Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Sometimes people make mistakes.
Next Week’s Pick:
We’ve celebrated the holiday season with bloody action and…whatever this is, so let’s ring in the Yuletide with a more traditional family favorite.
The Muppet Christmas Carol was the first Muppet feature produced after the passing of Jim Henson, and the film’s success went a long way to assuring fans and creatives both that the Muppets could continue to enthrall and delight audiences even with the innovator and voice artist behind so much of the characters’ indelible magic was gone.
Buoyed by a completely deadpan performance by Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge, and a host of new songs crafted by Paul “Swan from motherfucking Phantom of the Paradise” Williams, The Muppet Christmas Carol remains widely beloved, with a couple generations holding it up as the definitive rendition of Charles Dickens’ venerable morality play.
Submissions can be sent to [email protected] anytime before midnight on Thursday.
Our Guests
The Star Wars Holiday Special is objectively bad. Even in the context of campy, kitschy variety shows that were apparently so popular in the 1960s/70s this TV special must be considered a failure. The framing domestic story, introducing us to Chewbacca’s family just before an important holiday, had potential. But it’s the returning Star Wars cast members who are the real draw, and in giving us the first new scenes with those characters the Holiday Special drops the ball. Luke appears to have several layers of makeup caked onto his face. Leia’s odd singing to the tune of John Williams’ ‘Star Wars Theme’ must have been entirely fueled by drugs, and Harrison Ford’s performance as Han Solo plays like a preview of his monotone, deliberately botched voiceovers for the theatrical cut of Blade Runner. And while James Earl Jones *did* record new lines, all of the Darth Vader footage used is actually a recontextualized deleted scene from Star Wars.
The other thing that utterly tanks this special is its painfully slow pacing. The aforementioned plot is interrupted repeatedly by musical numbers and other performances that bring the story to a halt. Such is the nature of variety shows, but because most of these sequences are not particularly good it makes the interruptions feel even longer. Bea Arthur’s cantina musical number feels like it must be at least two or three hours long. And also, unless a human character happens to be around, the story is propelled (awkwardly) by un-subtitled Wookiee growls. It’s really rough going. But hey — it’s got the first (animated) appearance of Boba Fett, and that’s gotta count for something? Actually, no. It’s not worth it (unless you happen to get the Rifftrax version, because that’s pretty fun). (@T_Lawson)
The Team
Someone put this on at my birthday party one year, and it ruined my birthday. The following year was also perhaps the worst year of all time. Prince and David Bowie died, Suicide Squad hit theaters, and Donald Trump was later elected President of the United States. The Holiday Special is a curse. (@daviddelgadoh)
The Star Wars Holiday Special has a reputation for being basically unwatchable. The seemingly hyperbolic slams on its awfulness are actually far too kind. It’s fucking garbage. I tried to watch it several times this week and barely made it halfway through.
I’ll summarize it with my 9 year old son’s comments just before I shut it off for the third time…
“Dad, can we watch anything else? This is awful!” (@ThePaintedMan)
The Star Wars Holiday Special is of course known today (if it is known at all) as a raging piece of shit, the kind of misstep that could very well have strangled the saga in its crib had it caught on. That the special only aired once and then for decades existed almost entirely as a mythical idea floating in the ether of the fan-verse before the Internet allowed the…‘joys’ found within to spread like a plague on the back of rats, that has to be one of the saving graces of George Lucas’ entire media empire.
But what’s really shocking isn’t that the special is bad, but the way in which it is bad. Believe me, I was on. board. for a schlocky, camp romp through bargain basement reproductions of Star Wars sets while original cast members and new guest stars, alike only in being coked to the gills for the entirety, struggled through cue cards laden with impossible-to-pronounce names and jargon that could only be the product of a bunch of hack comedy writers of 1970’s television trying to reproduce the already highly-affected nature of a George Lucas screenplay. Bring on the delightful failure.
But along with being impossibly boring and long, The Holiday Special is also a true and profound bummer, going ALL IN on the fascistic and oppressive nature in a way that none of the actual features really do. There’s a pervasive melancholy to giant chunks of this interminable bullshit, and it makes the insane, desperate gropes for laughs that you see during the various Harvey Korman comedy numbers all the more off-putting and unfunny. Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh, what a nightmare.
Also Chewbacca’s Dad totally watches softcore porn right in the middle of this for, like, no reason. What the f, guys.(@TheTrueBrendanF)
Once venerated alongside Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four as the Holy Grail for geeky VHS traders scouring tape mailing clubs and stinky sci-fi convention side-rooms in search of degraded, oversaturated dubs, The Star Wars Holiday Special has lost the aura of rarity in the age of ye olde Internet, available in a version struck from broadcast tapes and deinterlaced for your viewing pl — well, for your viewing. (The Fantastic Four, on the other hand, actually fares well compared to some of the big budget versions that followed).
I tried to watch this last year and lasted about 20 minutes, which is 5 minutes longer than Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas, so it’s got that going for it.
It’s actually difficult to express just how bad this is. Despite appearances by the original cast, it somehow manages to be a cavalcade of boredom with awful musical and interpretive dance acts laboriously sandwiched between glimpses of Chewbacca’s family, bearing awful adjectives for names like Lumpy and Itchy (that stupidly parallel the nickname “Chewie” rather than the imaginatively alien “Chewbacca”).
The sole saving grace is the animated segment which, while not actually that great, at least delivers a specific aesthetic that immediately brings Heavy Metal to mind. Even this is hopelessly dumb in context, a Rebel propaganda cartoon watched by Chewie’s idiot son LITERALLY while stormtroopers are raiding his house, searching for Rebel propaganda. (@VforVashaw)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDAmBQ1u2g
Next week’s pick: