I know I can’t post the video review here because of… well, ya know, but the Nostalgia Critic did a review about The Star Wars Holiday Special as well!
This was directed by a sentient bag of cocaine.
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That would explain quite a lot.
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That explains Carrie Fisher’s participation.
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My first exposure to The Holiday Special was a review of sorts in Star Wars magazine, some point in the early/mid 90’s. I read that and thought, at first, that there was no way that could be real, it HAD to be made up… and then I thought… no, that’s too weird even for the writers of Star Wars Magazine to make up, they’d at least TRY to make it believable. I definitely watch it almost annually for the last 12-15 years now… ESPECIALLY once the Rifftrax came out.
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Great — JUUUUUUUUST great. Now we’ll NEVER be rid of it!
Curse you, YouTube!
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Hoooow sentient is perhaps the question?
I flipped past it at the time. It was, as @CLANG_Potroast said, an unremarkable variety show for the time, and even if it was bottom-of-the-barrel, there was no shortage of similarly bad shows at the time.
Variety shows in the '70s were like modern “reality” shows: Cheap ways to cash-in on fleeting fame. And the only reason people hone in on this one over the others is because nobody remembers Pink Lady and Jeff or Shields and Yarnell. Or “The Steve Landesberg Show” which I can find no evidence of existing on this mortal plane, but it did.
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There are commercials in the recording RiffTrax uses for two variety shows that I’m sure were at least as bad.
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The Hudson Brothers
Or, even further back: The Andy Williams Show, which at least one writer remembered, since they quoted it in Bloodlust. 
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I recall The Hudson Brothers as being widely reviled but also somewhat successful. They made a movie that’s a kind of an epic flop. Pandemonium!?
The Andy Williams Show ran for a decade, it was so popular. It may have been the first time I saw a TV (my dad was agin’ 'em and I cain’t say he was wrong) that Shatner was on Andy Williams doing the Hamlet soliloquy. I asked my mom why he was acting so strangely and that’s the story of how I learned the word “ham”.
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People think the Star Wars Holiday Special is somehow different from the other horrible variety shows because they didn’t see or don’t remember the many, many other variety shows of the time.
No one is going back and watching the Donnie and Marie show or any of the other one-off crap.
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There’s a Star Wars, uh, tribute that aired on Donny & Marie and it’s readily searchable on Le Tube. Not as funny as the time Dick Van Dyke was Steve Austin on The Carol Burnett Show. But… 
Also, I can’t believe I let this thread slip away without disclosing that somewhere in my town there’s a subdivision called Chewbaccaville. I can’t remember exactly where. Just near-random knowledge left over from a former job which involved lots and lots of property records.
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I remember all these things. None of them as all out weird as the Star Wars Holiday Special.
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Ah, so Mark Hamill was practicing playing The Joker LONG before the 90s Batman cartoon then.
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Yes, this is more like the things @moviegique was referring to. Dancing stormtroopers and so on.
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[idly wonders if Attack of the Clones would’ve at least gone by faster as a musical]
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Well, we did have a dance number after Yoda pulled out his lightsaber…
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I’ll leave this here without comment…
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