In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy wars who has since written material for 16 Oscar telecasts and starred as the extra-large Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical adaptation of John Waters’s Hairspray, Vilanch had just finished working on Bette Midler’s 1977 TV special, Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, for producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion when they threw him what sounded like a plum assignment: a spot on the writing team that would help George Lucas adapt more of the Star Wars saga for television.

A year had passed since the theatrical release of Lucas’s gee-whiz space epic, and in that time Star Wars had become the highest-grossing movie in history as well as a cultural phenomenon with its very own lexicon and mythology. With a sequel still two years away from theaters, Lucas had been sold on the idea that a Star Wars holiday television special—to be broadcast on CBS the weekend before Thanksgiving, when Nielsen audiences were plentiful—would sustain interest in the franchise, move more toys off the shelves, and maybe even pick up some new fans who hadn’t seen the movie.

Though Lucas would not be involved in the actual shooting of the special—Smith and Hemion would oversee that—he knew the tales he wanted to tell and planned to work with the show’s team of seasoned TV writers to develop his ideas into a viable script. For those who had been summoned, the prospect of collaborating with the father of the Force initially sounded like a sure bet. “We were really excited, because, ‘My God, this is an annuity—Star Wars!’” says Lenny Ripps, another writer who worked on the special. “How could it lose?”

But when Vilanch heard Lucas’s storyline at a development meeting at Smith and Hemion’s L.A. offices, he quickly realized that a “big challenge” lay ahead. Lucas was intent on building The Star Wars Holiday Special, as it would be called, around Wookiees—specifically, the family of Chewbacca, Han Solo’s shaggy sidekick, as they outwitted Imperial forces to come together on Life Day, the Wookiee equivalent of Christmas. Suddenly, Vilanch says, the special was in danger of looking like “one long episode of Lassie.”

“I said: ‘You’ve chosen to build a story around these characters who don’t speak. The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm,’” the 250-plus-pound Vilanch recalls. “In fact, I told Lucas he could just leave a tape recorder in my bedroom and I’d be happy to do all the looping and Foley work for him.”

Lucas met these comments with a “glacial” look. “This was his vision, and he could not be moved,” Vilanch says. “And of course Star Wars was so gigantic that he had been validated a hundred times over. So he had what a director needs to have, which is this insane belief in their personal vision, and he was somehow going to make it work.”

In 1978, however, there were a lot of other people and projects competing for Lucas’s time—most of them brought on by the sudden, unfathomable success of Star Wars, and all of them seemingly more important than a TV special. With his attention elsewhere during most of its production, The Star Wars Holiday Special metastasized into a monster. Two directors and much turmoil later, the finished special didn’t so much resemble its namesake as it did another science-fiction film: The Thing with Two Heads. Onto the body of Lucas’s sentimental and irony-free Wookiee plotline, the producers and writers grafted a campy 70s variety show that makes suspension of disbelief impossible. In between minutes-long stretches of guttural, untranslated Wookiee dialogue that could almost pass for avant-garde cinema, Maude’s Bea Arthur sings and dances with the aliens from the movie’s cantina scene; The Honeymooners’ Art Carney consoles Chewbacca’s family with such comedy chestnuts as “Why all the long, hairy faces?”; Harvey Korman mugs shamelessly as a multi-limbed intergalactic Julia Child cooking “Bantha Surprise”; the Jefferson Starship pops up to play a number about U.F.O.’s; and original Star Wars cast members Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill walk around looking cosmically miserable.

Even today, former Jefferson Starship lead guitarist and songwriter Craig Chaquico can’t quite get over the result: “It was such a strange iteration of the original big-screen-movie concept and your regular variety-show, Carol Burnett vibe,” he says. “I was like tripping on it myself, man.”

When The Star Wars Holiday Special aired, from 8 to 10 p.m. on November 17, 1978, the Friday before Thanksgiving, George Lucas’s name was nowhere on it. According to Nielsen Media Research, it was seen by close to 13 million television households, but it finished second to ABC’s Love Boat from 8 to 9 p.m., and, in the next hour, to Part 2 of Pearl, a mini-series about the misdeeds of another Empire—Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor—which starred a bed-hopping Angie Dickinson.

