Doc Watch: A Disturbance in the Force (2023)

Watched:  12/28/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jeremy Coon, Steve Kozak

I don't remember exactly when I became aware of the Star Wars Holiday Special.  I vaguely remember hearing Boba Fett had appeared in something on television back in the day, maybe back in high school (pre-1993), but while I was a fan of the 3 movies (and back then, there were only 3), I wasn't someone who read the books or obsessively read about the movies.  

Everything that wasn't the movies kind of didn't work out, in my opinion.  The Marvel Comics were not great, the live-action Endor movies were a weird combo of depressing and bad, and the Ewoks and Droids cartoons were oddly clunky.  

But by college I was well aware of the special existing, and its reputation.  And a couple years after college, right after Jamie and I got married, I was at Vulcan Video and they had the bootleg of the Star Wars Holiday Special on the shelf.  

We put it on, and for two, long, hours (it included the commercials) we groaned our way through the thing.  I've since seen it another time or three, at least once with Rifftrax.  

But if you're here, you're at least aware of the Special.  If not, here you go.  Behold.

A Disturbance in the Force (2023) is an easy slam dunk for someone.  It's got pre-awareness of the doc topic on a massive scale, and the bar is pretty low for getting eyes on nerd-docs.  And yet, the doc is better than it needs to be by quite a bit.  I'm not sure I *learned* a ton, but (a) it's amazingly well-researched and (b) confirmed things I sort of believed but just hadn't seen anyone draw the connections in a way that made the argument pretty conclusively.   To get there, the doc has a ton of new interviews as well as archival interviews that wind up including people who were there, Star Wars fans, and folks there just to provide some color (America's Good Guy, Donny Osmond!).  

It's such a weird bit of media, it means you get Bruce Vilanch - who was one of the writers, but you also get a guy from Jefferson Starship, performers from various sequences, and more.  George Lucas is unsurprisingly absent, and it is a surprise that Mark Hamill isn't one of the participants.   But there's ample archival stuff where he's talking about it, so maybe Hamill was just done talking about it.  The weirdest person to show up is famed clothing and costume designer, Bob Mackie, who worked on the special, and whom I'd never seen interviewed before. 

If you weren't around in the 1970s or don't remember the transition of media from the 1970's to 1980's media, you won't remember that a *lot* of media was made up of variety shows, the format chosen for the Star Wars Holiday Special.*  So the doc brings in Donny Osmond to weigh in on making that kind of TV and his part in starring in one of the more notorious Star Wars send-ups done at the time - with full-Lucasfilm participation.**

And, look, the special looks really weird now, but at the time, it was kind of one more thing that looked like other things.  Throw in:  media treated anything sci-fi or genre media in those days like nothing but fodder for spoofs and camp, and you were going to get Harvey Korman doing a cooking segment in drag.  That's just 70's TV.  There's a distinct line where people walked into Batman in 1989 and walked out and the spoofs suddenly needed to be a lot less lazy to work.  For a handy comparison of where we were in the 1970's as Marvel and DC scrambled to get their characters exposure, and if you really want some deep hurting, I suggest checking out Legends of the Super Heroes.  

With this framework, the doc can roll up its sleeves and get to work, and, if you thought something went wrong - you aren't wrong.  But the framing of how and what *is* interesting.  That 20th Century Fox somewhat pushed Lucas into just keeping Star Wars out there by any means necessary, that Lucas was *barely* involved, and as the show went along, fewer and fewer of the original team were there. How the network was likely thinking of it.  And that - in context - this made perfect sense.  Except that it didn't.

I also appreciate the "how do we think of this thing?" segment at the end.  At the end of the day, that's kind of what really matters, and in this era, I think it's a good question.  And there's no one answer.

For people young enough they grew up with the Prequels as part of their Star Wars, it's all a little unthinkable, but it's hard to explain how few things there were back in the day that looked remotely like Star Wars.  There was no set of rules for how this worked, keeping a brand identity for your movie, or even still *talking* about a movie months after it came out.  Let alone years later like we did with those 70's era blockbusters.  I mean, I think the completely Lucas-approved Endor movies make it clear that this was unknown territory, if Donny and Marie didn't make it clear.

I do wish they'd gotten at least Mark Hamill to talk directly about how he onboarded to the Special and what he thought.  And as interesting as it is hearing how it all came together, hearing what the thinking was for specific segments is really good.  

Anyhow - check it out at some point.  

*and before you get really smug about 1970's TV, imagine how decades of The Bachelor, Real Housewives, Kardashians, The Voice and Masked Singer are going to look like in fifty years while "Golden Age of TV" stuff was available.  

**and ponder an alternate reality in which Marie Osmond lands the Princess Leia role, because she doesn't not look right as Princess Leia, or the slim possibility that watching this is how Lucas decided Luke and Leia were siblings