One Missing Star Could Have Saved The Star Wars Holiday Special
A new documentary takes a close look at the disastrous Star Wars Holdiay Special, including one legendary star who might have saved the whole thing.
SUMMARY
- A Disturbance in the Force recounts a surprising detail about why the Star Wars Holiday Special failed.
- One of the producers wanted Robin Williams for the show, but was overruled because he wasn’t a star.
- Mork & Mindy premiered two months before the Holiday Special aired, skyrocketing Williams to fame.
The Star Wars Holiday Special remains the worst endeavor the Star Wars franchise ever embarked upon. It arrived 18 months after Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, with the saga still brand new and no one certain what to make of it. As recounted in the new documentary A Disturbance in the Force, that resulted in a perfect storm of disaster as the swashbuckling space opera was handed over to variety show TV producers who didn’t have the first idea what Star Wars was all about. Bad decision followed upon bad decision, with the Star Wars cast forced to put up with it while director George Lucas focused on getting Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back up to speed. The results were the rare kind of memorable badness that makes for the wrong kind of immortality.
One of A Disturbance in the Force’s most intriguing details, however, spells out just how snake-bit the entire endeavor really was. According to a rumor shared in the documentary, a pre-star Robin Williams was considered for the special, only to be rejected because he was still an unknown actor at the time. In a case of staggeringly bad timing, Mork & Mindy made the actor a household name just a few short months before The Holiday Special aired. While no single performer could have salvaged the train wreck, he could have at least injected a good deal of legitimate entertainment value into the proceedings. His case is an object example of the decision-making involved in The Star Wars Holiday Special, and part of what turned it from a forgettable misfire into a legendary flop.
Robin Williams Might Have Been Considered for The Star Wars Holiday Special
As A Disturbance in the Force explains, The Holiday Special arose from an uneasy marriage between two creative spheres. On one side stood the Lucasfilm people, led by director David Acomba who essentially acted on Lucas’s behalf. On the other side stood TV variety show experts fronted by husband-and-wife team Ken and Mitzie Welch, who had written for The Carol Burnett Show. The creative incongruity proved fatal for a number of reasons. For one, Star Wars is supremely ill-suited for the musical variety format. Second, it was also something of a generation clash, as the Hollywood establishment grappled with a blockbuster that was rewriting the playbook in real time.
The Welches came from a different era of show business, rooted in vaudeville and with strong television sensibilities. The Star Wars team came from cinematic backgrounds, and A New Hope was less than two years old. It was fresh, new and exciting. In other words, completely wrong for old-school entertainers used to song-and-dance routines. Among other things, it explains why older actors like Art Carney and Bea Arthur often stand at the center of The Holiday Special, with the actual cast of A New Hope left on the sidelines. It resulted in Acomba leaving the production just a few days in, replaced by Steve Binder, who had considerable experience with variety shows and was hired to simply complete the project before it fell apart.
Pop culture historian Brian Ward recounts a tantalizing rumor in A Disturbance in the Force that further explains the extent — and damage — of the creative clash. It claims that Acomba went searching for talent at various Los Angeles comedy clubs, and came across Williams who was filming the first season of Mork & Mindy at the time. He desperately wanted the performer on The Holiday Special, but the Welches squashed the notion. Williams was still largely unknown, and they weren’t interested in anyone but an established star. Instead, they went with the likes of Carney, who simply wasn’t on the same wavelength as Lucas’s sci-fi space opera.
Mork & Mindy Made Robin Williams a Star
As far as star power is concerned, the rumored decision was an unmitigated disaster. Robin Williams had already played Mork on Happy Days Season 5, Episode 22, “My Favorite Orkan,” which aired in Feb. 1978 in the midst of Star Wars mania. It resulted in Mork & Mindy, which famously coupled Williams’ out-there alien with Pam Dawber’s nice lady from Boulder. The series debuted on Sept. 14 1978 — just two months before The Holiday Special was set to air — and came in at Number 3 in the Nielsen television ratings. It even scored higher than Happy Days that week. It catapulted Williams to superstardom and launched a merchandizing bonanza of t-shirts, toys, and lunch boxes that closely resembled that of Star Wars.
