean, it's good. Today that would be an ad for an AI. agent who can order you the best red wine, you know? Oh, shit, I didn't, my AI agent didn't get me the right wine. And then Woody Harrelson comes by and it's like, you should have had an agent. I hate those ads. I hate them so much. I hate them so much.

Wait, this is a real ad about red wine? No, it's about AI agents. It's Woody Harrelson. You haven't seen the Matthew McConaughey? Connohey ads? Salesforce ads. It's so cursed. This is why they fired Danica.

She came up there. She fucking didn't. Don't put that. Don't put that evil on Danica. At Salesforce? How dare you? They're really bad. It's a series where Madame Konaughey doesn't have an AI agent, but.

So your restaurant puts him outside during a monsoon. Yes. Because an AI agent would have stopped the restaurant reservations for saying, give him the monsoon seating and let him fucking drown in the storm. And meanwhile, across the street, Woody Harrelson, who is the gallant to Matthew McConaughey's AI goofus, his AI agent moved him indoors. Yeah, a person couldn't do that. He couldn't do that himself. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. That's right. I'm not just, please. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. No, go ahead, Ali. Not to get stuck on this, but like, I've realized now that.

All commercials are just like nostalgia for old TV shows, and they have been forever, and I just wasn't old yet. And now I'm seeing, like, you know, scrubs and the office just in commercials all of the time. But was true detective one of those? It's like they're like the sweet, like, oh, it's the two of them together again. I don't apparently. Like, it's just that one fucks me up so especially. I just want to yearn people yearn for a true detective

season it was good I don't want to see them go to a restaurant they were dealing with some fucked-up stuff in that show like I don't know man yeah what happened to his fucking dreams you don't want to see Matthew Connhe go to an OBGYN

because his AI agent booked him for the wrong medical appointment no but if you did have an AI agent of course, you get the red carpet treatment at the hospital. Waiing rooms, nope, don't have to worry about that.

A.I. agent has solved health care. It sucks. It sucks. It sucks. It's that he has a bad AI agent right now. Or he doesn't believe in the better one. He needs the, well, because it's called what AI was meant to be with Matthew McConaughey. So what I'm coming to understand is that there's almost a self-awareness to this. No, because the way it's framed is like,

if my health care provider had agent force, the powerful AI from Salesforce, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't think it says like their shitty AI did this instead. I think it's just like he didn't. I see. My health insurer did a bad job, you know? This would never happen. No.

I think this is actually like one of the top comments on this dining one is, I think closing the patio and moving right. reservations inside is a solved problem for restaurants. Like, the thing about all these AI commercials is none of this ever happens to anyone ever. If you are accidentally at the OBGYN, it's because you press the wrong button on the fucking elevator and you walked out onto the wrong floor and it's supposed to be Sweet 607 and you're on Sweet 706. That's right. Get it right. That's your own damn fault. The implication of the commercial, by the way, is the doctor.

on autopilot just horribly violates him. That is that commercial is because like an AI agent would have stopped him from just like, look, like a surgeon, you put someone in front of me on the table, I'm cutting. I don't give a shit. Like the OBGYN sort of reacts that way too where it's like, look, I'm getting up in there. And an AI agent could stop that. It's not good. That's bad. That's bad.

Well, anyway, so the Star Wars Holiday Special is. over. Yep. What? Shall we rank the musical numbers? Let's rank the musical numbers. There's four musical numbers, right? It's the moment.

This Minute Now, right, by Diane Carroll. Yeah, this minute now. Light the Sky on Fire by Jefferson Starship. Good night, but not goodbye by B. Arthur. And the Life Day song by Carrie Fisher. Okay. Just give me one moment. I'm just taking them all in really quick.

The B. Arthur one is a number. Yeah. This thing does not have numbers. Yeah. This is it a great number? No. But like she's going around the cast of characters singing with them. Like there's blocking.

