The Star Wars Holiday special is the greatest piece of Star Wars fiction ever made

Merry Chris…errr…Life Day everyone!

This isn’t a joke. Really.

Declaring the Star Wars Holiday Special the best piece of Star Wars fiction is a bit like saying Jar Jar Binks is a Beethoven-esque overlooked genius, or that midichlorians were George Lucas’ best decision.

But trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

You see, if decades of Star Wars fandom has taught me anything, it’s that disagreement and, sometimes, flat-out open hostility is part of the programming. Being a Star Wars fan in 2025 is less like being part of a nerdy community and more like standing in the ring during Royal Rumble.

Once, being a Star Wars fan meant arguing about whether Han shot first (of course we’re far more enlightened now and we all know that Han shot first because Greedo didn’t shoot at all). Internet culture wars have turned a galaxy far, far away into a cosmic battleground for people with YouTube thumbnails that scream in ALL CAPS and 72-point Impact font. Somewhere along the way, Star Wars stopped being a shared love and became a weapon for grifters who believe “inclusivity” is the name of a Sith assassin.

And don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of criticism that is valid. Star Wars hasn’t exactly been sticking the landing lately. But we’ve reached a point where every piece of new content is immediately thrown on the altar of culture war sacrifice. It’s exhausting.

Take The Acolyte, for example. Great premise: the old republic, dark side origins, mystery, moral ambiguity. It was ripe for some gritty Force drama. And then it actually came out, and, you know, it wasn’t great. It wasn’t even “mildly disappointing.” Poor writing, weird pacing and characters who talk like they’re fresh from a tanning salon down in the O.C. And instead of going “this show didn’t work,” the internet descended into a frothing rage about feminism, race and whether or not Disney has a secret vault labelled “Things that will make our old fanbase cry harder.”

Lee Jung-jae absolutely nailed it though. Justice for my guy.

It didn’t help that Disney’s track record with the sequel trilogy has been, umm, varyingly "inconsistent”.

Let’s talk about The Rise of Skywalker. Even I, a man with a high tolerance for narrative nonsense and a weakness for Stormtroopers with terrible accuracy, had to wear a peg on my nose while I watched it. I understood the hate. For once, it wasn’t the seething, performative rage of the terminally online, it was genuine confusion mixed with mild despair.

Episode IX wasn’t bad because it was trying to offend people or challenge narratives. It was bad because it was just… bad. A confused mess of retcons, panic rewrites and a plot that read like it was cobbled together by feeding the script of Return of the Jedi into a paper shredder before gluing the pieces back together.

And look, I liked Episode VIII. It took risks. It said, “Hey, maybe the Jedi kind of suck?” and I was totally into that. I’ve been making that point for years. But then the backlash happened. A loud, vocal minority screamed loud enough to make Disney executives soil their underwear and Rise of Skywalker became JJ Abrams’ apology letter. They backtracked on everything. Finn, who had one of the most interesting set-ups in the franchise was sidelined like he’d wandered off to have lunch and was locked out of the building.

What’s truly wild is that underneath the confusion, you could see glimmers of something fun. There were chase scenes, a treasure hunt and a secret Sith map hidden in a weird dagger like an Indiana Jones movie. But it was all buried under the weight of narrative whiplash and a desperate need to please everyone.

Which, of course, pleased no one.

That’s kind of the modern Star Wars problem in a nutshell. It’s trying to be all things to all people in a franchise where half the fanbase thinks stormtroopers are fascist metaphors and the other half also thinks they’re fascist metaphors but are kind-of into that.

And yet… in the middle of all the chaos remains one Star Wars property – shining like a beacon of Gondor that unites the fandom. Not with praise. Not with joy. But with shared, unfiltered contempt.

I am, of course, talking about the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Broadcast once in 1978 and never again (supposedly on George Lucas’ express command), it is a fever dream of Wookiee growls, Jefferson Starship music videos, a coked-up Carrie Fisher singing like Julie Andrews and one of the Golden Girls tending a bar at the Mos Eisley Cantina like it’s Space-Cheers. It’s a deranged, chaotic, truly baffling piece of television. And that’s precisely why it is the greatest piece of Star Wars fiction ever made.

Because for all the yelling, the fighting, the tears over canon and continuity, absolutely everyone in the entire universe agrees the Holiday Special is terrible. No exceptions. It is the one point of consensus in a fandom built entirely out of disagreement. Prequel fans, original trilogy purists, sequel defenders, Clone Wars psychopaths, we can all link arms, look up at the stars and laugh at the pure, uncut absurdity of Chewbacca’s dad watching space porn.

It is the Switzerland of Star Wars; utterly neutral, universally panned and is somehow still a thing.

It’s bad in a way that’s comforting. It’s not divisive, not agenda-driven, not algorithmically engineered. Just bad. Gloriously, unrepentantly, hilariously bad. And in a franchise that now takes itself far too seriously, the Holiday Special reminds us that Star Wars used to be allowed to be silly.

Star Wars is allowed to have suburbs. Star Wars Lightsabers can be double sided, triple sided, they can form god-damn dodecahedrons if they want to.

It’s fun. Remember fun? Remember what that used to feel like?

Because let’s face it, the Star Wars universe is, at its core, deeply ridiculous. It’s about laser swords and space wizards and a tiny green goblin with ears like a hang glider who talks like a Victorian fortune cookie. We pretend it’s Shakespeare because we’ve been trained to treat it with reverence, but at the end of the day it’s pulp science fiction that’s had some robes thrown over it to try and sell you some action figures.

The Holiday Special doesn’t try to be deep. It doesn’t try to be meaningful. It barely tries to be coherent. And weirdly, that’s what makes it great. It’s a museum exhibit of 1970s variety show chaos, featuring Mark Hamill in enough eyeliner to cosplay as a space panda and Art Carney selling intergalactic blenders. It’s not trying to win any arguments or score political points. It’s just existing. Loudly. Incompetently.

And in a fandom torn apart by everything from gender politics to lightsaber colours, that shared acknowledgment of “Yeah, that was awful” is rare.

Precious even.

Every Life Day, when the stars align and the Force compels some poor soul to rewatch the Holiday Special on a grainy VHS rip from the depths of the internet, we are reminded of our shared humanity. We laugh. We cringe. We wince when Itchy moans in delight while watching Diahann Carroll perform a sultry musical number aimed directly at horny dads. And we know, deep in our hearts, that despite everything, despite Jar Jar, despite the sequels, despite somehow, Palpatine returned, we are not alone.

We are one fandom.

United in horror.