Talking About 'Star Wars': In Star Wars: The Radio Drama, there are episodes that tell how the Death Star plans were stolen in detail. Why weren’t these ideas used in Rogue One?

In Star Wars: The Radio Drama, there are episodes that tell how the Death Star plans were stolen in detail. Why weren’t these ideas used in Rogue One?

© 1981 National Public Radio and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL)

There are several reasons why the Brian Daley-created bits of Star Wars: The Radio Drama were ignored when John Knoll, Lucasfilm’s VP for Creative Affairs and former special effects head at the studio pitched his idea for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to his boss, Kathy Kennedy. One of them is purely conjectural on my part, but the others are based on the movie industry reality.

• Daley’s expository material for Star Wars’ Princess Leia was not cinematic enough: Sure, the Imperial invasion of Raltiir, Leia’s initial encounters with Vader and Lord Tion, and Tion’s subsequent (and fatal) visit to Alderaan work well as a radio story, but it’s hard to see Lucasfilm shelling out a huge budget for a film with not that many action scenes. Daley’s two-episode story arc (Points of Origin and Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns) doesn’t even depict the battle in which the Death Star plans are stolen; it just covers the Princess’s flight to Toprawa aboard the Tantive IV and receiving the stolen plans from Rebel agents via a transmission from that planet’s surface. It’s informative, sure, but it is talky and would have been difficult to adapt in a satisfactory manner
• Even though many Star Wars fans have heard the Radio Dramas and even own them on cassette, CD, or mp3 files, that portion of the fandom is small in comparison to the larger, wider audience. So if Lucasfilm had announced that it was going to make a “how the Rebel spies stole the Death Star plans” based on a radio serial most of the world had not listened to, it might not have been received well
• Also, there is the whole “why should we tell a story that many people already know?” bit of business. This is one of the reasons why most screenwriters go out of their way to make movie adaptations of novels or short stories as different from their literary sources as possible while still staying true to their characters, themes, and situations
• It’s possible, however unlikely, that John Knoll may not have heard the Radio Drama. Knoll was 18 when National Public Radio aired the 13-part radio adaptation of Star Wars in 1981, so he was probably busy with his studies in high school and first year at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts

© 2016 Lucasfilm Ltd. 

These are my (admittedly) educated guesses. It’s possible, for instance, that everyone involved in the making of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, including director Gareth Edwards, knew of Daley’s version but decided to ignore it. By the same token, it’s also likely that the reverse was true.

In any case, while I enjoy the 1981 version of how Leia acquired the Death Star plans, I like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story more.