This was a lackluster TV debut for a franchise that, just a year earlier, had rocked the entertainment world. But that was not to be the worst of it. Although Lucas has subsequently had the special disappeared from American television—it has never again been officially aired or released in any video format—Star Wars geeks have not let the world forget that, even more than Jar Jar Binks, this is the one true embarrassment attached to the mostly superlative Star Wars universe. As one professed fan of the films posted on his Web site, “This is the great secret of Star Wars, the 3-eyed cousin who lives in the barn attic, humping sheep and eating spiders. This is the thing that doesn’t get mentioned at American Film Institute dinners.”

It is no small irony that technology—the very tool that Lucas wielded to achieve independence from Hollywood—is the thing that keeps the filmmaker from scraping The Star Wars Holiday Special off his heel. There were no chat rooms or Web sites in 1978, but there were VCRs—the VHS format had been introduced two years earlier—and, today, grainy bootleg DVD copies of the special are readily available at comics conventions and on the Web, ensuring that the generation who came of age during Episodes I, II, and III will not be deprived of the moment when not even the Schwartz was with George Lucas.

There is an oft-recycled quote of Lucas’s saying that if he had the time and a hammer, he would personally “smash” every bootlegged copy of the special; otherwise he has yet to come clean on the matter. He declined to be interviewed for this article, although in a chance meeting that I had with him prior to that decision, the filmmaker, known for obsessive control of his projects, called the special a “travesty” and said he regretted not exercising a tighter grip over its production. As Gary Kurtz, one of the Lucas organization’s producers at the time, says today, the experience with the holiday special “certainly added to the idea that the only way to make sure it turns out the way you wanted is to be in control.”

For someone so careful as Lucas, the special was an incomprehensible miscalculation. It was one of the first times that his golden gut for mass entertainment and his protective instincts toward his Star Wars universe had gone awol.

Among sources who worked within the Lucas organization, which was known in 1978 as the Star Wars Corporation, there are conflicting reports as to which person or company actually brought the idea of doing a holiday special to Lucas. According to Charles Lippincott, who at the time was in charge of marketing and merchandising for the company, CBS initially approached him and later Lucas with a slew of Star Wars ideas. Foremost on the network’s agenda, though, was a special. In the fall of 1977, with the film still in theaters, segments featuring the Cantina aliens on variety shows hosted by Donny and Marie Osmond and Richard Pryor “helped revive our box office,” Lippincott says. And so, in a world that had yet to see 24-hour cable channels dedicated to entertainment or even pay-per-view movies, some in the Lucas camp saw a TV special as a way to keep the movie and its characters on the public’s radar screen while The Empire Strikes Back was being prepared.

Lippincott says the special was always intended to be a variety-type show, but, he explains, “we wanted something that was going to make us different in variety shows. We didn’t want the same-old, same-old.” That, he adds, is “why David was brought in.”

David is David Acomba, the man initially chosen to direct The Star Wars Holiday Special. A native of Montreal, Acomba had gotten critical notice for Welcome to the Fillmore East, a concert documentary featuring Van Morrison and the Byrds that aired on PBS in 1971. Acomba had also directed a movie, Slipstream, that had netted him best-picture and best-director trophies at the Canadian Film Awards. He’d even attended U.S.C. film school at the same time that Lucas was there, though the two did not meet then. Rather, Acomba knew Lippincott, another U.S.C. Film student and a fraternity brother.

David was “a guy we could trust,” Lippincott says, and along with a team of Star Wars technical consultants and Wookiee specialists, Acomba was inserted into the television production team that was being assembled for the network. Not surprisingly, the group had an impressive track record in the realm of network-television specials. Executive producers Gary Smith and Dwight Hemion were considered the class act of the field, having produced Elvis in Concert, as well as similarly successful vehicles for Sammy Davis Jr. and Sandy Duncan. In 1978, the Star Wars special was one of at least seven that they produced or executive produced, and because of their workload, they brought in three additional producers, the husband-and-wife duo Ken and Mitzie Welch and their friend Joe Layton, to work in the trenches on the Lucas project. The Welches, parents of singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, were longtime composers for The Carol Burnett Show. Ian Fraser, a composer who had worked on Doctor Doolittle, was brought in to supplement John Williams’s orchestral music from the film, and Bob Mackie was hired to design costumes.

