Article contributed by David Allen
Combine two decades of radio experience, a dozen years of comic book writing and a lifelong obsession with Star Wars, and a truly unique project is born: Mud 79, a full-cast, fan-produced Star Wars audio drama.
“Fearless” Fred Kennedy, a life-long fan of comic books and Star Wars, is the drive host for Toronto’s Rock Station, Q107. Mud 79 is his brain child.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t want to be a broadcaster,” Kennedy said. “I wanted to be a paleo cultural anthropologist and study the origins of human culture.”
A love of science fiction is born
Due to his father’s military service, Kennedy grew up in Belgium. There, his love for science fiction was born.
“My dad would go on, like, trips for work,” he said. “Whenever he was home, one of the things we always did was watch Star Trek. So Star Trek, if I’m being honest, is the beginning of all my nerd love.”
Kennedy’s exposure to Start Trek opened up a world of science fiction for him. He began watching European animated series such as Ulysses 31 and City of Gold. From there, it was a quick leap to Star Wars.
“I remember watching Return of the Jedi for the first time with one of my cousins, who is like six years older than me, and just being blown away,” he said. “I watched Return to the Jedi before I watched any of the other ones. And that scene when Luke Skywalker walked down the hallway of Jabba’s palace and chokes the Gamorrean guards, I was like ‘I’m in’. I don’t even know what’s happening right now, but this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Raised on radio
Kennedy’s family would eventually relocate to Canada. There, he began to take an interest in radio broadcasting.
“When I moved to Canada, I was listening to the radio, and it was like, all of the radio stations were in English, which to me was a wild thing,” he said. “So I could listen. And it wasn’t even that they were just in English; there was a country music radio station. There’s no country music in Europe. I never listened to Country. I found it so fascinating.”
In high school, he became involved in a radio club that would steer him toward his future career.
“All the radio club did was we broadcast music for an hour before classes in the morning,” Kennedy said. “That was the morning shift. Then there was the lunch shift where you broadcast music during the lunch hour. And then, at any school events, we ran the audio equipment.”
From high school, Kennedy went to broadcasting school and immediately disliked the experience. He decided to take a college demo and send it to radio stations to get a job instead. He took the first job offer he received and left broadcasting school behind.
“I shamelessly love it so much,” he said. “Despite all of the flaws in the industry, despite all the jokes that people make about radio people, I don’t care. I love it so much. I can’t deny it.”
From spinner rack to published author
In addition to his radio work, Kennedy has been writing small press comics for over a decade. When he first moved to Canada, he didn’t have a lot of friends. He quickly managed to connect to the world of comic books.
“I used to go to the 7-Eleven,” he said. “I would play Street Fighter II, and it had a spinner rack of comics, and I used to read all the comics while I’d wait for my turn.”
As he got older, he developed a love for creating comics, as well. He has written several comic book stories, including contributing to anthologies like True Patriot Presents and working on his own science fiction quarterly, The Fourth Planet.
“I think that there’s a lot of things that you can do in comics that you can’t do in any other medium,” Kennedy said. “It’s a really cool methodology of telling stories, and I just love it. I love writing comics. And I also love the collaborative nature of it because I can’t draw.”
Creating Mud 79, a Star Wars audio drama
Now, Kennedy has combined his extensive experience in radio broadcasting with his story-telling skills to create Mud 79, a full-cast audio drama set in the Star Wars universe.
“For the past three years, I’ve been doing a podcast,” Kennedy said. “But then, when the pandemic happened, I found myself kind of lacking subjects I really wanted to talk about a lot. I just started working on this audio drama that’s been kicking around in the back of my head for a few years now.”
Mud 79 tells the story of a mud trooper and his squad. After the battle of Endor, the Empire is imploding. The trooper is stuck on a backwater planet, holding the line alongside his fellow imperial troops.
