'Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization' book review

-




(C) 1994 Ballantine/Del Rey Books
Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization

Radio Play by Brian Daley

Based on characters and situations created by George Lucas



Star Wars: If you missed the thirteen-part radio series, you haven’t heard the whole story. – Brian Daley

A long time ago (35 years ago, actually) in an efficiency apartment on the West Coast, a young novelist named Brian Daley undertook a mission worthy of a Jedi Knight – to adapt George Lucas’s original Star Wars movie into a thirteen-part radio drama for National Public Radio.

Daley was chosen to translate Lucas’s cinematic work into an audio-only dramatization by Carol Titleman, the Lucasfilm executive who oversaw the Radio Drama, because she’d liked what the author had done with Star Wars material in Han Solo at Star’s End. Daley spent three months working on the scripts for the Radio Drama, which premiered in the spring of 1981 as part of NPR Playhouse

Star Wars: The Radio Drama was a spectacular success: 750,000 listeners heard the show when it originally aired, and the network’s drama listenership grew by 135%. The series’ ratings were so good, in fact, that two follow-up series based on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were produced and broadcast (in 1983 and 1996, respectively).

Thirteen years later, Ballantine Books’ Del Rey imprint published Star Wars: The National Public Radio, a 352 page paperback with Daley’s complete scripts in their original form.

What you now hold in your hands are the thirteen original, uncut scripts, just as they were when we took them into the studio. Astute listeners will notice discrepancies between these and the final recordings. – Brian Daley

Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization consists of an introduction by the late science fiction writer, who died of cancer in 1996, and a chapter for each of the Radio Drama’s thirteen parts:

  1. A Wind to Shake the Stars
  2. Points of Origin
  3. Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns
  4. While Giants Mark Time
  5. Jedi That Was, Jedi to Be
  6. The Millennium Falcon Deal
  7. The Han Solo Solution
  8. Death Star's Transit
  9. Rogues, Rebels and Robots
  10. The Luke Skywalker Initiative
  11. The Jedi Nexus
  12. The Case for Rebellion
  13. Force and Counter Force



My Take

Brian Daley’s Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization is one of my favorite Star Wars resource books, even though it’s now out of print and available only from used book sellers, mostly online ones. It not only presents the radio scripts in their pre-broadcast form, but its foreword also sheds some light into the creative process involved in translating Star Wars (aka Star Wars – Episode IV: A New Hope) from screen to radio.

Taping was a learn-as-you-go experience for all of us. It had been thought that the stormtroopers’ helmeted voices could be emulated by having the actors wear plastic and foam-filter painter’s masks, but the results didn’t “read” properly for the microphones. In the end the actor-troopers were isolated, as Tony Daniels was, and their voices were processed later.

Daley also explains some of the reasons why the episodes that aired on NPR differ slightly from the scripts in the book:

Between the first broadcast of the series and the second, some lines were cut to allow for a full credit roll at the end of each episode. That’s why, for example, part of Leia’s conversation with her father in Chapter 2 was trimmed. For those who’ve been wondering what they missed, the script shows the scene in its entirety.

Brian Daley’s style is clean, elegant, and witty. He not only gives reader’s an insider’s perspective into the creative process involved in making the series, but he is also generous in his praise for the Star Wars Radio Drama team. In his foreword, he explains how George Lucas sold the radio licensing rights for Star Wars to KUSC-FM in Los Angeles. The asking price? $1.00. “It was a striking act of philanthropy,” Daley writes, “but he wanted the show to be unprecedented, as his movie was something unprecedented.”

Canon Issues

When Star Wars: The National Public Radio Dramatization was published in 1994, Lucasfilm Limited considered Daley’s expansions, such as Leia’s covert mission on the planet Raltiir and some of Luke Skywalker’s backstory, to be Star Wars canon just like the films. However, since Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise, only the material derived directly from the film and its 1976 novelization are considered canon. Everything else is now considered to be part of the Star Wars Legends non-canon mythology.









Book Details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Del Rey; First edition (September 20, 1994)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0345391098
  • ISBN-13: 978-0345391094


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O.,
Read more

Bolero: The One Movie I Have Seen That I Wish Could Be Erased From My Memory

-
Image
If you could have 1 movie that you’ve seen in the past erased from your memory, what movie would that be and why? That’s easy.  Bolero. © 1984 Cannon Film Group Now, I have seen more than my fair share of movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t enjoy at all or once liked but have changed my mind about as I have grown older.  Me Before You  is an example of the former;  Avatar  and  Midway  are exemplars of the latter. But writer-director John Derek’s softcore porn movie disguised as an “adventure in ecstasy” is still the dumbest, most boring film I ever paid a movie ticket to go see in an actual multiplex. It’s so bad, in fact, that my friends (yes, I went with a coed group of buds from college) and I decided, collectively, that as spectacular as Bo Derek looks naked, she was way too old to play a nubile if naive girl in her 20s. The story was just a barely-there plot woven together around a series of nude scenes (including the obligatory girl-girl scene) that
Read more