If you’re filling Star Wars Day (May the 4th) with Star Wars media, and you need a breather between intense episodes of Andor, you can do no better than the Mark Hamill episode of The Muppet Show. Featuring Hamill both as himself and as Luke Skywalker, alongside R2-D2, C-3PO, and Chewbacca, the episode features the Star Wars staples in wonderfully out-of-character moments, a great running joke at Hamill’s expense, and an ending that seems shockingly prescient.
Airing during The Muppet Show’s fourth season in Feb. 1980, the episode begins with a fakeout. Scooter comes into the dressing room of the “host,” a Muppet named Angus McGonagle, a plaid-wearing gargoyle who can gargle George Gershwin tunes. Suddenly, Luke Skywalker busts through a wall with his two loyal droids R2-D2 and C-3PO. They’re on a mission to rescue Chewbacca, and they’ve crashed the Muppets’ show because they got a galactic telegram from Chewy saying he’s being held captive by “a bunch of weird turkeys.” Showing Kermit the note, C-3PO says, “It does rather sound like your show.” Kermit can’t help but agree.
The “rescue Chewy” plotline is only really a loose thread used as an excuse to place the Star Wars characters in the best possible familiar Muppet Show locations — namely, the planet Koozebane and the Swine Trek, the spaceship featured in the recurring “Pigs in Space” sketches, where Captain Link Hogthrob, First Mate Piggy, and Julius Strangepork go on ridiculous sci-fi adventures. In this episode, Luke hijacks the Swine Trek to go save Chewy, which gives Strangepork the opportunity to marvel over R2-D2 and Miss Piggy a chance to don Princess Leia’s hairdo and fawn over Luke.
Then they arrive on Koozebane, which in previous episodes has been home to a bunch of sketches where Kermit, in an old-school journalist trenchcoat, reports on the behavior of the aliens who live there. On the alien planet, Luke, the droids, and the Muppets rescue Chewy from Dearth Nadir (Gonzo dressed like Darth Vader). In very Muppety fashion, they defeat Nadir with a big musical number which features Chewy and R2-D2 dancing together, C-3PO tap-dancing, and Mark Hamill, as himself, finally getting to sing and dance.
Up until this point in the episode, Hamill has been backstage at The Muppet Show, between scenes with Luke Skywalker, who he claims is his cousin. Hamill tells Kermit and Fozzie that he really wants to perform on the show, but they’re hilariously uninterested, and they reject all his performance ideas. The episode shows off what a ham Hamill is in a way he wouldn’t really be appreciated for until his voice acting career took off in the 1990s.
But at the end of the episode, Hamill gets his due when he (as himself) leads the Muppets and the Star Wars characters in a rendition of the Disney musical mainstay “When You Wish Upon a Star.” At the time, it played as a Star Wars joke simply because “star” is in the title. (The characters even precede it by singing another “star” song, “You Are My Lucky Star.”) But 46 years after the episode was released, the song seems like spookily accurate foreshadowing.
At the time, George Lucas still owned Star Wars and Jim Henson still owned the Muppets. But in 2004, Disney bought the Muppets. Eight years later, in 2012, the company also bought Star Wars. Perhaps in 2026, after Disney has scooped up countless other companies, it’s hard to grasp how strange this Muppet Show moment is, but back in 1980, Disney was mostly just focused on its own properties. (And A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, which the corporation wouldn’t actually own until 2001.) Back then, no one could have guessed that the company the Muppets and Star Wars characters lovingly lampoon in this episode would eventually own all the characters on screen.
Overall, Mark Hamill’s episode of The Muppet Show is just a bit of lighthearted entertainment. It came out a few months before The Empire Strikes Back was released, so it was merely a way to promote the film and have some fun with the characters. And today, the episode is still full of good jokes and unique moments for both the Muppets and the Star Wars characters. By sheer coincidence, however, it happens to predict the future more accurately than even the most powerful Jedi could have.
The Muppet Show is available to watch on Disney Plus.
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