Star Wars Holiday Special

  • EntertainmentYahoo TV

    'The Star Wars Holiday Special' at 40: How a landmark TV bomb was born

    Steve Binder, the director of the infamous Wookiee-fueled variety show, which aired only once, fondly looks back.

  • NewsSuperfan

    The Messy, Disappointing History of ‘Star Wars’ on TV

    Is a live-action Star Wars series finally coming to TV? The answer is a definite possibility that lands somewhere on the scale directly between yes and no. At least that’s the impression ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey gave at the TCAs. Live-action Star Wars series have been in the works for over a decade and hit nothing but roadblocks along the way.

  • NewsYahoo Premium Partners

    Bea Arthur's Back! 'Deadpool' Cameo, Animal Collective Song, and New Secrets of the 'Star Wars Holiday Special'

    The son of the late Golden Girls star reveals how star Ryan Reynolds personally asked permission to wear her image on a tank top in the blockbuster film. A version of this story first appeared in the March 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Fox’s $600 million box-office juggernaut Deadpool is introducing a new generation to the unlikeliest of heroines: Bea Arthur.

  • NewsMarcus Errico

    'Christmas in the Stars': Revisiting the Sadly Forgotten 'Star Wars' Holiday Album, Bon Jovi and All

    Meco Monardo’s disco version of the Star Wars theme song was a smash hit, outselling the original John Williams music and allowing the trombone-playing music producer to carve out his own lucrative niche in the recording industry covering sci-fi movie scores. By 1980, as “disco was dying,” as Meco explains to Yahoo Movies, but he still had Star Wars fever. “I wrote a letter — I think it was nine pages long — to George Lucas,” the producer recounts.

  • NewsKevin Polowy

    Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher Reflect on the 'Embarrassment' That Was the 'Star Wars Holiday Special'

    Want to get a look of pure scorn from Harrison Ford? Just tell him that there were some positives to come out of 1978’s Star Wars Holiday Special, the much-maligned television variety show that introduced us to Chewbacca’s extended family of Wookiees (including father Itchy and son Lumpy), featured celebrity guests like Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, and Art Carney, and found Carrie Fisher belting out a song about the fictional holiday “Life Day.” (For the record, it also gave us the first look at f

  • NewsGwynne Watkins

    Happy Life Day! Today's the Anniversary of the Amazingly Awful 'Star Wars Holiday Special'

    On Nov. 17, 1978 — a day that will live in infamy — The Star Wars Holiday Special aired for the first and last time on CBS. A two-hour musical variety show featuring the Star Wars cast (plus special guests Jefferson Starship, Harvey Korman, Art Carney, Diahann Carroll, and Bea Arthur), the holiday special was meant to capitalize on the success of the 1977 movie, and to give fans something to savor while they waited for 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. Instead, it became one of the strangest foo