How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise

by Taylor, Chris

  Fox was upset too: the studio had pitched the concept of a Star Wars TV show to Kenner CEO Bernie Loomis and other potential licensees. Now it seemed Universal was going to beat them to the punch, making it that much harder for any Star Wars show to make it to the TV screen. Furthermore, the Battlestar premiere episode was shown in theaters in Europe as a movie, meaning it had started to compete on Star Wars’ home turf. Fox sent Universal a cease and desist in December 1977. When work continued on Galactica regardless, Fox filed a lawsuit the following June, alleging thirty-four ways in which Galactica had ripped off Star Wars. Universal countersued, alleging that Star Wars had ripped off the 1939 Buck Rogers serial, to which Universal still owned the rights. Slightly less preposterously, the suit also alleged theft from Silent Running, the 1972 bomb that sunk Barwood and Robbins’s film Home Free. But of course, McQuarrie had consciously based the design of R2-D2 on the reverse of Silent Running’s robots, making Artoo round where his predecessors were square. They waddled; he mostly glided.

  When the Galactica pilot finally aired on television—in September 1978, the same month most theaters finally stopped showing Star Wars—the science fiction community rallied around Lucas. “Star Wars was fun and I enjoyed it, but Battlestar Galactica was Star Wars all over again,” opined Isaac Asimov in a newspaper column. “I couldn’t enjoy it without amnesia.” Writer Harlan Ellison dubbed Galactica’s creator “Glen Larceny.” Prior to the premiere on ABC, Time magazine called it “the most blatant rip-off ever to appear on the small screen.”

  But not everyone agreed that they were watching a rip-off. Dykstraflex spacecraft shots and laser fire from fighter craft in space do not a copycat make. The more the show developed, the more it staked out its own territory—just as Gene Roddenberry noted that Star Trek had to go fifteen episodes to find its footing. “The characters are given more psychological dimension than the comic-strip cutouts engaged in Star Wars,” wrote Newsweek’s critic on viewing the pilot.

  Galactica lasted a single season on ABC. Ratings started out high, but an irregular time slot torpedoed the show. Outraged fans protested outside the network’s headquarters; one young fan in Minnesota committed suicide. Larson would reuse many of the sets and equipment for another, more successful TV show: a remake of Buck Rogers. Galactica returned for one more series in 1980 without much of the main cast. Some twenty-three years on, the Sci-Fi Channel (later Syfy Channel) would remake the entire series in a darker fashion, altering one essential detail: the Cylons could now look like humans. It ran for four successful seasons, and would come to influence Lucas in the late 2000s, when he finally got around to planning a Star Wars live-action TV show.

  Fox’s suit against Universal was thrown out of court in October 1980; Universal’s case against Star Wars was likewise dispatched the following May. Fox’s case was restored on appeal two years later, with the court declaring that it “raised genuine issues of material fact as to whether only the Star Wars idea or the expression of that idea was copied.” In 1984, Universal paid Fox $225,000 to make the whole thing go away.

  The claim and counterclaim left one odd piece of legal trivia in its wake. In a decade-long deluge of science fiction movies with borrowed concepts, after black samurai helmets and planet-sized weapons, only one US feature film was slapped with a lawsuit accusing it of outright copying: Star Wars.

  Early in 1978, Twentieth Century Fox contracted TV producer Dwight Hemion to executive produce an hour-long Star Wars Holiday Special for CBS. Fox believed three years was going to be too long to wait between Star Wars movies. Lucas agreed. The Emmy-nominated Hemion had spent a decade producing specials for the likes of Frank Sinatra and Barbara Streisand. In 1977, he had produced the last TV special to star Elvis Presley, one of Lucas’s idols. Hemion had also directed a well-received version of Peter Pan starring Mia Farrow and Danny Kaye, suggesting he could handle children’s fantasy. If his holiday special worked, it could be the pilot for a Star Wars TV series.

