Rebel Radio

In re-enactment mode (l-r): Adam Cortez, Andrew Carter, Brian Ledden, Matt Needles (Photo By John Anderson)

Every Monday night from 8:30 to 9, a radio show airs on KVRX that by all rights should be a matter of total indifference to me. There's nothing about American politics or world events or the NBA on this show; nothing about Philip Roth or the Marx Brothers or electronic music.

The only thing this show is about is Star Wars.

Star Wars. Aside from the forced march I subjected myself to for six interminable hours to get through the prequel trilogy – mercifully laid to rest last May, with any luck all prints buried in a vault somewhere in deepest Africa – I haven't seen a Star Wars movie in years.

But every Monday night, from 8:30 to 9, I turn my car radio to 91.7, and I don't shut it off until These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For has signed off.

Brian Ledden, Andrew Carter, Matt Needles, Adam Cortez – the show's hosts: Those are my guys.

You can keep your All Things Considered and your This American Life.

Just give me a half hour of college-radio Star Wars philosophizing every Monday night, and I can get through my week.

Brian Ledden, the man and the mind behind These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For, is a 21-year-old Radio-Television-Film major at the University of Texas, by way of Houston. He sports glasses and a thick beard, and he has a low voice and a dry sense of humor. On his back, he's got a tattoo of a Mandalorian warrior symbol, the same worn by notorious bounty hunter and popular Star Wars antihero Boba Fett; when I first met him, he was wearing an R2-D2 T-shirt.

Ledden started Droids in the fall of 2004, after he and a friend wisely decided against a weekly radio show about old Nickelodeon television programs, tentatively titled The Nickelozone. "It was a stupid idea," he acknowledges.

The duo lasted a year, until Ledden's partner quit before the start of the fall semester. For a month, before he enlisted his current co-hosts in October, Ledden was forced to go it alone – just a man, a microphone, and Star Wars, for a half hour every week.

"It was painful for me," he admits dryly, "and I'm sure it was painful for anyone listening."

I've been listening to These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For for months, and in that time I've come to learn that there are a few things you can count on.

First, the hosts will be having at least as much fun as you are. They're talkers by nature, and they love their subject, so their conversation is spirited and free-flowing, filled with obscure references, inside jokes, heavy sarcasm, scenes quoted verbatim from the movies, and bits of cinema and military history. Call it stream of consciousness.

The second thing is that Ledden, Carter, Needles, and Cortez will make no concessions to listeners who know less than they do. If you've never seen Star Wars, the show will make no sense. If you've only seen Star Wars a a few times, the show will probably make very little sense. I've seen all the Star Wars movies, a few of them dozens of times, and half the time even I don't know what the hell these guys are on about.

Third, rather than discussing the Star Wars films as films – how this scene was directed, say, or how that line was read – or as a social phenomenon – how many millions made, how many toys manufactured – the guys behind Droids tend to view the Star Wars universe as a fully formed alternate reality: a fantasy world, true, but one with an internal logic that should be analyzed and argued about.

Everything in the movies is there to be discussed and dissected from as many angles as possible. Military strategy, scientific inconsistencies, the theological subtleties behind the Force: all in an evening's work. As Needles says, "For the sake of the show, there's more to talk about if you accept the world as real."

Carter, the most sociologically inclined of the group, as well as the most excitable, lays it out like this: "I like to talk about the universe of Star Wars and how rules would apply in that world. For example: How do cultures come to be in a galaxy where space travel is so easily achieved? What are the limits of one's culture?

"There are a lot of 'what-ifs' in the movies, and you can ask a lot of questions," he continues. "That's what I like about Star Wars."

"What I like about Star Wars?" Needles grins. "Laser swords."

At 8:30pm, in the UT communications building off Dean Keeton, Ledden, Carter, Needles, and Cortez take their usual seats around the small KVRX studio. Ledden sits in the controller's chair, near the computer, where he can download the script for a scene from one of the movies to read aloud at the end of the half hour, one of the great traditions of the show. One night a couple of months back, during a UT holiday break, the four of them read the entire script for The Empire Strikes Back in a single evening.

The topic of this week's show: military strategy, or the lack thereof.

Matt Needles, the most eloquent of the group, is first on the board, with a critique of the Empire's use of AT-ATs – those walking, dinosaurlike tanks from Empire – during the invasion of Hoth. "The AT-AT land invasion just doesn't make any sense from a tactical standpoint," he says. "Obviously you need bombing. An entire fleet of star destroyers is hovering in orbit and you don't send anything down? There's a shield, yes, but ..."

Ledden agrees, "You need to bring in aerial support first."

Needles: "Exactly."

Ledden: "You send some tie bombers to destroy the shield generator and then bombard them with your fleet of star destroyers."

Carter jumps in, "Even in modern warfare they generally wait months before they send in ground troops. Why would you even send in ground forces if you're not planning on holding the position?"

Needles: "Right. You need more than just tanks. This isn't Rommell in North Africa."

God bless any man who can drop an Erwin Rommel reference in a conversation about Star Wars.

For 30 minutes, the four hosts talk over and around one another, their conversation running from Wookies to Nazis, from Jedi blood transfusions to alcohol abuse in the Imperial army. One minute they're criticizing the strategic flaws in Luke's plan to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt; the next, they're theorizing about what would actually happen to a planet filled with Ewoks if a planet-sized space station orbiting around it were blown to pieces. (Nuclear winter seems to be the consensus.)

As the show comes to a close, Ledden puts on a CD to transition listeners to Close Enough for Jazz, which starts at 9. A track by the Sword, a local heavy metal band, comes out of the small studio's speakers as the hosts stand up to leave,

Now that the show is done for the week, I think to myself, surely the conversation will turn elsewhere: politics, sports, the weather, perhaps.

Before emerging to the outside world, though, Carter has a thought.

"Do you think Wookies would listen to metal?" he asks.

Needles considers. "I don't think so," he decides.

"I think Wookies would listen to metal," Carter says, undeterred.

Needles considers again.

"I don't know," he says. "I think they'd probably be more into reggae."

I can now go about my week.

These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

Mondays, 8:30pm

91.7FM KVRX