Talking About 'Star Wars': Have you listened to 'Star Wars: The Radio Drama'? Does its subplot about the Death Star plans impact 'Legends'?

Have you listened to 'Star Wars: The Radio Drama'?  Does its subplot about the Death Star plans impact 'Legends'?

If you’re referring to 1981’s Star Wars: The Radio Drama, of course I have!

Brian Daley (1947-1996) Photo Credit: Beauregard Simmons, www.briandaley.com

So have many other Star Wars fans, both at the time that Brian Daley’s 13-part adaptation aired on National Public Radio and later, when Highbridge Audio (a subsidiary of Minnesota Public Radio) released it on audiocassette and compact disc in the early 1990s.

In fact, I have two box sets of the Star Wars: The Radio Dramas. One is the “as heard on NPR” edition that most people own on tape, CD, or MP3 audio files; the other is the pricier Limited Collector’s Edition set that presents the Radio Dramas as they were originally recorded, without the edits asked for by NPR stations for station identification breaks and other industry-related issues.

In case some of the readers aren’t aware of this, in 1980, then-Lucasfilm vice president for publications Carol Titleman hired science fiction novelist Daley to adapt Star Wars (aka Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope) into a radio dramatization. The idea was not hers; one of National Public Radio’s execs pitched the idea to Lucasfilm in a bid to get new content for a new program called NPR Playhouse. The suggestion wound up being heard by George Lucas, who not only authorized Titleman to sign off on the project but also sold the licensing rights to his alma mater’s radio station, KUSC-Los Angeles (an NPR affiliate) for $1.

Titleman chose Daley because she had liked how he had handled Lucasfilm characters in his best-selling Han Solo trilogy of novels, and he was authorized to expand the story of Star Wars a bit beyond the confines of Lucas’s 121-minute film. This meant that in addition to using deleted scenes from the movie, including Luke Skywalker’s exploits as a skyhopper racer in Beggar’s Canyon, his conversation with Biggs Darklighter about someday joining the Rebellion, Daley could set up the film’s backstory by delving into some of Princess Leia’s mercy missions on behalf of the Alliance.

Which brings us to the subplot of Operation Skyhook, the Rebel mission to steal the Death Star plans and seek a vulnerability that might lead to the destruction of the Empire’s planet-killing battle station.

Back then, John Knoll, the Lucasfilm special effects expert who is now the company’s VP for creative affairs, was a teenaged fan and had not yet dreamed up the story that eventually got made as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In 1981 there was no Director Orson Krennic, or Galen and Jyn Erso, or Saw Gerrera, or Cassian Andor and K-2SO.

Instead, there was the Imperial invasion of Raltiir, a planet that had just joined the Rebellion; Lord Tion, a minor noble with connections to Grand Moff Tarkin; a Rebel soldier who had, under hypnosis, been instructed to warn the Rebellion that the Death Star plans had been stolen during a great battle (not at Scarif); and that the agents who had them were on another planet called Toprawa.

This backstory was depicted, through sound effects, voice acting, and John Williams’s Star Wars music, in the bulk of two of the 13 episodes: Points of Origin and Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns. (The Radio Drama eventually catches up to the events of the movie in the second half of the third episode; Luke’s backstory on Tatooine is described in the first episode, A Wind to Shake the Stars.)

Highbridge Audio, which was affiliated with Minnesota Public Radio, published the audiocassette and compact disc sets of Star Wars: The Radio Drama. © 1995 Highbridge Audio and Lucasfilm Ltd. 

For many years - at least till the late 1990s or early 2000s - Lucasfilm’s official position was that the Radio Dramas were co-equal in canon to the Star Wars Trilogy. After all, Daley drew most of his material from the films themselves, only adding “fill-in-the-blanks” information of his own to answer such questions as “How did the Rebels steal the Death Star plans?” or “How did Luke become a Commander in the Rebel Alliance before the Battle of Hoth?”

Because of this, many authors, especially Michael A. Stackpole in his X-Wing novels, referred to people, planets, and events from the Radio Dramas. In one novel (don’t ask me which one), we are told that the Empire exacted a painful revenge on the inhabitants of Toprawa for allowing the Rebels to transmit the Death Star plans to the Alliance. In another novel, a Rebel ship called the Derra IV makes an appearance; this is a reference to an Imperial victory over a Rebel convoy ferrying supplies to Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back: The Radio Drama.

Daley’s trilogy of Radio Dramas thus had a great deal of influence in what we now know as Star Wars Legends, mostly because it was popular with fans at a time when all we had was the Star Wars Trilogy, a handful of Expanded Universe novels, and the Star Wars Role Playing Game, which also drew some of its data from the Radio Dramas based on A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.

As with everything else Star Wars-related, the Radio Dramas’ status in the official canon has evolved over time.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, before Highbridge Audio was given permission to produce the Return of the Jedi Radio Drama (1996), the NPR series had the same “yes, this is the official story” level of the canon of the novels and comics directly derived from the movies. After all, Lucas had vetted it, Ben Burtt’s sound effects and John Williams’ music were used, and in the case of the first two series, Mark Hamill himself played Luke Skywalker while his cast-mate, Anthony Daniels, reprised his role as C-3PO in all three Radio Dramas. (Billy Dee Williams also played Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back: The Radio Drama back in 1982, but when Return of the Jedi was finally made in 1996, both he and Hamill were unavailable. Luke was played by voice actor Joshua Fardon, while the suave Lando was portrayed by Arye Gross.)

Now Lucasfilm’s official position, stated as far back as 2005, is that only the material directly derived from the films is canon; everything else that Daley invented and that the Lucasfilm Story Group does not later use is Legends.

The one instance that I’m aware of in which original material from Daley’s Radio Drama becomes canonical occurs in Star Wars: A Certain Point of View, an anthology of 40 short stories that tell the narrative of A New Hope from the perspective of secondary or even tertiary characters. In Pablo Hidalgo’s “Verge of Greatness,” a story that is told from Grand Moff Tarkin’s point of view, the Lucasfilm Story Group member quotes, word for word, a conversation between Tarkin and Admiral Motti written by the late Brian Daley for the Star Wars Radio Drama, thus making it part of the canon.