The Star Wars Holiday Special is a thing of legend. It was a television special set in the Star Wars universe that ran one time in November 1978. The story goes that George Lucas thought the special was so bad, he said that if he had enough time, he would smash every copy in existence.

As a Star Wars fan, I was naturally curious about the special. What could be so terrible about the piece of history that introduces Boba Fett to the world? Could anything Lucas touched really be that bad? (Even the prequel trilogy has its defenders.) A copy of the special is not exactly easy to come by, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, my friends, husband, and I were able to obtain one. We picked a night and settled in to what we thought would be two hours of “it’s-so-bad-it’s-awesome” television.

We could not have been more wrong — or more right.

First, let’s discuss the basic plot of the movie: Han Solo and Chewbacca are racing through space, dodging the Empire, and trying to get back to Chewie’s home planet of Kashyyk in time for the Life Day celebration. For all intents and purposes, Life Day appears to be the Wookiee version of Christmas. We get to meet Chewie’s family and actually end up spending a good deal of time getting a peek at how a “typical” Wookiee family prepares for Life Day … including approximately 15 to 20 minutes of untranslated Wookiee conversation.

You read that correctly, no need to go back. There is a significant portion of the show in which the audience is left to either speculate what Chewie’s family might be saying to each other, pull out their Wookiee dictionaries, or do what I did and lie on the floor crying out that they didn’t understand what was going on.

The strangeness doesn’t end there. The audience is subjected to suggested Wookiee porn (go to 3:30 in this video), an obviously not-all-there Carrie Fisher singing a Life Day song to the tune of the Star Wars theme, Bea Arthur looking sadly out of place as the owner of the Cantina, and a pretty fantastic Jefferson Starship non sequitur. It was honestly enough to make several in our group fall to the floor and wish for death to take them, non-ironically.

I will not say that The Star Wars Holiday Special is without merit — this is a love letter, after all. As I stated before, no matter how you may feel about the character, the fact that the special was the first appearance of Boba Fett is a pretty noteworthy thing in Star Wars fandom. There was a fantastic cast that, under normal circumstances, would have made the special worth viewing just by being on the screen. If you watch it with a group of friends, you will definitely feel bonded for life to those people with whom you have shared the experience of watching the most terrible, most nonsensical, and — somehow — the most awesome holiday spin-off special in existence.

And if the fact that so many people are willing to go to such great lengths to find, watch, and experience this piece of Star Wars history doesn’t make Lucas feel at least a little better about its existence … well, then I don’t know what will.