The third episode of our trip through some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time isn't actually beloved.  Notorious would be a better word.  Infamous would be another.  It also isn't a movie; it's a television special.  What's more, it isn't even a television special you can go rent at your local Blockbuster, or queue up via Netflix.  In fact, unless you happen to have been watching CBS at 8PM Eastern Time, November 17, 1978, you've probably never seen it.  Or, unless you have one of the approximately one hundred billion bootlegged copies that have been floating around sci-fi conventions for the last 30 years.  Or unless you have Google video.  Anyway, you sure as hell are never going to see an official release:  George Lucas -- the man who willingly released Star Wars Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith into theaters -- has said that he is so ashamed of the Holiday Special that if he could, he would hunt down every copy of it in existence and smash them to pieces with a sledgehammer.

How bad is the Star Wars Holiday Special?  It's so bad that even Star Wars geeks, many of whom pretend that the second trilogy wasn't relentlessly awful and have paid real cash money for Star Wars novelizations, think that it's a bad joke.  It's so bad that Harrison Ford, during an appearance on the Conan O'Brien show, attempted to deny that he even remembered doing it.  It's so bad that it goes beyond so-bad-it's-good into so-bad-it's-actually-terribly-bad and back around into so-bad-it-in-fact-is-immune-to-such-meaningless-abstractions-as-bad-and-good.  It's so bad you feel sorry for Jefferson Starship for having had to be in it.  Unless you have spent two hours being savagely tortured by members of the Iraqi Republican Guard, it is the most excruciatingly long two hours you will ever spend.

Written and produced during a brief period of time when it wasn't completely certain how humongously successful the Star Wars mythos would become, its creators decided to cash in by putting together something that combined the worst elements of the sci-fi classic with the utter dregs of 1970s variety shows.  To get one thing out of the way, the Star Wars Holiday Special does contain the first appearance of Boba Fett, in a nifty little animated sequence by Canada's legendary studio Nelvana.  Beyond that, though, it is 100% utterly horrible and awful from the first frame to the last.  It's so bad, you don't even know how it ended up on TV even in the late '70s.  The plot, such as it is, involves Chewbacca's quest to defy an Imperial barricade and get home to spend "Life Day' -- a sort of outer-space super-Christmas -- with his Wookie family.  But the Special isn't so much a story with a plot as it is a bunch of completely disastrous moments strung together so incoherently that it makes you want to commit suicide.  At times, you begin to suspect that the Star Wars Holiday Special is what the head of the Silver Shamrock Corporation should have gone with in Halloween III instead of those lame masks that turned kids' heads into bugs.

Picking out the worst moment of the Star Wars Holiday special is like picking out the worst moment of the Second World War:  it's really just one unspeakable horror after another, only WWII ended sooner.  Every time you think you've seen a scene that is as ungodly bad as it can possibly get, another scene that's even worse shows up, and then you look at your watch and you realize that there's still an hour and a half left to go before it's over.  A mere listing of some of the most memorable scenes should be enough to scare off any sane human being:  there's the scene where Chewbacca's wife, son and father -- Malla, Lumpy, and Itchy -- bellow at each other in Wookie-speak (which resembles a couple of dying walruses bellowing at each other) for something like fifteen minutes, with no subtitles.  There's the scene where Art Carney walks around with his shirt open to the belly-button talking about how he loves to make a Wookie happy.  There's the scene where the nauseating old freak Itchy watches Wookie porn, which involves Dihanne Carroll manning a futuristic phone sex line, and makes profoundly disturbing Wookie pleasure noises.  There's the scene where an Imperial storm trooper watches a Jefferson Starship music video for no discernable reason.  There's the scene where Mark Hammill shows up wearing more makeup than Joan Crawford (and looking considerably less butch, to boot).  There's the musical number by a coked-out-of-her-gourd Carrie Fisher, which would be the worst musical number in television history if it weren't for the fact that it comes after an even worse musical number by Bea Arthur.  (Yes, that's right, Bea Arthur is part of the Star Wars canon, and there's nothing you can do about it, fanboys.)  There's not one, not two, but three comedic roles by Harvey Korman, one of which involves him playing an outer space version of Julia Child called Chef Gormaanda.  There's the scene where Han Solo kills a guy just to break up the monotony.  And more, more, so much more.

12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: An uncontrollable 2 turtledoves crapping all over your kitchen.  The only way this thing could possibly be any worse is if it had Jar Jar Binks and/or Hayden Christensen in it.

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