In addition to Ripps—who would go on to write for Bosom Buddies and write and produce Full House—and Vilanch, the writing roster included Pat Proft, who is known for his work on Scary Movie 3, and the original Police Academy, Naked Gun, and Hot Shots movies. Ripps and Proft weren’t writing partners, but they had worked together on The Shields and Yarnell Show, a variety series that starred a young mime team, which had been a big hit the previous season; the two say their expertise in nonverbal comedy—just the ticket for a family of nonverbal Wookiees—was one of the reasons they were chosen for the show.

This was a comedy-variety dream team, but that expertise was an odd fit with Star Wars. “We should have realized that there was no way that we could fit the characters into this kind of format,” says Gary Kurtz. Indeed, not only was the format wrong, it was on its last legs with American TV audiences. After 11 seasons The Carol Burnett Show had aired its final first-run episode in March of 1978. The previous year saw the retirement of variety-show veterans Sonny and Cher. The network was waning, too: after spending much of the 70s leading a three-network race, CBS, the network of adult comedies such as All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was now finishing second to the escapist programming of Fred Silverman over at ABC, home of Charlie’s Angels and Fantasy Island.

But the deal had been struck, and Lucas and the writers got down to the business of roughing out a script. “We would ask him questions [like] ‘Would a Wookiee slap his knee—do they laugh the way humans laugh or is there some other way?’ Because, you know, we didn’t want to piss on the Bible,” Vilanch says. “We knew that he had his rules. And we didn’t know what his rules were. Mostly, he was just passing judgment. He had constructed the framework for the show, and we were basically just throwing things onto it and seeing if they stuck.”

Vilanch says it was Lucas who named Chewbacca’s father and son, respectively, Itchy and Lumpy (though Star Wars nerds will note that the names are actually abbreviations of Attichitcuk and Lumpawarrump). The filmmaker had an even more interesting appellation for one of the Cantina aliens. While flipping through a book of production stills, Vilanch says, the Star Wars creator came across a particularly provocative-looking creature. “Lucas, who had been pretty stolid the whole time, turned to me and said: ‘Oh yes, we call him Cuntface.’ And that’s what it looked like, actually. I noticed in a later movie”—Return of the Jedi—“that Lucas had, like, a huge vagina in the desert that sucked things in. So, I think this is one of his leitmotifs.”

David Acomba, meanwhile, felt as if he had been sucked into the maw of a creature that he could not comprehend or stop. In an effort to avoid the same old variety-show tropes, he says, he sought out fresh talent. For instance, he brought in the Canadian animation company Nelvana Ltd. to produce an animated short of Lucas’s story introducing the bounty hunter Boba Fett, who was to play a small but important part in The Empire Strikes Back. Acomba also says that after seeing the relatively unknown Robin Williams perform at an L.A. comedy club and then meeting the comedian backstage, he proposed using Williams for the special, but was told by the producers that Williams wasn’t enough of a known quantity. (The Welches say Acomba never mentioned Williams to them, and Williams—who, in September 1978, debuted in the series that made him a household name, Mork and Mindy—says he does not recall the meeting.)

Acomba says he increasingly sensed that there was not only a gaping generational divide between him and the producers but also a cultural impasse between the get-it-right Lucas film camp and the I-need-it-yesterday Smith-Hemion TV people. Acomba was a product of rock ’n’ roll and the rebellious milieu of 70s filmmaking that had also shaped Lucas. The producers and, to a lesser extent, the writers, haled from the song, dance, and shtick era of Establishment American TV, which paid heed to advertisers and Standards and Practices. Acomba was excited about shooting the Jefferson Starship. The Welches and their musical cohort were writing songs that emulated Kurt Weill and Erik Satie and inviting Diahann Carroll and Bea Arthur to perform them.

“It was a mix that never mixed,” says Ripps. “And everybody was good.” But, he adds, “I’m sure there wasn’t a bad welder on the Titanic.”

By the time the cameras rolled, Lucas had moved on, and Acomba realized he was in over his head. “For me, there was no center,” Acomba says. “I couldn’t seem to grasp it. I’m the director. I’m supposed to know. I’m supposed to draw on something that makes it all work. And so, in those first days of shooting, everything came home to roost. And it was hell.”

