The “inappropriate” 1978 movie Mark Hamill wants to delete from history: “Why are we doing this?”
On paper, playing the main character in the highest-grossing movie in cinema history should open almost every door and lead to much bigger and better things. That isn’t always the case, though, and Mark Hamill is far from the only actor to find that out the hard way.
As the protagonist of George Lucas’ Star Wars, which annihilated box office records in 1977, he was the face of a pop culture phenomenon. And yet, his big-screen career never took off in the way he would have liked, especially when Harrison Ford parlayed his contributions into endless superstardom.
For every Julie Andrews, who used The Sound of Music as a springboard toward legendary status, or Leonardo DiCaprio, who capitalised on his Titanic fame to become a generational great, there’s a Sam Worthington, who hasn’t been up to much outside of Avatar, or a Henry Thomas, who slipped into the background after ET, until his recent Mike Flanagan-assisted renaissance.
Hamill fell firmly into the latter camp for a while, at least until he became one of the most versatile, reliable, and prolific voiceover artists in the business. When you make something as impactful as Star Wars, what comes next is always the biggest question. Unfortunately for him, it was the holiday special.
So notoriously terrible that George Lucas has refused to make it available on home video or streaming at any point since it first premiered in November 1978, Ford has spent the intervening years pretending it doesn’t exist, and if it wasn’t for those grainy bootleg copies floating around, it may well have been deleted from history.
As for Hamill, he knew he was fucked. “Well, I just thought it was really inappropriate,” he reflected. “I read it and thought, ‘Why are we doing this?’ It’s one thing to do a Star Wars sketch on a Bob Hope special, but this seemed to be like a big, long one. I complained about it.”
Having experienced the highs of becoming household names when the blockbuster sci-fi turned Hollywood upside down, the Star Wars Holiday Special brought the cast crashing back down to earth. “It taught us some humility,” the actor acknowledged. “I just didn’t get it, and I realised it was done for reasons that were more in the commercial realm than in the artistic realm.”
It’s so unbelievably shite that it’s come full circle and become a beloved relic of the franchise’s earliest days, despite Lucas doing his best to try to sweep it under the rug. Hamill knew it was a bad idea from the get-go, and almost five decades later, all he can conjure up about the Star Wars Holiday Special is the cliché to end all clichés: “It is what it is”.
