“You wanna shoot first?”

“After you.”

Starting with the very original Star Wars Holiday Special, I decided that I wanted to watch all of the Star Wars feature-length films that I hadn’t seen yet, including both the Holiday Special and the two straight-to-video Ewok movies. Out of technicality, this also happened to include the LEGO specials that came out on Disney Plus a few years back, because they were at least forty minutes or longer, which, according to Academy rules, counts as feature length. The first movie that came out from those was LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, and I honestly had no idea what to expect from it. It had relatively positive reception online, but I didn’t know if it was going to go too far into “kiddy” territory for me to actually enjoy.

I was extremely pleasantly surprised by this, as cheesy as it may sound, since it is quite literally targeted towards kids. To start things off with my review, it’s just, to put it in the simplest terms, a really fun fifty or so minutes. While it is specially designed for Christmas and the holidays, that is honestly more of a backdrop than anything. The main story revolves around Rey finding this device that allows her to time-travel to different important events in the galaxy; important events that we all know and love (well, at least most of us). It was just really cool to see Rey interacting with other iconic characters in their different phases of life in different scenes from the saga. Yes, there is a silly tone to it, but that is what I am going to get into next.

For being something designed for children, the writers and creative team absolutely nailed the humor here, in my opinion. One of the most shocking things about this special/movie is that it is willing to make fun of some of the more debated and less universally praised parts of the movies, which I found to be quite refreshing, especially because, believe it or not, this movie actually makes fun of some of the elements of the sequel trilogy! There isn’t too much that it makes fun of when it comes to the prequels, but there are a lot of things that it does make fun of with the originals, such as stuff from the special editions and some of the logic issues from Return of the Jedi, even though I love that film. As far as the sequels go, I was honestly kind of shocked, considering this came out literally only a year removed from those movies coming to a close. We get a lot of jokes targeting how the sequels were, even if people love them (which I absolutely respect), pretty derivative of the original trilogy, as well as the more obvious things from The Rise of Skywalker, which, to say it again, came out only a year before this special’s release.

And for being a made-for-streaming special that probably had a pretty low budget all things considered, I think the animation was really well executed. It looks a lot like how the LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga video game looked, and with this special kind of remaking some of the more iconic scenes from the franchise, it has me really curious with seeing all of the mainline Star Wars movies recreated in this animation style, even though that would probably never happen. With how fast Disney was able to pump out these specials over the course of a couple of years, I honestly don’t think that would be completely impossible. Anyway, talking more about the animation, this also has plenty of really fun action. There are a few lightsaber duels here and there, and I know some people will roll their eyes at this, and yes, I am aware that this was animated and not live action, but the choreography was honestly better than anything we got from the sequels, which is kind of sad.

The main element of this special that I somewhat intentionally saved for last was that there is a big part of this story that made the disappointment with The Rise of Skywalker hit even harder in retrospect. I am not going to go too far into details with this, because I went back and watched the trailer for this just to double-check while writing this review, but where they start to take Finn’s character in this, as ridiculous as it sounds for a kids’ TV special, is way more interesting than what we got in episode nine, which was practically nothing if I’m being honest. It’s more of what we should have gotten with his character, instead of the absolutely wasted potential that we did get.

I don’t have any negatives, but the one mixed that I do have is a fairly predictable one, and that is some, and I mean some of the humor. Yes, most of it worked really well for me, but for being something made for kids, there is still, of course, some cheesy humor that adults, including myself, will find pretty cringeworthy. As I said, it’s not a negative because there really isn’t enough of it to justify it being a negative, but it’s still there nonetheless.

As I (hopefully) made it clear, though, I had an absolute blast for the fifty minutes that I spent with this, and am now pretty curious to check out the other two specials (Terrifying Tales and Summer Vacation).