thumb|NPR Star Wars Radio Series promotional poster
A radio dramatization of the original Star Wars film trilogy was produced in 1981, 1983, and 1996. The first two radio series, based on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, were produced and broadcast by National Public Radio (NPR) as part of NPR Playhouse. A dramatization of Return of the Jedi was produced by most of the same team and it was also broadcast on NPR.
The radio serials were made with the full cooperation of George Lucas, who, in exchange for a dollar each, sold the rights to KUSC-FM, the public radio affiliate at his alma mater, the University of Southern California (USC). Lucas also permitted the use of original sound effects and music from the films.
Overview
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center; width:99%;"
! scope="col" | Serial
! scope="col" | Episodes
! scope="col" | First aired
! scope="col" | Last aired
! scope="col" | Director(s)
! scope="col" | Screenwriter(s)
! scope="col" | Home station
|-
! scope="row" | Star Wars
| 13
|
|
| rowspan="3" | John Madden
| rowspan="3" | Brian Daley
| rowspan="3" | NPR/KUSC
|-
! scope="row" | The Empire Strikes Back
| 10
|
|
|-
! scope="row" | Return of the Jedi
| 6
|
Despite Lucasfilm's generous offer, NPR was still faced with the costs of writing scripts, hiring actors and renting studio space. With no funding available to cover the $200,000 budget, NPR entered into a co-production deal with the British broadcaster, the BBC, which had a long tradition of radio drama production. The BBC provided a production team, including director John Madden, and in exchange received broadcasting rights in the United Kingdom. From the outset, the NPR producers felt that the script would lend itself well to an episodic treatment, drawing on the format of the 1930s movie serials such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers that had originally inspired Lucas when he wrote Star Wars.
The American science fiction novelist Brian Daley was brought in to write the script. Daley had access to Lucas's early drafts of the Star Wars scripts, and expanded the narrative to include material which had been cut from the final edit of the film so that the 13-episode radio adaptation ran approximately four hours longer than the film version. Casting the audio serial was not as easy as had been hoped; while the producers were able to secure the actors Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels from the original film, Harrison Ford was unavailable as he was filming Raiders of the Lost Ark at the time, and his place was taken by Perry King, an actor who once auditioned for the part of Han Solo in the 1977 film.
Led by Mankiewicz, NPR promoted the Star Wars serial with a successful publicity campaign, attracting coverage in Playboy, The New York Times and Time, who hailed the production with the headline, "Radio drama is making a resounding comeback". Star Wars was launched at a special NPR event at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, in which the drama was played under a starry light show. Broadcasts began in March 1981 to critical acclaim, and the drama instantly attracted 750,000 new listeners, representing a 40 percent increase in NPR audiences and a quadrupling of the network's youth audience. On the basis of this success, KUSC went on to produce popular adaptations of the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. An adaptation of Return of the Jedi followed over a decade later, and it was produced by many of the same people who produced the KUSC/NPR productions.
Canonicity and continuity
The Star Wars radio dramas were authorized adaptations of Lucas's scripts, and they were originally considered canon. Commentators argued that while the radio dramas varied somewhat from the film scripts, they should be considered canon insofar as they did not directly contradict the films. However, in 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm and the rights to Star Wars. In 1994, Lucasfilm's continuity editor, Allan Kausch, stated that "'Gospel', or 'canon' as we refer to it, includes the screenplays, the films, the radio dramas and the novelizations." In 2014 Lucasfilm announced that previous works which were set in the Expanded Universe (including comics, novels and videogames) were to be re-branded as Star Wars Legends, and only the Skywalker saga and The Clone Wars film and television series were to be considered canon, in addition to new spin-off works.
The first radio drama relates the backstory which immediately precedes the narrative of the original 1977 film, and this backstory overlaps with the Legends novels Jedi Dawn and Rebel Dawn and the 2016 film Rogue One. Commentators have since noted that the canon story which is introduced in Rogue One conflicts with episode 2 of the radio drama, "Points of Origin". In the radio drama, the Death Star plans are obtained after a Rebel attack on an Imperial convoy; Rebel agents then transmit the Death Star plans from the planet Toprawa to the Tantive IV. In Rogue One, the plans are transmitted from Scarif, where they were archived, to Admiral Raddus' flagship, the Profundity. The plans are then taken on board the docked Tantive IV, which launches before Darth Vader can recapture them.
In 2015 another adaptation of A New Hope was published, The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy. The author, Alexandra Bracken, stated that she was reading the Expanded Universe to try to "sneak elements in" to the canon and adapted material from the radio drama.