  Lucas suggested a story that focused on Chewbacca’s relatives and a galactic holiday called Life Day on his home, Kashyyyk. The Wookiee planet had been recently rejected for The Empire Strikes Back. Now, because Lucas liked to recycle just about every concept ever considered for Star Wars, and because he still had a soft spot for Wookiees, it was revived. Ralph McQuarrie produced paintings of the planet. Lucas provided the names of Chewie’s family: his wife, Malla; his father, Itchy; and his son, Lumpy. Lucasfilm produced a “Wookiee bible” with everything the writers would need to know about the apelike species, including how they reproduce: “Wookiees have litters.” Lucas would also tell one of the writers of the show that Han Solo was married to a Wookiee, “but we can’t say that.”

  The Holiday Special is legendarily awful—not in that so-bad-it’s-good kind of way that heralds a cult classic like Starcrash, but in the sense of monumentally boring. (Look it up on YouTube and see how many minutes you can suffer through.) Before it aired, Lucas and Gary Kurtz took their names off the project. “We were kind of appalled,” Kurtz told me. “It was a bad mistake.” A quote falsely attributed to Lucas by practically the entire Internet has him expressing a desire to destroy every copy of the special in existence “with a hammer.” But he told Starlog magazine in 1987 it would be released on videotape “soon.” Here’s what he said in 2002: “That’s one of those things that happened, and I just have to live with it.” (Lucas was less restrained in his appearance on Seth Green’s Robot Chicken spoof, where within the safety of satire he offered his only real public critique of Holiday Special: “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” his character screamed from the therapist’s couch. Green says Lucas requiered little coaching.)

  Did it have to be that bad? When McQuarrie died in 2012, something turned up in his papers: a treatment for the special, dated March 1978. The author remains unknown, but it reads a lot like Lucas. The treatment begins with Chewbacca arriving at his home and reuniting with his family. Han Solo appears on a video screen, congratulating the Wookiees on the fact that their planet has been chosen to host the galactic festival called Life Day. Solo gives us the stakes: Life Day isn’t illegal, yet, but the Empire fears it could unify the galaxy and is scheming to shut it down in any way it can. Chewie, the most famous Wookiee, will be the focus of the festival. The Starship Musica is on its way to kick off the ceremonies.

  Meantime, a trader arrives at the Wookiee residence. Chewie buys a “Video Book” for his son as a Life Day present, though the trader makes it clear that Life Day isn’t a commercial festival. Chewie relaxes with a “Mind Evaporator” that plays rock and roll, which Wookiees apparently enjoy. (As weird as that sounds, it wouldn’t be out of character for George Lucas, rock and roll fan and the man who gave us an equally incongruous Benny Goodman–style swing band in the Mos Eisley cantina.) Chewie then discovers to his horror that Lumpy has gone missing: he’s stowed away aboard the trader’s ship, destination Tatooine. The trader is eventually reached at that familiar cantina, and he agrees to return Lumpy to Kashyyyk via the Musica. Meanwhile, an Imperial commander dispatches a guest star—the treatment suggests Raquel Welch—to make sure the Musica never makes it to Kashyyyk. She seduces its commander, dances (literally) into its control room while explaining to Lumpy how starships work, and “screws everything up.” The droids follow her and notify Leia and Luke, who alert Chewbacca, who takes a shuttle to the starship and flies it to safety. Life Day and Lumpy have been saved. And Chewbacca would finally get the medal he was denied during the final ceremony of Star Wars.

  Would that have made for the greatest holiday special ever? Probably not, but it might have provided the foundation for a campy cult classic. The treatment appears to have been transformed, however, by Hemion’s producers, Ken and Mitzie Welch. Chewbacca was removed from most of the show; instead we see his family wondering if he’s ever going to show up at all, and watching various entertainments to distract themselves. Life Day remains utterly unexplained throughout the final version; at the end, it ap
pears to be a festival composed entirely of Wookiees in red robes.

  The show’s writers realized with a dawning sense of horror that they were now writing a script dominated by characters that didn’t speak a word of English. “The only sound they make is like fat people having an orgasm,” writer Bruce Vilanch noted. Heavyset himself, he told Lucas he would create the show’s dialogue by leaving a tape recorder in his bedroom. Lucas was not amused. Nor was he particularly interested in keeping tabs on the show. He appointed David Acomba, a frat brother of Charley Lippincott’s, as director. But Acomba was not accustomed to TV directing; the crew found him high strung. He quit the production after shooting a few scenes. “These people don’t know what they’re doing,” he told Lippincott.

