Empire Strikes Back Storybook (Paperback)

For those looking for an in-depth Star Wars read, look elsewhere. This is casual reading material. The book's pacing is brisk and the reading light. Experienced readers will polish this off in one lazy Saturday afternoon, while younger readers will enjoy this over the course of a week. This isn't a BAD thing, of course - it just is what it is. And what it is, is a fairly run of the mill movie novelization.

While this isn't as essential as some original Star Wars books, most notably those by Timothy Zhan, hardcore Star Wars fans will probably want to check this out. It is, after all, one of the core group of stories around which the Star Wars universe was based. In addition, some non-film material (Luke training with Yoda comes to mind) is interesting enough to make you see the movie in a different light. Just don't expect classic literature. This is a novelization of a movie, and reads like it. Nice beach reading, and little more.

Three years after the Battle of Yavin, the Rebel Alliance is fighting for its very existence. Though they had won a significant victory with the destruction of the Death Star, the evil lord Darth Vader survived and made his way to the Imperial capital, where Emperor Palpatine gave him the ultimate assignment -- to find and destroy the Rebel leadership and crush the Rebellion once and for all. For three years Vader's Imperial Death Squadron of six Star Destroyers -- including his own massive flagship -- has pursued the Rebels from system to system.

Vader is driven, too, to find one Rebel commander in particular: Luke Skywalker. Sometime after the defeat at Yavin, Vader discovered that Luke was the pilot who, with the assistance of the mystical energy field known as the Force, fired the torpedo that destroyed the Death Star. Realizing the young Rebel's untapped -- and untrained -- Jedi powers, Vader has made it his mission in life to capture Luke and, eventually, turn him to the dark side of the Force.

So when an Imperial probe droid spots evidence of a hidden Rebel base on the remote ice world of Hoth, Vader unleashes his legions of stormtroopers against the small Rebel force. In a brief but violent battle, the Empire overwhelms the Alliance troops fighting a rear-guard action, but the bulk of the Rebels, including Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Luke, and the droids escape.

Vader doesn't know, however, that the Star Warriors have set out on diverging paths. While Han, Chewie, Leia and See Threepio fly off in the damaged Millennium Falcon in a desperate attempt to rejoin the Rebel fleet, Luke and Artoo are on their X-wing starfighter on a different mission altogether. For the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Vader's former Jedi Master and now Luke's spirit-guide, has sent Luke to the Dagobah system. There, he will seek Yoda, the Jedi Master who first instructed Kenobi.

Although Glut (like all Star Wars adapters) had to use an earlier draft of Kasdan's screenplay (Yoda, for instance, is described as being bluish and with long white hair parted in the middle), he is a good enough writer and captures the essence of the film's characters and new settings.

Following the success of NPR's 13-part radio adaptation of Star Wars, writer Brian Daley reunited with director John Madden and post-production wizard Tom Voegeli to bring The Empire Strikes Back to the airwaves. Having attracted large audiences (for public radio) with the Star Wars Radio Drama, NPR and everyone involved in the ambitious project were anxious to prove that lightning could, indeed, strike twice.

After all, Star Wars films are best known for their visual effects, so many people, including fans, were surprised that Star Wars worked well as a radio serial. But visuals are only part of the movie-going experience, after all. Where would any movie be without characters? Or sound? Or music? Or, for that matter, a coherent narrative thread? (And before someone points out that movies were silent once, I will remind readers that yes, they were silent, but they had musical accompaniment.) Furthermore, expanding the two-hour-plus film into 10 episodes gave familiar characters both depth and color.

The Empire Strikes Back Radio Drama opens with action when a Rebel convoy bound for Hoth is ambushed by waves of Imperial TIE fighters and annihilated near Derra IV. We then cut directly to the opening of the movie, when an Imperial Star Destroyer launches a batch of probe droids programmed to seek out the Rebels' new hidden base. Then we are reunited with our favorite heroes on the icy planet Hoth....and, well, if you have seen the classic trilogy, you know the Empire will definitely strike back.

In addition to the original cast from the Star Wars Radio Drama (which included Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels - both reprising their film roles of Luke Skywalker and C-3PO - Perry King, Ann Sachs, Bernard Behrens, and Brock Peters), Madden was able to enlist Billy Dee Williams to be the voice of Lando Calrissian, the charming but duplicitous Baron Administrator of Cloud City. To round out the major characters from Empire, John Lithgow was cast as Yoda. (He doesn't sound much like Frank Oz, but after a while one gets used to this and gets swept away in the story.)

Although this Radio Drama also expands the story somewhat (it has 10 episodes and runs for roughly five hours), it sticks to its source material and leaves the cliffhanger ending intact. Most of the new material covers the prelude to the battle of Hoth (we get to hear Han and Luke trying to survive that horrible night in an emergency shelter on the ice plains near Echo Base, for instance), and of course Daley and Madden often have to resort to the old radio conventions of characters having to say what they see or are doing.

There were, of course, plans to make a radio adaptation of Return of the Jedi, but it got, as Han Solo says in that film to Jabba, "a little sidetracked" by budget woes at NPR. It did get made at last, but that story will have to wait a bit....