The Story of the Faithful Wookiee

Chewie is behaving weirdly: he's tied up Han, and refusing to return to base. Luke and the two droids go to investigate.

This is the only part of the infamous Star Wars holiday special currently available on Disney Plus. While it's not something you need to rush out and watch, it's a perfectly fine way to pass nine minutes. The animation is clearly working off a TV budget, in no way as impressive as what Disney was delivering at the time, or what Studio Ghibli would deliver starting in '84, a mere six years later. Princess Leia, frustratingly not allowed on the adventure, looks perfectly fine but the other returning characters are all in the uncanny valley.

It does not have very much in the way of action, and the plot, though a decent mystery hook, doesn't really make it essential viewing. This is the first on screen appearance of Boba Fett, and his riding the mythosaur has gone from a kind of cool visual here to being extremely important in The Mandalorian.

I recommend this only to completeists. 6/10.

I've seen the Holiday Special and I regret it ever since, but when I saw the title The Story of the Wookiee on Disney+, I wasn't sure how it's going turn out and I noticed it's the same cartoon as the one that was part of the special. Watching 9 mins of this recently is honestly better than how I watched it with an hour and a half of the entire holiday special on YouTube almost 7 years ago. The animation is not perfect by all means, but I'm pretty sure you get the idea on how it was made. On top of that, I feel like we wouldn't have had Boba Fett from movies and shows, nor even Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones, especially The Mandalorian series if it wasn't for Boba Fett's first appearance in The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, and don't get me wrong, those Star Wars works, including The Book of Boba Fett, are a lot better than The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, even if the cartoon is apart of the holiday special, and we still have that cartoon to thank for that.

I did rank this a 7/10 (in case you couldn't tell), but if anything, I wish I would have the option to rate this a 6.5/10 instead of either 6/10 or 7/10 because I feel like this cartoon is somewhere in between those numbers when it comes to IMDB star ratings, but that's just me.

This movie doesnt accomplish much but its nice for being old and 9 minutes long. Weird choice on Han Solo animation. Not really an accurate title either. Animation is alright i guess.

The Faithful Wookiee was originally part of the dreaded Star Wars Holiday Special, something that speaks for itself. But the sequence that introduced the world to Boba Fett wasn't all that bad; it was just a bizarre choice of style that clashed with the original Star Wars' aesthetic (the characters having four digits was SUPER weird; it's meant to be five if it's trying to pass off as being consistent with the film's canon). Let's not even get started with Han's infamously smooshed face that kept morphing into freakishly weird and warped interpretations of Harrison Ford's face.

The Faithful Wookiee is an interesting if somewhat baffling but of Star Wars history; it came out during a time when there was no Star Wars media outside the original film, and knowing the troubles production of The Holiday Special makes this little segment somewhat endearing being part of television's greatest disaster in the 1970s.

Now that this has been retroactively made into a short film, The Faithful Wookiee is definitely worth looking into for Star Wars diehards, but maybe ONLY for them because of its historical value to the fandom. 3/5 stars.