  The writers did the best with the treatment they were given by the Welches, creating what they hoped were charming scenes of family life on Kashyyyk. Itchy the young rascal steals cookies, annoys his grandfather with a toy spaceship, and amuses himself with a hologram of circus tumblers. Malla watches a cooking show. She checks in on Chewie’s progress via video screen with Luke and Leia, and distracts Imperial troops who search her home for the unauthorized video screen.

  The first ten minutes after the opening credits is nothing but Wookiees roaring at each other. If the writers had left it at that, the Holiday Special might at least have gone down in history as a kind of avant-garde insurgency, a mime’s delight that baffled the mainstream. But this was a variety show. Songs were written. Jefferson Starship was to perform its single “Light the Sky on Fire.” A cartoon, featuring the debut of bounty hunter Boba Fett, was in production. Bea Arthur, of Maude fame, was to sing a song in the Mos Eisley cantina to the tune of the cantina band’s swing music, called “Goodnight but Not Goodbye.” It all had to be shoehorned into the show somehow. (Mark Hamill, at least, resisted plans for Luke to sing a number.)

  In the most horrific example of how the Holiday Special went completely off the rails, Chewie’s father, Itchy, relaxes with the Mind Evaporator provided by the trader. But what he witnesses isn’t rock and roll. It’s singer Diahann Carroll, cast by the Welches with two explicit intentions: one, make sure the cast was multiracial, and two, perform an erotic song that was PG enough for the censors. “I’m your fantasy,” she coos to the old Wookiee. “I am your pleasure.” The Wookiee growls with orgasmic delight. “Ooh,” giggles Carroll, “we are excited, aren’t we?”

  But even Carroll’s song is easier to stomach than the special’s ending. Carrie Fisher was going through what Vilanch described as “her Joni Mitchell period.” Showcasing her singing talents, such as they were, was the quid pro quo for her participation. The Welches duly wrote a ballad for Princess Leia—celebrating Life Day to the tune of the Star Wars theme itself. Fisher, who loved to sing but hated the song, appears glassy-eyed and struggles to hit the high notes.

  By the time Lucas and Gary Kurtz saw what was going on, it was too late to do anything but remove their names. “In the long run, it wasn’t necessary,” Kurtz remembers. “Fox was worried that three years was too long to wait for the second film and something needed to be out there in the meantime. It really didn’t.” But the studios and networks had spoken. CBS was overjoyed to have what would surely be the holiday season’s biggest ticket. So many advertisers had climbed on board, the one-hour show was stretched into two. Del Rey published a Wookiee storybook. Kenner, the lead advertiser, prepared to release a line of Wookiee action figures. Never again would they be caught flat-footed by demand!

  The show was teased for months beforehand. Kids were thrilled that Star Wars, which had only just left theaters, was now showing up on TV. Folks who didn’t go to the movies, and had only Battlestar Galactica to go on, would finally get to see what was all the fuss was about. That applied not just in the United States but around the world; the Holiday Special was sold and screened in at least six other countries, including Canada and Australia.

  At first, it seemed to have paid off. An estimated thirteen million people in the United States alone tuned in for the start. But ratings dropped precipitously after the Boba Fett cartoon at the end of the first hour. By the time Fisher performed her song, most viewers had switched over to ABC or NBC, or switched off altogether.

  The special, strangely, clung to the edges of Star Wars canon for years. Since it marks the first appearance of Boba Fett and the first time the Wookiee home world is mentioned, Lucasfilm couldn’t ignore it altogether. (That was until 2014, when Lucas took a scorched earth approach to all Star Wars media in which Lucas’s name was not in the credits; only then did the worst Star Wars clone of all vanish from the Star Wars galaxy.) It was never released on home video, despite what Lucas said he hoped in 1987, and was only kept alive by fans on bootleg tapes until the YouTube era arrived.

  At the time, the Holiday Special seemed the startling self-immolation of a promising franchise—proof, if any were needed, that the sequel was likely to bomb. For George Lucas, it was an object lesson: never again would he cede so much control over how his universe was represented. When it came to his sequel, if he was to avoid losing every penny of his Star Wars wealth, he would have to watch the process like a falcon.

  ________

  * And unlike Gone with the Wind, here was a story that post-1960s America could be proud of itself for telling. The cantina bartender’s refusal to admit droids—“We don’t serve their kind here”—was widely interpreted as a civil rights parable.

