The Worst Star Wars Sequel Ever

If you can't get into a theatre to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens this weekend, maybe you'd enjoy seeing the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

This. This was the first "sequel" ever to the most popular movie franchise of all time. It's legendary not only for it's awfulness but also for the lengths that were taken to keep it from ever being seen by human eyes again. For almost 35 years, the special was never rebroadcast or released to the public in any form. No home video, no DVD. In fact, it wasn't until the YouTube era that people began uploading VHS recordings that were taken from the actual network broadcast. It was only aired once and it was terrible so you can imagine how rare it was that someone would still have a copy they taped laying around on a cassette somewhere.

Thank God they did, though. Whomever made this special took the original character and actors from the greatest SciFi movie of all time and turned it into a cheesy 70s variety show. The story is nominally about Chewbacca going home to see his family for Wookie Space Christmas. But actually, it's a about shoe-horning in as many B-List celebrities from the Muppet Show era as possible.

This special includes:

• Diahann Carroll singing about sex with Chewbacca
• Bea Arthur singing a torch song in the Mos Eisley cantina
• Jefferson Starship doing some late seventies rockin'
• And, in a weirdly prescient moment, Chewbacca's son Lumpy using what looks exactly like a modern desktop computer