The infamous Star Wars Holiday Special:
Long, long ago — 40 years, to be precise — The Star Wars Holiday Special brought George Lucas’s far, far away galaxy out of movie theaters and into living rooms for the very first time. Lucas himself conceived of the notorious two-hour variety show, which aired on CBS once, and only once, on the evening of Nov. 17, 1978. Arriving one year after the original Star Wars became a pop-culture phenomenon, the Holiday Special reunited everyone’s favorite Rebels — human, alien and droid. That meant that the Luke, Leia and Han (Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford) were back, alongside Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and the dynamic duo of C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and R2-D2 (a radio-controlled version stood in for Kenny Baker). They were joined by a cavalcade of celebrities eager to be associated with the biggest blockbuster around, including Bea Arthur, Art Carney, Harvey Korman and Diahann Carroll.
As is true with so many things today, its real purpose was to convince people to buy stuff:
It all started with the merchandise, or lack of it. When “Star Wars” premiered, no toys had even been developed. Christmas 1977 came and went without the fans getting to play Jedi and Stormtroopers at home, a situation Fox wanted to correct by Christmas 1978. But if the studio was going to sell toys it needed something to remind kids how much they loved their heroes from a galaxy far, far away.
... “The public never knew this wasn’t Star Wars II. This was a television show that Lucas sold CBS to sell toys to kids, and that’s all it was. Everybody who tuned in without that knowledge was expecting it to be a big expensive movie! But Lucas made a deal with Hasbro and wanted to get on national television to sell merchandise, and that was the whole purpose of the show to begin with. The public never knew any of this — it was behind the scenes.”
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