Listen to some of the earliest interviews given by the original cast of A New Hope for radio stations in 1978, including some very rare insights offered by the late Sir Alec Guinness!
As part of the marketing blitz staged by Twentieth Century Fox during the summer of 1978, fans were assaulted with Star Wars messaging from every conceivable media outlet -- magazines, television, movie trailers, restaurant promotions, toy store character appearances, and radio. There were, of course, countless promotions waged a year earlier for the film's 1977 debut, but 1978 was to be the year that Star Wars released wide, reaching small town theaters and audiences who may have missed it the first time around. This rare series of radio interviews was part of that marketing campaign.
In general, the public knew very little about the core cast back then -- Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford were relative unknowns at the time, while Alec Guinness was the only name generally well-known to American audiences. Fans may note that the announcer commentary leading each celebrity response sounds a bit tabloid-esque by today's standards -- so was the nature of 1970's radio promotion. The commentary was often provided to radio stations pre-scripted on cue sheets, allowing radio personalites to assume the role of "interviewer" by reading the cues corresponding to the celebrities' canned responses. We have restored these cues in their original form (thanks to Lucas Online's Bonnie Burton!), voicing them verbatim as they were originally scripted for the 1978 broadcast.
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1978 Star Wars Radio Interviews | Download
While the responses from Hamill, Fisher, and Ford lend some rare insight into their own personal reactions to the Star Wars phenomenon at the time, the real gem of the presentation is commentary offered by Sir Alec Guinness, an actor who rarely granted interviews or commentary on his iconic performance as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
