- If you hate Christmas music, you’ll love hating this!
To the discerning deep nerd, the musical artist Meco needs no introduction. For everyone else, Meco, born Domenico Monardo, was the fella who contributed to the canon of Star Wars exploitation a deathless disco arrangement of John Williams’s theme music in 1977. Hunger for anything to do with the film was so intense that “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Music” was a number one radio hit, and the album that contained it, Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, made it to the top 20.
- Meco’s Greatest Hit
Meco tried his hand at other music—big band medleys, similar treatments of themes from The Wizard of Oz and The Black Hole—but his Star Wars spinoffs kept the bread buttered for several years after mania for the original film had abated—who can forget 1983’s “Ewok Celebration”? (See below the jump if you dare to care.)
- If it said Star Wars on it 1n 1977-’78, someone would buy it
Though both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi provided Meco with memorable musical moments to plunder, The Empire Strikes Back did not. So he did what any innovator would do: He wrote his own. And given his keen commercial instinct, it’s no surprise that when he did, he combined the Star Wars thing with the holiday song thing. The result was the beloved chestnut “What Can You Get a Wookiee For Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)?”—a confluence of novelty, exploitation, and sheer meretricious tackiness unrivaled in the canon before or since its 1980 release under Meco’s nom de guerre, The Star Wars Intergalactic Droid Choir & Chorale. (Attentive listeners may detect the stylistic debt owed to this number by Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer’s Waiting For Guffman gem “Nothing Ever Happens on Mars”—see below.)
Good luck getting this one out of your skull. Merry Christmas, fuzzball.
The celebrated b-side, “R2-D2, We Wish You a Merry Christmas” (featuring a young Jon Bongiovi on vocals), and more classics from the Meco hit parade after the jump.
“R2-D2, We Wish You a Merry Christmas”
The Original Star Wars Disco Jam:
“Ewok Celebration” a.k.a. (“Yub Yub”):
The Wizard of Oz Part One:
The Wizard of Oz Part Two:
The Black Hole:
“Big Band Medley”:
And, his gesamtkunstwerk, “Pop Goes the Movies, Part One”:
BONUS TRACK:
“Nothing Ever Happens on Mars”
