Star Wars has had a relationship with TV almost from the off, but it has taken decades for them to get things right. In 1977, early adopters included the Donnie & Marie show with guest stars C-3PO, R2-D2 and Chewbacca along with some camp, dancing stormtroopers and Kris Kristofferson as Han Solo – starting a tradition of celebs dressing up as Star Wars characters that continues to this day with tonight’s Children in Need sketch.
That same year saw the cantina creatures turning up in a sketch on The Richard Pryor Show, which is still Star Wars at its least child-friendly. All fairly standard for the day, notable perhaps only for showing how fast Star Wars had become imbedded into pop culture. But there were dark times ahead ...
Which brings us to the legendary Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978. It never aired in the UK, but anyone here who wanted to has probably seen it thanks to years of bootleg tapes and DVDs. George Lucas famously said he’d like to personally smash every copy with a hammer, but he couldn’t have predicted a modern technological force that surrounds, penetrates and binds us together: the internet.
Holiday specials were nothing new; they’ve been responsible for some of TV’s most bonkers moments, such as Raquel Welch’s groovy space-girl dancing and Paul Lynde playing host to Kiss. But nothing could prepare viewers for the toxic torture of spending low-quality time with Chewbacca’s family, including wife Malla and son Lumpy, as they celebrated the non-denominational holiday of “Life Day”.
Plenty of stars from the movie turn up, including Carrie Fisher, backed by a host of corny guest stars carefully selected to have almost zero appeal to the youngsters in the audience: Bea Arthur, Diahann Carroll and Jefferson Starship. The only thing worthwhile here is an animated adventure introducing the world to the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Nelvana, the Canadian studio that provided the cartoon went on to make two further Star Wars series: Droids and Ewoks.
Droids followed C-3PO and R2-D2 for a mere 13 episodes as they were passed from different masters over a decade before they completely lucked out when their escape pod fled the blockade runner at the beginning of Star Wars.
Ewoks fared better, lasting two seasons with 35 episodes, delivering a Star Wars-ified mix of Care Bears and Smurfs-style antics on the Moon of Endor. Aimed at the very young, Ewoks is set in those carefree pre-Return of the Jedi days when their simple life involved protecting sunberry trees and evading various beasts and wizards while teaching us all a thing or two about teamwork and responsibility.
Around the same time we got two made-for-TV Ewok movies: Caravan of Courage and The Battle for Endor. The first started off as an hour-long project with the ominous title The Ewok Thanksgiving Special. But this time George Lucas kept total control, although it did get caught up in the crossfire of another war as ABC threw money at everything in a vain effort to topple NBC as the US’s number one TV channel. With the budget increased, it became feature length, although you can tell by the amount of inane Ewok slapstick that pads everything out that there is still only an hour’s worth of story going on.
The Battle for Endor was a slight improvement, mercilessly killing off most of the humans from the first, leaving only a little girl who is barely more expressive than the fixed-faced Ewoks (who can now speak basic English). Some decent ILM FX work (by TV standards, at any rate) enlivens things and this is the last live-action Star Wars spin-off until the promising sounding Rogue One: A Star Wars Story next year; with the long promised live-action TV seriesstill nowhere to be seen.
Lucasfilm then took a break from television for almost two decades, working on the prequels and some decent computer games. When it returned to the small screen in 2003 with the Star Wars: Clone Wars series, things finally seemed to fall into place. With two seasons of three-minute episodes, going to 12 minutes for the third, this was Star Wars as short bursts of action, sometimes dialogue free – which can often be a blessing in this universe. With Samurai Jack’s Genndy Tartakovsky at the helm, it was stylish and exciting, easily the best TV version of Star Wars, beating the much more expensive movie prequels at their own game.
2008 saw the similarly named Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a bigger (but not necessarily better) series set in the period between Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith. With an effective, mottled painterly look to the heavily stlyised CG animation, it certainly looked like nothing else on TV. While things got off to a shaky start, over six seasons it built up nicely, with several multi-episode stories working particularly well.
We currently have two animated Star Wars shows airing: Star Wars Rebels and Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles.
Rebels, set 14 years after Revenge of the Sith, follows an intrepid group of freedom fighters aboard the starship Ghost. It sounded terrible when first announced, promising a character who is also a graffitti artist. But it has turned out much better. It looks great, thanks to a visual style based largely on the gorgeous production paintings of the original movie trilogy by the late great Ralph McQuarrie. With things such as Blockade Runners and Imperial Star Destroyers, as well as a well deployed Darth Vader (voiced by the original’s James Earl Jones), it’s full of moments that feel like proper Star Wars. The Lego cartoon is a comedy aimed at younger viewers, but it is surprisingly enjoyable with plenty of silly gags that appeal to all ages: “Green, what’s wrong with?” bristles Yoda when someone compliments Mace Windu on his purple lightsaber.
Some of this may well link up with the new movies – it has in the past with the prequel trilogy full of nods to the Droids series, and Star Wars: Clone Wars basically being the story from the opening crawl sequence in Revenge of the Sith. JJ Abrams even included a few homages to Star Trek: The Animated Series in his Trek movies – we’ll find out next month if he’s playing the same game with Star Wars.
