It’s a busy day for me: I’m gearing up for my first presentation on behalf of "The Empire", which will happen at Microsoft’s TechDays event in Calgary (Wednesday, December 10th and Thursday, December 11th). More on that in a later post.
In honour of this preparation, I thought: here’s an opportunity to riff on the theme of “The Empire” (and to provide you with some reading material) — I can present the storybook version of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Of course, back in those days, it was known simply as plain ol’ Star Wars.
The book came with a vinyl record that was meant to be played along with the book; I’ve included its audio below in MP3 format:
The voice work on the record is terribly off – whoever’s playing Darth Vader sounds more like Count Dracula, but you have to keep in mind the book was released in 1979, well before Star Wars had firmly established itself as part of the pop culture canon. Enjoy!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh my lord, I have these books kicking around somewhere. As a kid, we didn’t have a record player so I always thought the disc was a cosmic frisbee or something. To this day, I’ve never heard the recording.
@kobuta: Well, you’re in for a treat (and some silly voice acting, to boot)!
I had that book/record. Last year I found (a torrent of) a condensed edit of the film that used the record as the soundtrack. The memories (although the film version did not use my record as the soundtrack. There was a big scratch at the part where Artoo projects Leia’s message at Obi-Wan’s place. The scratch made the record go [Luke] “I wonder who she is – oo she is – oo she is – oo she is – oo she is”
I had a record like this, too, but the audio was from the movie. That is, the record was an abridged version of the movie, if I remember correctly. I might even still have it somewhere.
WOW! My brother and I had this record and also the Empire and Return records. We listened to them all the time on our Bee Gees record player. Thanks for the memories, it was great to hear that again as I am sure it has been at least 25 years.
tg