Acomba shot only a handful of segments, among them a scene featuring Bea Arthur as the owner of the Cantina bar who must coax her volatile alien clientele to go home when the Empire declares a curfew. She does this by dancing with an alien or two and singing a song, “Goodnight But Not Goodbye,” which was written by the Welches in a style that suggests Kurt Weill was popular not just on Earth but beyond the Outer Rim. Sources say Acomba seemed overwhelmed by the demands of television production, such as shooting a scene with multiple cameras to cover various angles. Instead of directing scenes via monitors from a control booth, as most TV directors do, he worked the floor, like a movie director, which greatly annoyed the tight-knit staff of TV veterans. “He was a loose cannon,” says Elle Puritz, a producer’s assistant on the special.

The length of the Bea Arthur shoot also proved too much for some of the people in the stifling alien suits. Proft says that that day he’d brought his son, a Star Wars fan, to Burbank Studios to watch the scene being shot. “Some of them were passing out because they didn’t have oxygen,” he says, while an overwhelmed Acomba rushed from prostrate body to prostrate body. “And there’s my son watching these creatures he loves die in front of him.”

The last segment Acomba directed was the Jefferson Starship’s lip-synched performance of its song “Light the Sky on Fire.” Puritz remembers the director throwing his headset and screaming, “No, no, no!” when the special effects didn’t work according to plan. Acomba doesn’t exactly deny this, but he says that by that point he had already informed Smith and Hemion that he was quitting. (Some connected with the special were under the impression that Acomba was let go.) “I sent a telegram—how romantic,” he says. “I didn’t even tell my agent.”

The incredibly moving Life Day ceremony. From Lucas Films/courtesy of Neal Peters Collection.

A lot of people, not just Vilanch, were beginning to have a bad feeling about The Star Wars Holiday Special. Puritz remembers one of the project’s associate producers, Rita Scott, who was in charge of the budgets and schedules, “walking around, wringing her hands,” and saying, “Are we getting out of here alive?”

Lucas was well aware of what was happening, too, but, Kurtz says, “I don’t think he thought much about it, really. We were working on a lot of other things at the time and there was a lot of effort in preparing Empire, so nobody had any time.”

Acomba’s replacement was Steve Binder, a protégé of Steve Allen’s. Binder had directed both The T.A.M.I. Show, a rock ’n’ roll movie featuring the Rolling Stones and the Supremes, and Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special, as well as Shields and Yarnell. (Later, he would produce Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.) Were it not for him, The Star Wars Holiday Special might have sunk quietly into the Sarlacc Pit of dead TV shows. When he was hired, Binder says, Gary Smith told him, “If you didn’t come in, there’d have been no show.”

Binder’s only contact with the Lucas organization would be a Wookiee bible—“a backstory brochure of the Chewbacca family”—that was delivered to the set for him. His primary job was to bring the production, which was overbudget and behind schedule, to a close. He also had to shoot the scenes that involved members of the original cast—Hamill, Ford, Fisher, and Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca. Kurtz, whose task it was to convince the actors to make the effort, says begging was involved. Though film actors cross over into television much more frequently these days, in 1978, it was considered déclassé. Ford was especially reluctant to appear, though, as Kurtz points out, the actor was loathe to cooperate with any kind of ancillary Star Wars project.

According to Vilanch, Fisher was willing to appear under the condition that she got to sing. “She was going through her Joni Mitchell period,” he says. “And she came into the office and played a couple of very lachrymose ballads on a piano. She was singing about heartbreak and all the Joni Mitchell things. She very much wanted to show this side of her talent. And there was general dismay because this was not what we wanted Princess Leia to be doing.”

In the end, Fisher did get to sing. In fact, it’s the next-to-last scene of The Star Wars Holiday Special. As Chewbacca, his family, and all the other furry members of the Wookiee planet Kashyyyk gather for Life Day, Fisher, wearing her trademark honey-bun hairdo and a glazed look, sings to the Wookiees. The Welches say Fisher did not seem happy with the song they wrote for her.

In fact, the actors did not seem to be happy with much of anything that was going on at Burbank Studios. Though Binder says Hamill, Ford, and Fisher were “a pleasure” to direct, Kurtz says there was a moment when the actors confronted him while he was visiting the set. “They all came up to me and [one of them] said, ‘How did we get into this mess?’” Kurtz says he doesn’t remember which actor said it, but then he laughs. What actually might have been asked, he says, was, “How did you get us into this mess?”

