Chasing Shadows

Kind of a corny name, huh? Get used to it.

I was struggling with what I should write up as the first real post on this blog, and I’ve recently dived back into a mystery that’s been troubling me for the last few years, and I thought it might be fun if we all explored it together! And who knows: if I can’t get to the bottom of it, maybe someone somewhere will see this someday who has all of the answers I seek. Probably not, but that doesn’t matter because I’m going to get to the bottom of this if it’s the last thing I do.

Anyway.

The Setting

One crisp morning a couple of years ago, I was on my daily morning walk with my earbuds in. I take this walk basically every day, with the length varying based on how much free time I have. I mostly listen to podcasts, but sometimes I listen to music too. And on even rarer occasions, I listen to an audiobook.

For whatever reason, I generally don’t like my first exposure to a novel to be the audiobook. Maybe it’s the physical media hoarder in me. Despite that, I’ve acquired a large collection of digital Star Wars audiobooks over the years through the kindness of many different internet strangers, and I will occasionally use those to revisit books that I’ve read already, both from the new Canon timeline and Legends. They’re also FANTASTIC to fall asleep to. However, for better or for worse, most of the books from the latter timeline come in the form of novels abridged to fit on two cassette tapes, so they all come in at under four hours. This is far from the ideal way to experience these stories for the first time and has led to them being maligned by many fans as being lesser. (That said, I love them all the same because I’m just that kind of freak.)

On the morning in question, I got a wild streak in me and decided to take my walk listening to one of these audiobooks. I chose “Shadows of the Empire” by Steve Perry, which is a pretty awesome book when it hasn’t been chopped to pieces to fit on some magnetic tape! As I walked, the book proceeded as I might’ve expected: opening title theme, Anthony Heald, Xizor witnessing the conversation between Vader and the Emperor from The Empire Strikes Back to set the time frame the book takes place in, the usual. At the end of this vignette, we even get a little taste of Joel McNeely’s fantastic “Xizor’s Theme” which is part of the full score that was composed for the Shadows of the Empire multimedia project! This will become important shortly, but I’d first like to take a moment to underscore just how cool this is.

For those who don’t know, Shadows of the Empire was Lucasfilm’s way of testing the waters for what would become the Prequel Trilogy. There had been a dedicated fanbase for Star Wars that had been steadily growing throughout the 90s with the establishment of the Expanded Universe of novels, comics, games, etc., but Shadows of the Empire was more than that. It ended up comprising everything that Lucasfilm would’ve comissioned for a film, including a novel, video game adaptation, and soundtrack, without the film actually existing. How all of those things were received vary greatly from person to person, but the reception was positive enough (or it made enough money, at any rate) that George Lucas decided he wanted to bless us with the Prequels. I say without event the faintest hint of sarcasm, mind you. This brings us to our mystery.

The Mystery

Now, the soundtrack is particularly relevant to this little anecdote that I’ve spent far too long setting up just by virtue of the fact that it exists. According to Wookieepedia, it was written, recorded, and released all before the audiobook in question, or at the very least around the same time. The fact that it was ready while the audiobook was in production is further evidenced by the use of music from that very score in within the first five minutes of the audiobook. However, despite all of that, at about 24 minutes and 45 seconds into the first side of tape one a snippet of “Xizor’s Theme” is heard once again… but this time generated by some sort of synthesizer? MIDI? Complete with artificial reverb and everything!

This almost literally stopped me in my tracks. I hear you thinking “so… this is all just because you heard some MIDI music? That’s it?” But hear me out: this is highly unusual in the sphere of abridged Star Wars audiobooks from the 1990s! I consider myself something of a connoisseur of these particular artifacts simply because I find them so quirky! Sure, they’re missing half the story, but if you’re already familiar with it, you can fill in the gaps yourself. They’re nostalgic, digestible, and fun. The three elements you need for something to be worthwhile. Or something. All of this is to say that I can say with very near 100% confidence that not a single other Bantam Doubleday Dell Star Wars audio production uses music specifically recorded for that production in this way.

As you might imagine, virtually all of the music in these audiobooks is just music straight from the film scores. It feels like at least half of what makes something feel like “Star Wars” is in the music, after all, so it’s a no-brainer if you’re putting one of these things together. That’s why this fifteen seconds of computerized music sound so out of place; not only is it limited by the method of its creation and lacking the full-throated sound created by a full orchestra the rest of the music has, but it’s a complete anomaly! Unlike anything else to be found in the Star Wars audiobook cassette landscape.

Shortly after I discovered this, I took some very early steps to uncover the truth of what happened in that production studio sometime in early 1996, but I quickly hit a dead end and felt too discouraged to continue… until now. But that’s a tale for next time.