I think it wins. I think it's the this is the showstopper. I think I'm with you. That's my number one. I honestly agree I think number two is the mind evaporator

Yes AI horny girlfriend Yeah It's it is collidoscopic She is good at it It's just I don't If we didn't have to cut away to itchy We'd all be a little more comfortable with it

And if it's he didn't If it wasn't Made by his mind Actually care about this What a musical a mind he has. Oh,

I couldn't think of that. If you put me in that machine, she won't be singing. I don't have that in me. You don't know what the mine evaporator has in store for you. What it could extract,

what it could evaporate. You're right. You're right. It might make an even better mop. And then is three the Jefferson Starship song or is it the

Carrie Fisher song? For me. It's the, for me, for me, me it's the Carrie Fisher song because of the Star Wars theme interpolation. I think just getting that and I think also the way in which she looks at Chui so lovingly is so powerful to me that it has to be my number three for that. I also think the other song was like so

boring. It was like literally hard to focus on. Like it was just like immediate like I am tuning this out. You're not wrong. Yeah. It just shouldn't be here. Like, it should have been, I don't know. Something else. That's what happens when your script just says some kind of rock and roll.

That's right. Yeah. Who would you put here instead instead of Jefferson Starship? Curious for anyone who has a strong rock and roll recommendation. Let's look at the Billboard. Yeah, Billboard, 1978. Let's just see who's hot. Here's the thing.

I do think, like, if the people were actually here to see with Jefferson Starship were there, I think this would land differently. But for whatever reason, Grace Slick is not there. I don't. I think it should be the Bee Gees. But that's not the rock and roll that that Wookieies crave. Well, hang on. This wasn't for Wookie's. This was for an Imperial officer.

So it's possible. It is actually. It's like rockish vibes of this track. I see. Hmm But I don't want to give I don't want to give the Imperials The Beegis

Deferces Defer to Star Ship is at 66 Yeah there's some other rock Acts above it that are all I But you have to stay Like if you're looking at a top 100 Yeah

You have to stay below 40 on this one Like they are not pulling Capital N names Okay I see what you're saying I see So we're not getting wings We're not getting meatloaf

No Foreigner at Hot Blooded by Foreigners 36. He would be great in Star Wars. So, but yeah, these are all under. Okay, let's see here. I don't know. I don't know. We could go a different direction

and we could get the OJs and get some past its prime R&B going. That would be fun, but that's not rock and roll. So, uh, oh, Kansas's dust in the wind is 39. Imagine Star Wars dust in the wind. That would have been it. Okay, here we go.

55 sticks is come sail away. And it's a Star Wars version of Come Sail Away. There we go. Spaceships. Book it. Thank you. Yeah, I was down there too. Seeley Dan is on this list.

People are yelling at us for not saying Steely Dan right now. I mean, I was going to say Steely Dan, but I feel like, I feel like Steeley Dan kind of is a, is a wookie vibe. Deacon Blues is the 100th is the 100th song at the year-end hot 100 singles year-end billboard list. So maybe it's Steely Dan. Maybe they just come on and play Deacon Blues. Well, these are the important questions. Yeah, big time. Anyone have any wrapping up thoughts on this thing?

I want to say that if you're sitting there, if you, the audience, the listener, I'm talking to you. If you're sitting there, you're thinking, and you've listened to all of this, perhaps, or maybe you started the podcast, but then your thumb button to the end of the podcast, and this is actually the first thing you're hearing, if you were thinking that the Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978 is going to be, like, bad in a cozy way, it is not that. that. It is, it is, it is not, there is little to nothing at all that could be described as cozy in this movie. Perhaps the, the stone fireplace is like kind of a cozy. Yeah. Um, but if you, if you, what you're thinking is like, this is going to be like a hilariously bad cozy Christmas

experience. Sorry, holiday life day experience. Yeah, please. Yeah. Yeah. Life stays for everyone. Are you alive? It is not. That's my like warning to the listeners out there. But if you want to see some, I can't even call it like, like fascinating in a way. Like it is fascinating, but a way in which you have to like be down to suffer. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing.

like this has, I think a lot of people come to this expecting it's going to be like so bad it's good. Yeah. It isn't. Like this is an unwatchable train wreck unless you are willing to just completely embrace it on the terms of like I really want to look at the components of this. It's like you're an accident reconstruction like person sent by the department transportation to be like, so why did all these people die horrifically in this plane crash? and that's kind of how you have to approach it is like this whole, this whole release is like a debris field.

