In the 1980s,
radio drama was in decline in the United States. An associate dean of the
University of California School of the Performing Arts, Richard Toscan, was keen to champion this art form. Toscan was supported by
John Houseman, the producer responsible for
Orson Welles's 1938 radio production of
The War of the Worlds. He began with the dramatisation of short stories by
Raymond Carver on
KUSC-FM, a
campus radio station affiliated to NPR. Following this production, Toscan collaborated with Houseman and NPR producer
Frank Mankiewicz on a project to revive the fortunes of
NPR Playhouse, the umbrella title for drama productions on NPR. At the suggestion of one of Toscan's students, Joel Rosenzweig, they developed an idea for adapting the 1977 epic
space opera film
Star Wars for radio. The popularity of
Star Wars would certainly attract new, younger listeners, but they feared that the production costs would be prohibitively high. However, the production team's academic connections proved to be advantageous: USC is the alma mater of the writer and director of
Star Wars, George Lucas, and
Lucasfilm quickly granted the rights to KUSC, including the rights to the use of original
Star Wars music and sound effects, for a
token fee of one dollar. 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==