Evidence of Early Star Wars Fan Audio Dramas
in Classic Bantha Tracks
(source: Official Star Wars Website, 03-08-05)

ChronoRadio listener and Fanworks visitor Daniel Contreras has dropped us a line with a startling bit of information that has us fascinated.

It would seem that we have been wrong for a while now about the earliest fan audio productions to get widespread attention. For a while, we thought it was Star Wars: The Radio Play, released online in 1998. We later learned that The Adventures of the Galactic Star Force Power Squad, which was released online in 2004, had been originally produced back in 1993. Until now, that was the earliest evidence we have had of fan audio productions from Star Wars fandom.

Now, Daniel Contreras has pointed us to issue #22 (November 1983) of Bantha Tracks (the official Star Wars newsletter of the 1980s), which was reprinted in online form at the Official Star Wars Website as a Hyperspace Member Exclusive on Sept. 18, 2003. In that issue, we are informed of the winners in a Star Wars Creativity Contest. The 3,000 contest entries included artwork, written stories, and, yes, fan-made audio dramas.

A look at the results shows that the Grand Prize Winner was Nicole Courtney of Chicago, IL, who, at the age of 28, submimtted a "radiodrama" entitled The Dark Lords of the Sith. This of course also won in the Sound category, alongside another "radiodrama," Mission Peril by Abel Rodriguez (age 20) of Corona, NY. A synopsis of The Dark Lords of the Sith is also available in the Bantha Tracks article.

Further info from the article in the original Bantha Tracks (not the online version), reveals other titles, including David Rich's Battle of Kessel, Mark Moore's The Son of the Emperor, David Ransom's Prepare to Return, and Vicki Sharman's Princess Leia's Diary.

So, it would seem that Star Wars fan audio, as we long suspected but could never prove, actually began at least a decade before the production of Galactic in 1993, and the internet-release of Second Strike in 2002 may have been the birth of an internet genre of Star Wars fan audio dramas, but the notion and style of project has been around since at least 1983.

The article is a great find, and we thank Daniel for passing along the info to us. If you have a Hyperspace subscription, you can find a link to the specific Bantha Tracks article at the link below. (Sorry, though. Only Hyperspace members have access to that particular content on StarWars.com.)