The Star Wars Holiday Special. Aired only once during the pivotal years between the original Star Wars in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, the Holiday Special is regarded as, well, an awkward mess. And it objectively is. But the new indie documentary A Disturbance in the Force is an informative yet candid deep dive asking the questions: “how did it get made?” “how did it get its awful reputation?” and perhaps most daringly, “how much is that awful reputation even fully deserved?”
Surprisingly, the answers to these questions are illuminating not just for fans of a galaxy far far away, but for the broader implications of how fandom culture operates across media itself.
Ostensibly about the marketably-generic holiday of “Life Day” on Chewbacca’s home planet, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a bizarre artifact of hokum humor, musical numbers, microbudget reimaginings of an underexplored part of the nascent Star Wars canon, and even a fully-animated interlude that is the first ever appearance of Boba Fett. Its years of obscurity resulted in it being seen by subsequent Star Wars fans as simultaneously something of a holy grail and as the worst piece of media ever produced for the IP. A Disturbance in the Force is a film that neither reinforces this mythologization of the Holiday Special as the worst thing ever, nor attempts to “rescue it” from its objectively oddball character. The documentary comes from the perspective of 70s television specials as much as it does from Star Wars, and the result is surprisingly illuminating for how cross-media fandom used to operate.
Directed by pop culture documentarian Jeremy Coon and decades-spanning late-night TV staffer Steve Kozak, A Disturbance in the Force is a breezy, 86-minute piece that wastes no time in explaining the cultural moment of Star Wars in 1977 as well as the personal ambitions of George Lucas and the studio and media culture he worked within. Much of the film is about the cultural zeitgeist of 1970s television—specifically the strange world of 1970s variety specials in which Kozak is so familiar—a mold that Star Wars was quickly fit into for trying to keep the nascent juggernaut relevant in the leadup to The Empire Strikes Back. A lot of archival material is shown from Donny & Marie and the various 70s specials that Star Wars made an appearance at, giving fans everything from Darth Vader and Chewbacca incongruously chumming to a Stormtrooper dance-number in 70s-era swing music. The earnest exploration of these weird artifacts, along with the surreal scramble to fit them into the larger mania of Star Wars, is what makes the documentary so interesting and puts it above just being any normal nerd culture documentary.
Although the Holiday Special managed to keep all the main talents from the mainline Star Wars films, A Disturbance in the Force’s relationship to the original Star Wars superstars remains at a respectful distance. Lucas and Hamill are more or less shown only through archival footage, older interviews, and even DVD commentary assembled with a careful crafting of fair use, but these materials are presented in tandem with the production staff in a way that creates a very dynamic peeling of the multiple layers of the Holiday Special and how so much of it all went so incredibly wrong. When Hollywood messes up today, it’s usually the result of boardroom decisions, focus-testing and watering-down. When things got messed up back then, it made for an event.
Rounding out the film’s editing are several interviews with celebrities including Kevin Smith, Seth Green, Gilbert Gottfried and others. Some of the given celebrity interviews are fun anecdotes into the special’s reception and fandom culture, such as Smith’s childhood recollection of hoping God would not let him die before he got to see it. For a lot of other times, though, the celebrity interviews can feel moreso like a perfunctory attempt at “star power” rather than directly baked into Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon. As a whole though, the ratio of the production staff interviews, the fandom/historian interviews, and the archival sources are very cleanly ratioed and naturally paced.
In an era of streaming-shows, cross-platform synergy, and all of the buzzwords accompanying current media, the effort behind making the Holiday Special for television in the 70s can be taken for granted. But in today’s era of constant shakeups and mergers, can we really say Hollywood has risen above it all? And measuring up against the Holiday Special, will future generations at least this era’s media messiness as fun?
A Disturbance in the Force