Time magazine put Williams on the cover of the March 1979 issue, and for all intents and purposes, he remained universally famous until his death in 2014. Mork & Mindy itself ran for four seasons, with Robin Williams’ improvisational skills as the centerpiece. In retrospect, he made a perfect fit for The Star Wars Holiday Special, a fresh phenomenon who rapidly became a household name while openly parodying the science fiction genre. He was a natural fit for a variety special, and while it was doubtful that ABC would let him appear as Mork on rival CBS’s Holiday Special, he clearly had the sensibilities for sci-fi parody that the production needed.
Williams’ improvisational skills were unparalleled, allowing him to spin stew out of an oyster almost at will. Scripts for Mork & Mindy famously included sections where Williams would simply riff. This not only became a part of the character and the series, but Williams’ fundamental star persona. One way or another, The Holiday Special lacked the wherewithal to bring him onboard, and lost someone with the unique ability to elevate the benighted project into something more worthwhile.
Robin Williams Could Have Improved the Star Wars Holiday Special
According to a 2014 interview with the Happy Days cast in The Hollywood Reporter, both the script of “My Favorite Orkan” and the character of Mork from Ork were terrible. The episode went into production regardless because of the astonishing success of A New Hope. When comedian John Byner quit the role, producer Garry Marshall turned to Williams, who was then still an acting student, to fill in. He saved the episode almost single-handedly by improvising most of his dialogue and creating the character of Mork on the spot. ABC executives were so impressed that they signed him to a contract four days later. “My Favorite Orkan” originally explained Mork’s appearance away as a dream that Ron Howard’s Richie Cunnigham had. A coda was filmed over the summer retconning the revelation and sending Mork to 1970s Colorado to start the new show.
All of that was missed by the producers of The Holiday Special, and whether or not Acomba lobbied for Williams is almost irrelevant. The actor clearly possessed the comedic instincts and boundless creativity to inject the proceedings with genuine entertainment, and he was on his way up right when The Holiday Special was going. Harvey Korman’s bizarre sketches are a perfect example as Korman plays a variety of different oddball characters in The Holiday Special, including a four-armed cook parodying Julia Child and a paramour of Bea Arthur’s barkeep who takes his drinks through an opening in the top of his head.
Korman is utterly lost with them, but they’re exactly the kind of concepts that Williams could effortlessly turn into something magical. His celebrated performance in Mrs. Doubtfire, for example, also drew inspiration from Julia Child. With Mork & Mindy the hottest show on the air at the time, it would have spoken to the same vibrant energy as Star Wars itself. It still might not have saved The Holiday Special, but it stood a very good chance of salvaging some of it. A few improvised scenes from Williams could have made for a silver lining akin to the Special’s Boba Fett cartoon, which most fans regard as the only legitimate highlight.
The fact that Williams didn’t get the gig speaks to the kind of wrong-headed decision-making that led to such a memorable disaster. The producers went looking for the tried and true to compliment the exciting and new and damaging both sides in the process. Not only could Williams have improved things, but a general focus on emerging talent and better show business instincts could have elevated the entire affair. Intentional or not, his absence is a sign of just how little The Holiday Special understood about what makes Star Wars so special.
A Disturbance in the Force is now available for digital download.
Star Wars
Created by George Lucas, Star Wars began in 1977 with the then-eponymous film that would later be retitled Episode IV: A New Hope. The original Star Wars trilogy centered on Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa, who helped lead the Rebel Alliance to victory over the tyrannous Galactic Empire. This Empire was overseen by Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine, who was aided by the cybernetic menace known as Darth Vader.In 1999, Lucas returned to Star Wars with a prequel trilogy that explored how Luke’s father Anakin Skywalker became a Jedi and eventually succumbed to the dark side of the Force.
