While the "Star Wars Holiday Special" continues to inspire a variety of reactions from Star Wars fans, few have expressed their devotion to "the show you love to hate" more than SKot Kirkwood.
Five years ago, Kirkwood launched fansite starwarsholidayspecial.com to commemorate the special's 25 year anniversary because, as he says, "no one else would." Since then, he's fleshed out the site with extensive "Holiday Special" content culled from sources both official and non-official, resulting in a robust collection of "Holiday Special" goodness found nowhere else.
We asked SKot a few questions about his site, and why the "Holiday Special" continues to intrigue fans three decades after its release:
"The Star Wars Holiday Special" is pretty, well, bad. Why glorify it with its own fansite?
SKot: Because no one else would. That pretty well sums it up. The absolute vacuum of real information about the "Holiday Special" is what compelled me to fill in the gap. And creating a fansite was the best way to do that. I've been obsessed with the "Holiday Special" ever since I first saw it in 1978. The fact that nobody else I knew seemed to remember seeing it made me that much more determined to prove that it really existed.
Lucasfilm has understandably made images and information surrounding the "Holiday Special" pretty scarce [well, until now -- see our prior coverage this week!] -- where did you locate most of the content for your site?
SKot: I literally spent decades since the original airing collecting any and all sources of information and photos relating to the "Holiday Special"... magazines, newspapers, TV guides, press releases, anything I could get my hands on. For years I found almost nothing at all. But put it all together from all those sources over time and it starts to add up. Eventually I had enough to create a website.
Why do you think the special has had such a lasting appeal among fans?
SKot: First, because it's been kept such a mystery that people can't stop talking about it -- it just makes them want to know more about it! And second, because it's one of the few pure relics of that time period. It may have its flaws, but where else can you see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia in character in their original outfits from the first Star Wars movie? It's the very first Star Wars sequel!
The animated segment is obviously what most people will point out as the redeeming virtue of the "Holiday Special" -- do you have any other pet scenes?
SKot: I've always enjoyed the cantina recreation scene. Bea Arthur's singing aside, you've got close-ups of all those cool aliens from the original movie that you couldn't see very well in the film.
And I have to admit, ever since I was a little kid I loved the scene with Gormaanda the four-armed chef. It made me laugh in 1978 and it still makes me laugh today. Harvey Korman, rest in peace.
I was surprised to see in the "Memories" section of your site that the special aired in Australia during the early '80s -- and the fact that every other person posting a memory was eight years old at the time...
SKot: Eight seems to be the magic number. I was eight when I saw it, and so were so many others who remembered it [including the editor!]. Maybe you had to be exactly eight years old to really enjoy it?
As far as Australia goes, it seems to be the only country that managed to play it more than once. How that happened, I have no idea; but I've found plenty of evidence that it continued to be shown there well into the 80s. I guess Australia was "lucky", if you want to interpret that as luck!
You've got a pretty extensive character breakdown and profile section -- how did you compile all this info?
SKot: First I had to compile a list of every single character that appears on-screen in the "Holiday Special". Most of them were pretty easy to do, but the cantina scene was a big challenge. For that I had to watch the whole scene over and over again (a painful enough process for most people in itself!), sometimes frame by frame, and identify all the aliens. I wound up drawing a floorplan showing all the tables, chairs, and booths, and mapping out which character occupied every seat in the room. Luckily, most of them don't move at all during the segment until the very end.
When writing up the character profiles, I used every official source I knew of to gather details from. I took as much as I could from the "Holiday Special" or from the script itself, extrapolating information about each character from what they did in the show in such a way that it had to be true. For instance, Kelbo and Zutmore have a habit of borrowing money from Ackmena because she mentions it while talking to them, so we already know something about them there. I used this kind of information to build descriptions of the characters. Later on, starwars.com had a contest for their Hyperspace members to fill in the backstory of a few characters from the "Holiday Special", so when the winning entries were picked I tried to incorporate that as well. I probably should have submitted an entry or two myself!
Have a prize "Holiday Special" collectible?
SKot: Absolutely. Without a doubt, the most important thing I own is one of the original scripts from the set. It was this that really got me rolling on the website, since I now had something really big to share. The script revealed a number of things that were previously unknown, like a few character names and their proper spelling. For instance, nobody knew at that point that Diahann Carroll's character was a water creature named Mermeia. Only the people involved in the production had ever really known, and they weren't talking about it.
Besides the script, the real holy grail "Holiday Special" collectible for me was the press kit with the mylar mini-poster... the only poster ever produced for the show! I got lucky in finding a completely intact one. It's not an easy item to run across by any means, and goes for high dollar when it does turn up.
If you could ask George Lucas one question about the "Holiday Special", what would it be?
SKot: Why not just put out a DVD of the "Holiday Special" on April Fool's Day, maybe as a novelty budget release with a commentary track by the MST3K guys, and have some fun with it?
Be sure to check out starwarsholidayspecial.com (once you've checked out all our coverage, of course!) for rare interviews, behind-the-scenes photos, fan creations and much more!
