Happy Holidays! (Now with more Life Day!)

Happy Holidays everyone!


If you're not familiar with the travesty that is the Star Wars Holiday Special, now is the time to become acquainted. In 1978 George Lucas had a vision, a vision of Star Wars on the little screen. It was to have singing, cartoons, and wookies. Lots and lots of wookies. Wookies cooking! Wookies being harassed by Imperial guards! Wookies strapping themselves into holographic fantasy machines! (Yes, that one actually does happen.)

Sounds good so far? What if I told you that the majority of the film is spoken in Wookie-ese? A language comprised of howls, grunts, and other non-English noises? That's part of what made the show so horribly bad. Well, that & having Bea Arthur run the Mos Eisley Cantina. (Although in her defense she did her best to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.)


While there is a full version of this up on google video, Rifftrax has also released an audiotrack that will have you laughing regardless of how savvy you are on the Star Wars world. If you're not familiar with Rifftrax, they're a group of former MST3K cast members that decided to band together to form a company doing what they do best: mocking movies.

I don't have a link to a full version of the Rifftrax version, but you can find a collection of some of the best snippets at this link here. You can probably find a version on the internet that has the audio & video synched up, but of course I'm totally not telling you to download it off of one of the many torrent sites out there. (But if you do, make sure to donate a dollar to the Rifftrax site so they can keep bringing the funny.)

If you're curious, Rifftrax has also done tracks for films & shows that aren't as immediately identifiable as bad as well as films that truly aren't. (They riff for the fun of it.) Youtube has a plethora of these available, with one of the finest Rifftrax being for the film Twilight, especially the piano scene. One of my other favorites has to be the riffed version of Nic Cage's The Wicker Man, easily one of the worst films ever made. (On a non-Rifftrax related note, here's someone's homemade trailer for the movie where they turned it into a romantic comedy & actually made it into something that looks watchable.)