  * Warner and Universal tried the next best thing to cloning Lucas: they rereleased THX 1138 and American Graffiti respectively, both with the few minutes of footage they’d cut, to Lucas’s extreme chagrin, now restored. Graffiti was once again a hit; THX was once again a dud.

  15.

  HOW TO EXCEED IN SEQUELS

  In July 1978, actor Dave Prowse toured the United States as Darth Vader for the first time. The former British bodybuilding champion was irked by Lucas’s insistence that no publicity photographs were to be taken of him on the set of Star Wars in Vader costume with the helmet off, and further irritated that no information about him had appeared in the movie’s press materials. When Vader had placed his footprints in the wet concrete outside Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Prowse had been stewing in London.

  “I created Darth Vader,” Prowse insisted to a reporter in November 1977. “His movements, his mannerisms are what I and no one else put in the character. . . . So where does Fox get off pretending to the public that the real Darth Vader is inside my black suit when I’m 6,000 miles away? It’s disgraceful and dishonest.” It was around this time that Prowse started signing photographs, to Lucasfilm’s chagrin, “David Prowse IS Darth Vader.”

  The 1978 trip was an attempt to assert his rightful place, as Prowse saw it. His publicist arranged a West Coast tour. He gave a talk at Marin Civic Center, a few miles from Lucas’s home, and fielded questions outside a Berkeley comic store surrounded by roughly a thousand Star Wars fans, many in costume. Asked about his first meeting with Lucas, Prowse recalled: “I was confronted with what looked like a young boy.” Asked about the sequel, he said it would start filming the following February. Then he offered what a San Francisco Examiner reporter described as “a glimpse of a possible plot”: Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are in a do-or-die lightsaber duel when Luke learns that Vader is his father. “Father can’t kill son, son can’t kill father,” Prowse said—so the two characters would live to star in the next sequel. His audience cheered wildly.

  Now, according to Lucasfilm lore—and Prowse’s autobiography—he had no foreknowledge of the plot twist coming in The Empire Strikes Back. It was kept under wraps to the point where Prowse was given fake dialogue for the famous scene (“Obi-Wan is your father”). Mark Hamill was only clued into what was really going on minutes before the scene was shot. The voice of Vader, James Earl Jones, was the only other actor to receive the correct line. The story goes that Prowse learned that Vader was Luke’s father during the London premiere in 1980. (In fact, he’d a
lready seen a number of press preview screenings by that point.)

  So how come Prowse was casually discussing it as a “possible plot point” a year before filming even began? The plot twist itself was only a few months old; Lucas wrote the key second draft of the script, in which Vader announces his parentage for the first time, in April 1978. He was obsessively secretive about the revelation and wouldn’t even allow his secretary to type up that page. Perhaps Prowse had a mole inside Lucasfilm? Nope. He’d said the same thing at a convention around October 1977, according to an interview with a London fanzine called Little Shoppe of Horrors: “Vader didn’t kill Luke’s father, Vader IS his father.”

  This was decades before the advent of Internet-driven fan culture. The word “spoilers” was not in common currency. Prowse’s words vanished in the vacuum of forgotten fanzines and a single paragraph at the end of a local newspaper article. Still, they throw a spanner into the works of Star Wars history. After all, this was the twist that transformed everything. The moment Darth Vader officially became Anakin Skywalker, everything in the Star Wars universe changed. The path of the next four Star Wars films became clear: the third movie would be about his redemption; the prequels would cover his fall. The entire arc of Star Wars would become nothing less than the tragedy of Darth Vader.

  Lucasfilm would like to be able to say that the plot twist was planned way ahead of time, and that its secrecy campaign to prevent anyone finding out about it worked. The official history is questioned by blogger and Toronto-based cameraman Michael Kaminski, who expended a great deal of energy in The Secret History of Star Wars (2008) attempting to show that Lucas had no overarching plan for the series and came up with the Vader twist in 1978 on a whim. But what if neither of these explanations was true? What if Lucas happened to mention this “possible plot point” to Prowse on the set of Star Wars in 1976, for a future movie that then didn’t seem very likely, and Prowse decided to reveal it out of spite at a company he felt was spurning him?*