The night The Star Wars Holiday Special broadcast on CBS, Lenny Ripps threw a party. “I had lots of people over, and lots of food, and lots of anticipation,” he recalls. “And we sat in front of the TV, and after the first commercial, I turned it off and I said, ‘Let’s eat.’”

The special is not easy to sit through by any stretch of the imagination, but fans of old-school comedy or show-business carnage will find some guilty pleasures. As a karmic reward for his reluctance to participate, Harrison Ford gets to open the show in a scene where his and Chewbacca’s efforts to get back to Kashyyyk are stymied by a dogfight with Imperial forces. As the Millennium Falcon’s cabin is rocked by what seems to be a tired, off-screen Teamster, Ford gets to say lines like “That’s the spirit! You’ll be celebrating Life Day before you know it!” This leads into the special’s opening credits, where, if you look closely at the insert shot of Ford when he is introduced, you can actually see him fuming. The 10-minute dialogue-free Wookiee segment that follows is a sight to behold, as is, Vilanch notes, the beautiful St. Charles kitchen where Mrs. Chewbacca bakes the “Wookiee ookiees” that trader friend Saun Dann loves so much.

Saun Dann is played by a paunchy Art Carney, doing his best Ed Norton in Space routine. But instead of sending Jackie Gleason to the moon, Carney riles a black-helmeted Imperial Guard as he sets up a “boom box” to show the Jefferson Starship footage. Carney makes a florid production out of deploying an invisible antenna and catching and stomping on an imaginary fly until the guard hisses, “Will you get on with it!”

Perhaps the most bizarre sequence of the special is one involving Chewbacca’s dad, Itchy, and a virtual-reality device called a “Mind Evaporator.” Through it, Itchy, who has one of those textbook TV grandpa underbites, views what Mitzie Welch says was intended to be “soft-core porno that would pass the censors.” In 1978, that meant Diahann Carroll as a holographic “Wow” in a Bob Mackie gown and a frosted headdress, singing one of the Welches’ songs. The prurient part comes at the beginning when Carroll tells Itchy, “Oh, oh … We are excited, aren’t we?” which elicits the first—and last—orgasmic shudder ever to be seen in a Star Wars vehicle.

The cartoon with Boba Fett is considered the only redeeming feature by fans; if you scrutinize the Nielsen data, you can see that the ratings began to fall precipitously after the cartoon appeared, one hour into the show.

Gary Kurtz remembers watching the special with George Lucas, but he says he cannot remember the Star Wars creator’s reaction to it. “The determination was that it was a bit too late then to do much about it,” he says diplomatically. “We couldn’t pull the show. And, I guess, there was a determination that, well, it wasn’t really that bad compared to other Christmas specials, so what the hell.”

Twenty-eight years later, Ripps says he still hears from fans and fanzines that want to know about the special. “I think in a bigger sense, it’s nice to know that Star Wars does have feet of clay,” he says. “Ultimately, when all is said and done, it’s an outer-space movie. It’s not sacred. And what has amused me the most is that somehow people think the special discredits the image of this sacred text.”

Mitzie and Kenny Welch say they heard Lucas considered including the holiday special as an extra when the original Star Wars trilogy was released on DVD last year, but decided against it. As far as they’re concerned, they’d prefer to forget it, too. “Kenny looked it up on the Internet two weeks ago, and he said, ‘I’ve never read such comments in my life,’” Mitzie says. “I wouldn’t read them. Of course it hurts. We believed in the thing. Everybody did the best he or she could.”

David Acomba says he’s never seen The Star Wars Holiday Special. After he left the project, he says, George Lucas sent a letter letting him know there were no hard feelings. Acomba returned to Canada and has continued producing and directing. He found creative success, he says, though he adds with a laugh, “I don’t make $400 million a movie.”

For Acomba, The Star Wars Holiday Special was a long time ago and far, far away, but it does remind him of the old saying about success having many parents and failure being an orphan. Says Acomba: “It’s not an orphan as far as I’m concerned.”

Frank DiGiacomo is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.