"Revenge Of The Sith" completes the Star Wars saga of seven films. SEVEN films? Yes...

international | arts and media | news report

Tuesday May 24, 2005 15:22

by kevin

Alternative title suggestions for Episode 4.5:
"Revenge Of The Shit",
"A New Hopeless Episode",
"The Network Executives Strike Back",
and so on....

Screenshot of pirated internet copy of Episode III

Star Wars has been hitting the headlines again over the past few weeks. The buildup/hype to the new and final instalment of the series went into overdrive, with aggressive marketing and advertising in advance of the global launch day last Thursday. George Lucas personally stands to make a fortune from the film (again), especially from product tie-ins and merchandising. He is extremely protective of the brand - it being worth a fortune to him.

So needless to say when a pirate copy surfaced on the internet on the day of the release, the distributors and Lucas himself werent happy. In the run up to the global public release date, journalists and industry types attending advance screenings (including the one in Cannes) were searched by bouncers for hidden cameras, which could be used to tape the film. (this is a regular method of piracy - Irish cinema goers may be familiar with the message that comes up on the screen before a feature, asking them to inform staff if they see anyone with filming equipment).

For all the security measures taken to ensure nobody sneaked a camera in, in the end the leak came from somewhere within the film studio. Possibly a disgruntled studio grip or best boy who had had enough! The copy that surfaced on several bittorrent trackers was a timecoded copy (a big black stripe across the top with hours, mins, second, frames) with a studio watermark. A "tracker" is a website that points to the download location of a film on another individual's computer. The trackers were soon shut down by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), but the decentralised nature of peer-to-peer networks meant that people could download it without a tracker. An estimated 18,000 copies of the film were downloaded before legal threats managed to stem the tide - although the film is still out there in the murkier corners if you really want to go after it.

This isnt the first time that George Lucas has supressed a Star Wars film that was out of his control. It happened a long, long time ago, in a Galaxy very, very close by - this one right here in fact. While living abroad a few years ago, I met someone who was into what he termed "commerical cultural mistakes", albeit mostly of a sci-fi nature. He showed me one of his most prized posessions - a grainy, hissy VHS copy of "The Star Wars Holiday Special". This was a fifth or sixth generation copy, no doubt passed down through different archaic extinct video formats. The sound and picture were shit, and at the time I didnt want to watch much of it because I was hungover. From what he told me about it, and from reading extensively about it afterwards, the sound and picture were most definitely shit. A big piece of shit - one to put the Sith to shame.

CBS screened "The Star Wars Holiday Special" in 1978 on American TV. It was quickly put together in the aftermath of the massive success of Star Wars (IV, A New Hope). It has never been released since on VHS or DVD, the only copies floating around being aforementioned grainy from-the-TV duplicates. George Lucas subsequently denied all involvement with the film - although during an animated sequence the character of Boba Fett makes an appearance, pre-dating his introduction as a bounty hunter in "The Empire Strikes Back", which would suggest that Lucas would have had some input into the script.

I wont go into a full review of it here because I havent seen the entire film, but it takes place some time after episode IV, and Chewbacca is on his way back to his home planet for "Life Day". Apparently the wookies take up a huge segment of the film talking to each other - without subtitles. All the original characters from Episode IV are in the film too - Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Anthony Daniels as C3P0, and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. In one scene Carrie Fisher (who also publicly denied being in the film at one point) actually breaks into song. Another bizarre inclusion is Bea Arthur, the gravel-voiced star of TV sitcom "The Golden Girls" (who also sings a song in it).

All viewers of the film are in agreement that The Star Wars Holiday Special is excrutiatingly bad - much worse than Episode I: The Phantom Menace. It combines the worst aspects of made for TV films, American sentimentality, terrible acting and a cringeworthy script. The reaction to it by fans of Episode IV afterwards, meant that Lucas did as much as possible to suppress the film. Hence the reason why it has never been promoted and resurrected the same way the original 3 episodes were in the 1990's (which financed the 'prequel'). His protection of the brand means that this embarassing episode will never be marketed in collector box sets or special edition DVD. But it lives on through countless fan websites, dedicated to keeping alive the memory of a rubbish production that a billionaire would rather forget about it.

Thanks to http://www.starwarsholiday.com for the screenshots.

Boba Fett & Stormtroopers in the animated segment