How Donny and Marie Osmond Unknowingly Spoiled 'Star Wars' in 1977 TV Special (Exclusive)
Did you know that, in 1977, Donny and Marie Osmond unknowingly spoiled one of Star Wars' biggest secrets?
Well, sort of.
At the time, the siblings had their own eponymous variety hour, The Donny & Marie Show. The first Star Wars film had just come out in May 1977 and was the biggest thing in pop culture.
So, in September of that year, The Donny & Marie Show put on their very own Star Wars special. Featuring Donny as Luke Skywalker, Marie as Princess Leia, Kris Kristofferson playing the part of Han Solo, and some of the other Osmond siblings appearing as dancing stormtroopers, they sang Star Wars-inspired songs before boarding a makeshift spacecraft and "taking off."
Donny opens up about the bizarre moment in a new documentary about another surreal Star Wars relic from the 1970s: the much-maligned Star Wars Holiday Special.
A Disturbance in the Force -- from the filmmakers behind Napoleon Dynamite and Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made -- chronicles the "hilarious secrets behind Star Wars' iconically awful Holiday Special" as well as other ways the famous franchise was spun off to the far corners of pop culture during the era of '70s event television.
"I'm thinking, 'How in the world is George Lucas allowing this to happen?'" Donny reflects of the Donny & Marie special in ET's exclusive sneak peek at the doc. "Because it's just, so far from the movie. But it sure was funny at the time. And it's funny to look back on right now."
Donny jokes that the production "broke a lot of [Star Wars] rules," going so far as to include a shot of Chewbacca with his arm around Darth Vader -- something that even peripheral Star Wars fans would understand would never happen in the actual canon.
"I guess on Donny & Marie, everyone was friends!" he says with a laugh.
But the bizarre spoof featured one shockingly interesting detail. Siblings Donny and Marie playing Luke and Leia was an unintended hint at one of Star Wars' biggest secrets: that Luke and Leia were actually siblings themselves -- something fans wouldn't know until 1983's Return of the Jedi!
The year following Donny & Marie's Star Wars spoof, Lucas would find himself making the Star Wars Holiday Special, featuring memorably bizarre cameos from non-Star Wars celebrities like Bea Arthur, Art Carney, and Harvey Korman, in addition to most of the original cast, in a nonsensical side plot centering on Chewbacca's family and home planet.
CBS aired the two-hour Star Wars Holiday Special during the week of Thanksgiving 1978 and it was watched by 13 million people. It never re-aired, and has remained a cult collectors' item to this day. This new documentary digs deeper in an attempt to answer the how and why (god, WHY?) of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
A Disturbance in the Force arrives on digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray on Dec. 5.
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