TVSquad

I've been looking for a copy of this Playhouse 90 episode for years. VHS, DVD, some guy doing a puppet show version of it in his living room, whatever, I've really wanted to see it since seeing snippets of it on the excellent PBS American Masters episode "Submitted For Your Approval" (it's on one of the Twilight Zone DVDs). And now, thanks to YouTube, we can all watch it.

Well, most of it anyway. After the jump, I posted the opening of the show (complete with intros and commercials!), and then if you follow this link you can find other segments of the show (on the right), but I have no idea what order they go in because they aren't labeled. It's well worth watching though. I mean, look at the cast: Art Carney, Jack Klugman, Leslie Nielsen, Burt Reynolds, and the kid is Mickey Dolenz from The Monkees! They don't do TV like this anymore.

Where were you on November 17, 1978? If you were alive (I keep forgetting how young some of our readers are), you were probably in front of the one TV in your house, with your family, waiting on pins and needles for the evening news to end. Why? Because ABC was about to air the highly-anticipated show The Star Wars Holiday Special, that's why. Most of us had seen the blockbuster Star Wars about a dozen times by then, and we were looking forward to seeing our favorite characters in an all-new adventure!

Unfortunately, it stunk. It stunk so bad that, according to IMDb, George Lucas tried to buy up all master copies of the show so it would never be shown again. And it hasn't; its only broadcast was on 11/17/78. It's never been released on home video, either. Bootlegs of the show have been floating around for decades, but have been hard to find.

But now, thanks to our old friend YouTube, you can now watch the entire special, which has been broken up into 10 parts. Part one is after the jump; click here to go to the YouTube page for it, where you'll see the other parts in the "Related" section.