The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special

Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

The original Star Wars Holiday Special was reviled for good reason, being atonal, mawkish, asinine, and worst of all, painfully uncool at a time when Star Wars was the coolest thing around. This CGI-animated sequel is more competently produced but shares all of those same negative qualities with its inspiration. I can picture Lucasfilm producers wanting to attempt a new special to right the wrongs of the original (I think I read somewhere that Jon Favreau even said it was one of his personal priorities when Disney bought the brand), but this garbage has not succeeded in its mission. I'll grant that I'm not in the target audience here since this is aimed at kids, but even by that standard it's really dumb and really cringey. It's also a weird uncanny-valley facsimile of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, since it uses the same characters but replaces most of the cast with sound-alikes, and the Lego people have porous skin and visible strands of hair in high-definition which is... jarring. I don't want to contemplate what looks like real flesh on the surface of Lego people, but I suppose it's a more interesting thing to occupy my mind than whether Chewie will once again get to celebrate Life Day. I guess I'm just astounded that Disney would attempt to take on one of the most notorious creative misfires in geek culture history after forty years of everyone knowing what went wrong and still get it wrong again, but judging from everything else that Lucasfilm has screwed up with the Star Wars brand in the last few years, maybe it's not such a surprise.

− November 23, 2020 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply