Brian J. Robb explores the unlikely success of Star Wars on radio…

Opposite: Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels at the microphone recording their roles of Luke and C-3P0 respectively

Fand post-war years that caught listeners’ imaginations. operas (domestic dramas, so called due to their sponsorship by soap powder manufacturers) were family favourites, it was the pulp dramas of the 1930s rom the 1920s until the advent of television in the 1950s, there was a ‘golden age’ of radio drama in the US. Although variety entertainment and soap

Hollywood movies were adapted, while thrilling fantasy series like Lights Out and Suspense entertained a young George Lucas.

By the 1970s radio drama in the US had gone into a dramatic decline (although it continued to thrive in the UK and elsewhere in Europe). One last outpost was the part-publicly funded National Public Radio (NPR), where Richard Toscan—associate dean of the University of Southern California School of the Performing Arts—was trying to keep the art form alive.

He’d been encouraged by John Houseman, then USC’s artistic director. Houseman had once been Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air producer, responsible for the controversial 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Starting with the NPR-affiliated campus station, KUSC, Toscan first adapted the short stories of Raymond Carver to audio.

In the early 1980s NPR Playhouse was looking to expand their radio drama productions, but wanted a property that would benefit fully from advances in audio technology and the full range of dynamic audio and music effects then available. While Houseman and Toscan began a search for suitable material, it fell to Joel Rosenzweig—one of Toscan’s students—to suggest ‘Why don’t you do Star Wars?’

Toscan, Houseman, and NPR producer Frank Mankiewicz immediately recognised the challenge—movies had been adapted before for radio, especially during the golden age, but Star Wars was one of the most visually impressive and successful movies of all time. How could they capture the sheer excitement and drama of Star Wars with sound only? The serial nature of any adaptation would draw on those old movie serials, like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, which had inspired Lucas. The movie also had the kind of broad appeal that NPR were looking for, as they saw their dramas as attracting a new, younger audiences to their long established service.