The iconic but often referred to as legendarily bad “Star Wars Holiday Special” has been given a restoration. The film is about the celebration of “Life Day,” the intergalactic equivalent of Christmas or Thanksgiving. Now the image quality of the legally unavailable TV film has been finely refined in the form of a remaster.
After one broadcast it was over – actually
It rarely happens that actors regret a project so much that they want to delete it completely from their biographies. Likewise its producer. An exception to this is the “Star Wars Holiday Special”, which was produced by the US television network CBS in 1978 and was only broadcast once, on Thanksgiving 1978. Prominent participants in the first “Star Wars” film, “Episode 4”, such as Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Peter Mayhew and Anthony Daniels were all involved, but don’t seem to be particularly enthusiastic about their work. Quite the opposite – the embarrassment they felt towards the Christmas special led to everyone involved distancing themselves from it and producer George Lucas preventing further distribution.
The original trailer for the Star Wars special:
Anyone who has seen the special may understand why. Here we get, among other things, a drunk-looking, staggering Princess Leia, a somewhat confused Luke Skywalker and a ten-minute conversation among Chewbacca’s family in their own Wookie language – without translation, of course. In general, the film seemed more like watching an improvisation without any idea.
New quality standards for the trash flick
Despite all efforts to make the “Star Wars Holiday Special” disappear, it has repeatedly appeared on platforms such as YouTube in recent years, often in the form of digitized versions of old VHS recordings. This could be over now. The “Retro Recipes” channel has published a technically improved version of the special. With the help of AI upscaling tools from Topaz Labs and extensive manual post-processing, the image quality was significantly improved. The remaster is presented in a smooth refresh rate of 60 frames per second and a resolution of 5120×3840, which is marked as “4K” by the streaming service but actually has a higher pixel count than classic 4K UHD. The makers therefore call it “5K resolution”.