Yeah. And you're trying to piece together like, so what was the intent here? Like when they realized the production was in trouble, what decisions did they then make that actually further doomed it? For instance,

the, we have to fill two hours now. Right. So sell ads against this piece of shit. Right there, you're cooked. Nothing. You're done. You're done.

How do we run out of budget so fast? That is three. days. I think it's a good movie to put on if you're during a party where someone has insisted you put something on in the background, but you really don't want anyone to watch whatever it is you put on. And you really want people to hang out and talk instead.

You know? Or like put on silently at the bar on the projector. You know what I mean? But don't watch it. Don't watch it. And like maybe turn the brightness down too. Yeah. So it's kind of like hard to see. Especially when Itchy is on screen.

Yeah. Yeah. Jail for Itchy, to be honest. The Imperial should have carried him away. And the family would have been relieved. Like he, like, uh, grandpa just keeps ordering the Gunniverse 6,000. He's just like planted, like,

like fucking Martin Crane's, uh, easy chair. But it's like the masturbator VR system. And he's just like put it right there. And the sharp rim. This delivery guy is like, yeah, get cranking, buddy. Why is it in the middle of the fucking living room for everyone to watch Itchy go into the goon of it? Do that make more sense to you when you thought that Mala was his wife? Well, I guess.

I mean, that's just the relationship that I guess. It was hard to make sense in that scene. So it really mattered to me. Okay. It plays one to one, to be fair. Okay. Are we done? Can we be done?

That's that. We've reached the end of a more civilized age, at least this episode. Possibly the show. I don't think I will now wait a second. And welcome, and we will watch this space in 2026. This episode is produced by Chia Contreras and supported by you are listeners at patreon.com slash civilized. What exactly...

We don't know. I think we're taking a break. We're taking a one where the next episode will be off for the holidays because that's the way it's all lined up. And then we'll be back. I think the second week of January with... Yes. Yes.

That gives me time to order my collector's edition of the Revenge the Civilization. That's right. There it is. Yeah. I have not gone forward and like cut things up yet. I think there's 21 chapters, but I think that they're uneven in such a way

that we might end up doing. like, I don't know that we're just going to do 7-7 and 7 because of the length of it all, but maybe we will. I don't know. I don't know how much bonus material there is versus, you know, in this version versus the original version. So I want to make sure that we don't end up biting up more. Oh, you know what?

Wait a second. Wait a second. There's three parts. It's part one, part two, part three. So that just works. The first thing we'll do is part one. How's that sound? Unless part two ends up being like super short, you know.

But I don't think it is. I think having flipped through it, part one is 137 pages in this edition. Part one is, of course, called victory. Part two is called seduction. And part three is called Apocalypse. And so we'll do them in those parts. I'm so fucking excited. I'm vibrating with excitement.

For people who somehow miss this. Actually, there are a lot of people who would have missed this because we just said this in the Patreon feed. we didn't say this in the main feed. So we're just talking about this as if it's a known quantity. The next thing we were doing on the show is Matthew Stover's Revenge of the Sith novelization, which recently got a big shiny hardcover release, but has been around for a long time and has had some real... This book has shooters.

People really love this book and have said for a long time that it's something that we would eat up. And so we're going to read it. I think we'll probably read it over. three episodes across these three sections. That seems right. So get ready. Yeah.

Yum, yum, yum. It is the story of the end of an age. The gateway to a less civilized age. That's right. Truly. Wow. All right. Well, with that, I hope everyone enjoys their own life day at this, at this festive time.

Happy night day. And keep your elderly grandparents away from, away from porn. in the middle of the living room. Can I read the very beginning of this book, just to set the stage? Please, please. I'm going to read the first page. I believe this is the first page. Is this correct?

Episode 1. Page 1. Oh, this is actually, this is before, this is before page 1. Page 1 actually starts introduction, The Age of Heroes. Call me Sheave. It says, the skies of Correscent blaze with war, which I'm ready. I'm ready for it. But the page before it starts, this story happened a long time ago at a galaxy far, far away.

It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it. Banger. Ooh. That is Revenge of the Sith. That is the feeling of watching Revenge of the Sith. So, yeah. All right.

That's my Greek tragedy. That's right. We'll be back soon. Oh, I can't wait. Have a happy life day, everyone. Tabooet. To booate. Deboate.