TVSquad

Where would we be without the hallowed television Christmas special? We would be engaged in enthralling conversations with relatives who like to give the backstory about the gall bladder operation pictures they still carry in their wallet. We would be playing defense against every breakable item in the house while the neighbor's kids get enough sugar in their systems to power the Space Shuttle. We would not only have to muster the courage to taste Grandma's homemade rum and Kahula fruitcake, but also to pretend that we like it without our stomach turning inside out, crawling up our esophagus and out of our mouth.

Even if those scenarios will be true for you on Dec. 25, I offer you my pity as my Christmas gift. Plus, you still would rather spend it listening to ol' Uncle Hernia Scar than watching one of these holiday hams.

Before action figures became collectibles that should never, ever be removed from their little plastic bubble packaging boys and girls actually played with them. Sometimes, the adventures that these little characters had were not what they were intended for. In fact, I'm sure that some of these action figures did things that would make a grown man blush.

Details are finally being revealed today about the Robot Chicken: Star Wars special that is coming up on June 17th on Cartoon Network. We first heard about it last fall when Adam interviewed Morel Orel creator Dino Stamatopoulos, who shares a studio with Robot Chicken. The news today is that George Lucas and Mark Hamill are both participating. Lucas will play himself and Hamill will play Luke Skywalker. And, as Adam reported late last year, producers Seth Green and Matthew Senreich are actually working with LucasFilm Ltd. to create the 30-minute parody of the Star Wars series. Senreich says it's a dream come true and "How many people can say that George Lucas let them play with his entire Star Wars universe and do Robot Chicken-like things to it?"

I'm really looking forward to this episode. Green and Senreich have pretty much been obsessed with Star Wars and it has appeared in Robot Chicken many times. But- to be able to recreate the entire series with the blessing of The Godfather? Awesome!

By the way, this will be Mark Hamill's second visit to Robot Chicken. He voiced three characters, one of them was himself, in a 2005 episode. Other celebrity voices in the Star Wars special include Conan O'Brien, James van der Beek, Hulk Hogan, Abraham Benrubi, Breckin Meyer, Joey Fatone, and regular Seth MacFarlane.

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.

Paul Dini, a writer who has worked on several animated series, most notably Tiny Toons and Batman: The Animated Series, has a new online interview show on IGN Filmforce featuring himself and a sock monkey named Rashy. The series is called "Monkey Talk" and in the first episode Dini and Rashy interview Mark Hamill, who worked with Dini when he played The Joker on Batman: TAS. The picture quality is extremely poor, but it's worth a few laughs anyway, especially when Rashy the sock monkey pops up to ask Hamill questions about movies he wasn't actually in.