Chewbacca’s relatives grunting for 15 minutes! The first appearance of Boba Fett! Jefferson Starship! Wookiee porn! It’s all in the legendary, little-seen hallucination/two-hour TV special “The Star Wars Holiday Special,” which, after its one and only airing on CBS in November 1978, has never been officially shown again. George Lucas hated the show and never allowed it to be seen on home video, and this is the guy who thought Jar Jar Binks and “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” were brilliant ideas.
Bootleg copies of grainy videotapes made the rounds for years, but now there’s a fairly high-quality version on a fan site where you can catch such memorable moments as a cartoon in which bounty hunter Boba Fett made his first appearance (though he was later edited into a special edition of the original 1977 “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope”) and Chewbacca’s walking shag rug of a father, Itchy, enjoys some naughty virtual-reality gazing on the scantily clad image of singer-actress Diahann Carroll in a disco dress saying things like, “Ahh, yes. I can feel my creation. I’m getting your message. Are you getting mine? Oh! Oh! We are excited, aren’t we? Just relax. Just relax. Now we can have a good time.”
Among the other Very Special Guests awkwardly thrown into the mix are “Honeymooners” star Art Carney, who asks the wookiees, “Why all the long, hairy faces?”; Bea Arthur of “Maude,” and rockers Jefferson Starship, who perform their song “Light the Sky on Fire” on a video device as one of Darth Vader’s henchmen watches.
Toward the end we learn that (a version of) the “Star Wars” theme song apparently has words, which Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia sings. Now it’s called “The Tree of Life.” It is . . . not good.
Watch: Diahann Carroll’s wookiee porn segment in “The Star Wars Holiday Special.”