How Star Wars has depicted the rise of the Rebel Alliance through the years

polygon.com:

From the moment the words “Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire” appeared in the opening crawl of Star Wars, the minds of fans raced, imagining the circumstances surrounding that victory. While 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars story presents the canonical telling of those events, the intervening years are filled with different interpretations and tales of how the Rebel Alliance came together into a cohesive force in order to attain that first victory.

Now, with the release of Andor on Disney Plus, a series which promises to follow the development of Rogue One protagonist Cassian Andor from his days as a budding rebel to his death on the sands of Scarif, it’s worth looking back on some of the previous efforts to dramatize the words in the crawl and explain how the Rebel Alliance came to be, as well as examining how Andor is uniquely positioned to stitch some of those different narratives into a cohesive whole.

One of the first attempts to dramatize the opening crawl and provide more details about the nascent Rebel Alliance came via a vintage format. In 1981, NPR released a Star Wars radio drama based onA New Hope and produced with the blessing of George Lucas. It featured sounds and music from the movies, along with Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprising their cinematic roles. One of the fun things about the radio drama is it dramatizes scenes left on the cutting room floor (like Luke’s encounter with his old friend Biggs Darklighter on Tatooine) while also adding scenes which didn’t appear in the movie, notably in its second and third episodes, “Points of Origin” and “Black Knight, White Princess, and Pawns.”

In “Points of Origin,” Leia and her