“There’s this painting by this Italian painter, and it’s this watercolour painting of a scout trooper,” Kennedy said. “He’s like leaning up against the tree holding binoculars, and it looks like it’s raining. And I love that picture so much. I love it so much because you’ve got a mask, but with the body language, there’s just this sense of sadness and desperation in the way this guy is leaned up against this tree.”
For Kennedy, the weakness of Star Wars has always been that the Empire doesn’t contain characters, but caricatures.
“I just have always felt like there’s never really been a boots on the ground type story in Star Wars,” he said. “It’s like Platoon set in Star Wars is the simplest, most direct way of explaining it.”
Putting the pieces of Mud 79 together
Kennedy wrote the story in collaboration with his producer, Dila Velazquez, who helped him iron out a bunch of stuff and voiced “the Madame” in episodes 5 and 6. Kennedy also serves as the primary narrator and completes all post production personally.
“Voice actor roles are all people I know that are big Star Wars fans,” he said. “People that I know are not just broadcasters, but just like big fans of Star Wars that I wanted to involve in it.”
Forty-seven individual voice actors contributed to the first season of Mud 79.
In order to complete post-production, Kennedy had to draw on his extensive radio background.
“One of the jobs that I had when I started out in radio was producing commercials,” he said. “There are a lot of foundations of production that I learned then that made this entire thing possible. So, it’s those skills that I learned as a producer, but I also relearned all kinds of things as I went.”
The time investment in post-production was vast because Kennedy knew that high quality was a must.
“I knew it needed to be pro-level sounding, even from the get-go,” he said. “This needed to be something that could have a studio behind it. Otherwise, no one would care, and no one would take it seriously. I find with audio in particular, people are very judgmental.”
A matter of perspective
Although many Star Wars fans have received Mud 79 positively, it has not been all sunshine and rainbows. Kennedy’s choice to focus on realism in dialogue meant that swear words were fair game.
“The first piece of hate mail I got was ‘there’s no swearing in Star Wars’,” he said. “He said other things, which is interesting because he swore at me when he said there’s no swearing in Star Wars.”
Kennedy voiced a version of the script where there were no swear words. Instead, he threw in all the classic Star Wars swear words, but it didn’t feel true to him.
“My dad was [in the] military,” he said. “I worked on a military base. And this was like a training camp. So this is when soldiers were coming in, and they were training and they’d be there for a few months, and then they’d leave. And so I am watching the way these guys interact and watching the way these guys talk and they swear, they really do. And it sounds weird to say, but when they swear, it doesn’t feel vulgar, if that makes any sense. It’s not a vulgar thing, they just do it. And it becomes just the way they speak and the way they interact.”
Some fans have met Kennedy’s choice to focus on the perspective of imperial troops with skepticism.
“As soon as people hear it’s from the imperial [perspective], ‘well, I don’t know if I want to listen to that’,” he said. “[They think] it’s justifying all the awful things that the Empire did, when it’s not. If you listen to just the opening, he explains, ‘if it wasn’t for the Republic, my planet would have been scoured. So I owe everything I have to them. Why wouldn’t I join?’ You know, I really like telling a story like that. I want to humanise people, you know?”
Mud 79 returns and an ode to fan projects
With the first season of Mud 79 complete, fans can expect Kennedy to return to that world at some point. How soon, however, remains unclear.
“There might be a bit of a delay with the second season of Mud 79, and that’s because I just signed a contract for a comic and I can’t really talk about it,” he said. “I can say that I’m really excited about it.”
As a creator of a fan project, Kennedy would love to see more fan-made projects given a fair shake.
“There’s so much great fan-made Star Wars; it has the most vibrant fan base, the most multicultural, the most diverse fan group out of almost any property,” he said. “I see so many absolutely incredible fan-made projects out there. I think that we as fans need to do a bit of a better job of supporting other fan made projects. And we see so many people shouting and shouting to get recognised and having a voice when we really need to take the time to see those other people that are also shouting for a voice. There are so many wild things out there.”
