Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Review: 'Star Wars Encyclopedia'

Once nothing more than a single extremely, extremely popular space-fantasy flick, Star Wars soon expanded into a line of Marvel comics, then a funky TV holiday special, then a sequel, and then another sequel. Read-along records and Dixie cups aside, that basically brings us to 1983. Over the following four decades, what it means to be Star Wars would continue to swell, ultimately encompassing eight more feature films, numerous cartoons and live-action TV series, countless comics, novel series, and games, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It's only a matter of time before Guerra de las Galaxias: La Telenovela debuts.