A long time ago, Mike Farnham passed a list to me with e-mail addresses of many Star Wars authors. I just started a webpage called 'The Star Wars Holiday Special' at that time, and thought I could use Mike's list very well. Just about all of the people on the list responded, some more enthusiastic than others, and some, among others Steve Perry, even visited my site. Besides e-mail responses, I also posted responses I got through the mail, and those that I asked stars at conventions.  The e-mail replies are posted exactly as they were sent to me.

Michael A. Stackpole Wrote several X-Wing novels, the book 'I, Jedi', and many more.	Michael, What I can say about the special is this: I remember watching it with rapt attention when it was broadcast. At the time it was like water to a man dying of thirst. I really thought the cartoon with Boba Fett was cool, and I enjoyed learning more abou;t the Wookiees. In retrospect I can see why Georg e Lucas has said that if it were possible, he would personally hunt down and degquauss every copy of that special. Still, it has a certain maive Naive charm. How's that? Mike Stackpole
Barbara Hambly Wrote Planet of Twilight, Children of the Jedi, and more.	Mike - I'd like to help you out, but since I haven't watched TV in about 20 years I'm afraid I never saw the Star Wars Holiday Special. Good luck on the home page, though. Best - Barbara Hambly
Tom Veitch Wrote the Dark Empire comic book series.	Michael, You really want my opinion of the SW Holiday Special? It sucked. Except the Boba Fett cartoon was kinda interesting. ;-) Tom
Kevin J. Anderson Wrote just about everything! He is most famous for the Jedi Academy Trilogy.	Well, I know that George Lucas doesn't like it at all -- when I was working on THE ILLUSTRATED STAR WARS UNIVERSE, he told me that he would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and burned... I thought it dragged quite a lot. I *did* however enjoy the Boba Fett animated segment. And, in an unusual spinoff, I was thinking of the Diana Ross glittery-feathery alien when I designed my lovely female alien scientist Qwi Xux. Kevin J. Anderson
Steve Perry Author of Shadows of the Empire	I'd just as soon let the Holiday Special go on without me. When I saw it orginally, I wasn't too impressed and I'd just as soon not go down that road again . . . Steve
Animaniac (that's what he calls himself on his site!) Was an extra in the Special Editions.	Yup! I own it! Well, someone was selling copies of the Holiday Special at the opening night of Star Wars SE and I finally got to see it for the first time a few weeks ago! The tape also had Hardware Wars -- which was actually the best part of the tape. I am a die-hard Star Wars fan, but the whole story about the Wookies drove me crazy. I didn't like it very much at all! The first few minutes were kind of cool, just because it was a new part of the Star Wars universe, but as soon as the novelty wore off, the Wookies' grunts, silly names, dated jokes by dated celebs, bad filming, and bad acting turned the whole thing sour. (Lumpy? Come on!) I DID think that all the parts with Han and Chewie were cool though. The crazy disco part that came before the Wookies was pretty funny though! It was also badly filmed, etc. . . but you haven't quite lived until you've seen Stormtroopers dancing and singing "Into the Wild Blue Yonder." It made me laugh pretty hard! The Boba Fett cartoon was actually pretty cool! It was neat to see a somewhat rare part of the Star Wars Universe. (The first appearence of Boba.)
Michael P. Kube-MacDowell Wrote the Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy (which features Chewbacca's family)	I've never seen the SW Holiday Special. When I set out to recast and redeem the Lumpy story in THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS, I was drawing on a copy of the Star Wars Storybook which Lucasfilm loaned to me after turning down my proposal to give Chewbacca a polygamous family--I was obliged to work with the family Chewbacca already had. Which says to me, btw, that the Holiday Special, however hated, is viewed as canon by corporate Lucasfilm. Best, K-Mac
Roger MacBride Allen Wrote the Corellian Trilogy.	Dear Mr. Streeter -- Sorry for not responding to your previous message. I don't think I ever got it. If we're talking about the same thing, I have an extremely dim memory of seeing something pretty god-awful involving the Star Wars characters on badly lighted sets, and, somehow, Jefferson Starship coming on to do a number, the conceit being the characters were watching them on some sort of table-top three-dee projector. That's about all I know about it. All the best -- Roger MacBride Allen
L. Neil Smith Wrote the Lando Calrissian Trilogy.	Well, I hate to confess I didn't see it. Neil -- ====================================================================== "We no longer enslave animals for food." -- Commander William T. Riker (We simply eat the _aliens_ we don't get along with.)

I also had e-mailed Vonda N. McIntyre (Crystal Star).  She had no opinion on it.  I also e-mailed Ann Crispin (The Young Han Solo trilogy), and she said she had not seen it.  This was back in early 1997, but I later spoke to her in a chat, and she said that she had recently gotten to see it, and she said that she thought it was as dumb as a mudwall.

At the 1997 San Fransisco Science Fiction Exposition celebrating the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, August 22-24, 1997, I had a little minute-or-two conversation with Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca. Of course I can't give you his exact words, but about the Holiday Special, he said that it was a lot of fun to do, and that he was surprised to have a family, but he thought it was pretty funny to have a guy play his Wookiee wife Malla, because there probably weren't any female actresses that were as tall as him. Overall, he found it ' A lot of fun to do'.

I also spoke to Jeremy Bulloch, who played Boba Fett. He said that he wasn't in the Holiday Special, and that it wasn't his voice either (in the films, it isn't his voice either, because it was dubbed over with a synthesizer, and thus not the voice of a person). He told me he had never seen the entire Special, and that he didn't exactly have the desire to either.

I wrote Anthony "C-3PO" Daniels a letter featuring a question about what he thought of the show, and he answered it in his column in the Star Wars Insider magazine. However, it was a joke answer, and didn't actually say what he thought of it.

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