Diary of a Wookiee Housewife

I made a fanedit of The Star Wars Holiday Special. You can find it here https://youtu.be/PagotBc9QWY or here https://vimeo.com/246640916. For those not familiar, The Star Wars Holiday Special is a notoriously awful tv special from 1978 that aired only once and George Lucas has been trying to bury its existence ever since.

It’s primarily focused on Chewbacca’s family as they wait for him to arrive home to celebrate Life Day. There are long stretches where the Wookiees communicate only with each other, untranslated for the audience. Then there are guest appearances from original characters Leia, Luke, Han, Chewbacca, R2-D2, and C-3PO, musical numbers, a cartoon, an acrobats routine, and intolerable comedy bits.

My personal opinion is that it’s mostly fine, some of it is pretty good, and some of it is truly terrible. My objective with re-editing it was to approach it as a product that is not that bad, and could be salvaged into something perfectly watchable. I didn’t want to do just a clip show of it’s weirdest, craziest moments, but to actually maintain a consistent, coherent storyline, while also staying true to its format as a variety show. I was inspired by a fanedit I watched of The Phantom Menace that actually turned it into a pretty great movie, and felt like how the movie was meant to be. That’s what I hope I’ve done to the best possible degree with the Holiday Special.

Here are the MAJOR changes that I made.

1. Added subtitles for Chewbacca’s family. I don’t speak Wookiee, but I did the best I could to translate using context, and hopefully developed their characters more. I did not set out to make their dialogue funny, but I think it turned out that way anyway. Warning, in case this matters to someone, they occasionally use profanity. But like, also there’s a scene where Chewbacca’s dad masturbates in the living room, and that is an actual part of the original broadcast. So NSFW all around. I did not translate Chewbacca, or the scenes with his family once he returns, because it would feel like a violation of an original character/the films.

2. Removed all traces of actor Harvey Korman, who plays three characters and they are all horrendous. I also took out as much of Art Carney as possible, pretty much everything that wasn’t important to the plot.

3. I filled in all of the commercial breaks entirely with commercials directly related to Star Wars, mostly from the same era.

Other than that, it was a ton of trimming, taking out filler and bullshit. In total, I removed about 40 minutes. It’s now 70 minutes total (including 12 minutes of commercials). Thanks to EditDroid for the excellent image quality of the source material, and a ton of youtube users for making all the commercials available.

Please enjoy Diary of a Wookiee Housewife: The Star Wars Holiday Special Fanedit, and please spread it around to any Star Wars fans you think might enjoy it!