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When we talk about streaming culture, we’re usually enthusing about what’s new, but one of the best things about streaming is how it’s made old and obscure cult hits available to a new generation. Presenting Cult Corner: your weekly look into hidden gems and long-lost curiosities that you can find on streaming.

For the month of December, we’ll be focusing on obscure and offbeat holiday programming.

Even the staunchest Star Wars fan will throw 1978’s The Star Wars Holiday Special under the bus. The two hour made-for-TV special was the first feature-length follow up to Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope and is an unwatchable crime against entertainment. The songs are terrible, the dialogue’s atrocious, and there’s a weird moment where Bea Arthur has to sing a song to a bunch of aliens in a cantina. Simply put: this is the worst Star Wars “sequel” ever made.

George Lucas was immediately unhappy with the special and has repeatedly disowned it. Much like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it was born of a moment where corporate entities decided to wrestle his beloved franchise out of his hands to cash in on a big holiday season paycheck. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was made with love and care and a massive creative budget (and is getting good reviews); The Star Wars Holiday Special was made of nightmares.

I’m a tried and true Star Wars fan and still I have never been able to sit through all of The Star Wars Holiday Special. What makes it so terrible? Let’s start with the fact that it’s really boring. The plot focuses on Chewbacca’s family and their hopes to see Chewie again for their version of Christmas, called “Life Day.” This should be good, right? We want to know more about our favorite Wookie and his backstory. We get to explore the planet of Kashyyyk (here called “Kazook”) and see Han, Luke, and Leia again. The problem is the film features long, painfully terrible scenes of these mostly mute Wookies being domestic. There’s no action, no real tension, just a series of domestic vignettes played out without words. These scenes are uncomfortable and are obviously just intended to fill time in between celebrity cameos. One of the weirdest vignettes is when Malla is trying to cook bantha for Chewie. She struggles to follow along with an alien Julia Child played by Harvey Korman.

Then, there are the confounding musical numbers. Jefferson Starship, Diahann Carroll, and Bea Arthur all pop up to sing completely grating and out-of-place tunes. Poor Carrie Fisher has to close out the special with a strange ballad that sounds like the Man of La Mancha score and John Williams’ Star Wars theme were swirled together in a blender of hate. To his credit, Harrison Ford actually seems to try to be in the moment in some of the scenes. Fans only value the special because it marks the first canonical appearance of Boba Fett. The enigmatic bounty hunter pops up in an interstitial animated short. However, that cartoon — as well as many of the better musical moments — are hard to track down because of copyright disputes.

The Star Wars Holiday Special would have faded into an urban myth if not for the internet. Before pirating sites and streaming platforms existed, the only way you could see the maligned special is if you had one of the rare bootleg tapes of it. Then, with the advent of uploads and torrenting, the average Star Wars fan could search it down and download it illegally. Today, the best way to watch it is on YouTube. That is, if you want to watch it. But then, who doesn’t want to watch Chewbacca erotically sniff down his wife?

The Star Wars Holiday Special is not necessarily a welcome addition to the Star Wars saga, but it is a symbol of the power that streaming has to resurrect the sins of the past. It shows how through digitizing content, more people have the power to watch more titles. We often talk about how great this is because there’s greater access to so many rare and wonderful things. The dark side of that is that we can also watch more rare and terrible things.

[Watch The Star Wars Holiday Special on YouTube]

Previously On Cult Corner:

Cult Corner: Is Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas Too Weird For The Holidays?

Cult Corner: The Christmas Toy Gave Us A Darker Toy Story Before Pixar Was Even A Thing

Cult Corner: How To Live Stream Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day For Free!