I confess that the whole Star Wars thing is meaningless for me, but even I’ve heard of the fans’ love for the character Boba Fett. Seems to be a culty kind of thing. My question is- why haven’t they cashed in on his popularity by making one of their movies about him?
Episode 3(?) dealt with Boba’s backstory and the like. I could see one of the in-between movies dealing with his adventures as a bounty hunter between 3 and 4…maybe. His main niche was the strong silent guy - they don’t generally make good main characters, and he’d mainly be an antihero type.
I’m curious where they’ll go after Han Solo, given that they’ve tapped out the rest of the original trilogy characters at this point, except maybe Lando Calrissian - and he might be tied into the Solo origin. Weren’t they friends/cohorts/fellow criminals?
They’re trying. Short answer is that it’s tough to make a Star Wars action-ish movie about someone who is unreservedly a bad guy. That may be why this one is an origin story.
Also note that every movie to date has been part of the overarching Star Wars story. Boba Fett would be a definite side-story movie.
Wasn’t that Attack of the Clones, or whatever #2 was called?
I think this notion that Boba Fett has some massive fan following is overblown. He’s a minor character who doesn’t really do anything particularly cool in the OT, but he has enough screen time that knowledge of his existence sorta straddles the line between “I know that Dark Vader’s the bad guy, right?” types and “Max Rebo is actually playing his instrument with his toes” types. He’s got name recognition, that’s about it.
/steronz, who has a Fett keychain and a bobble head, but doesn’t really know why
I disagree, I think Fett is hugely popular. Maybe more so than Vader. Fett doesn’t get much screentime, but he makes a huge impression.
Quoting myself from a different forum where someone asked why Boba Fett was so popular:
[QUOTE=Darren Garrison from somewhere else]
…I believe much of it is the way Boba Fett was introduced. After A New Hope, Boba Fett was the first new character to be introduced from the upcoming Empire Strikes Back, originally not available in stores and sold only as a mail-in item (send in x number proof of purchases from Star Wars items and y amount of shipping and handling.) So he was mysterious, a promise of more to come, and available only to those willing to go to special trouble to get him! The marketing was prototypical of the modern marketing technique of slow, selective leaks of details along with the idea of exclusive limited-edition collector’s items. The minor controversy around the replacement of Boba Fett’s originally-promised rocket-launching backpack with a non-functional one because of chocking hazards may have had an effect on his visibility, too. (I can’t say how much Boba Fett’s appearance in The Star Wars Holiday Special may have influenced fandom—I don’t exactly remember clamor for the production of Bea Author and Porn Grampa Wookie figures.) The discovery that Boba Fett turned out to be a very minor character in the movies came long after the hype surrounding him. (IIRC, a Battledroid mounted on a STAP was a similar early-release hype item for The Phantom Menace, and General Grevious for Revenge of the Sith. And fan generated their own lovestorm for BB-8 before anyone knew a single thing about BB-8’s role or significance in The Force Awakens.)
I don’t remember being caught up in the Boba Fett hype as a child, but I do remember the exact location where I bought my own Boba Fett around 35 years ago—a toy section that was in the back left corner of a Woolworth’s in the nearest city to me—and it was one of the very few items from my metric shit-ton of Star Wars figures and vehicles that I didn’t sell off as a teenager and regret selling as an adult. (One other item I still have from childhood is a Rancor. I also specifically remember the circumstances for buying that—it was after the hype for Jedi had cooled and stores had mostly stopped selling Star Wars items. I found it in a crushed box in a clearance bin at a K-Mart in a different city from Boba Fett, discounted down to $1.50. Said Rancor is the second largest creature within a foot of my desk as I type—the largest being a 18-24ish inch Godzilla figure with launching fist bought at a yard sale in the 1970s.) The appeal to whipper-snappers who weren’t around at the genesis of Boba Fett—I assume—originates from all of the EU Boba Fett material created to feed the original demand created by the early hype.
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Also, there was a very extensive backstory for Boba Fett in the extended universe (which I personally didn’t follow) but which was retconned out of existence in the prequel trilogy, and the followers of the EU are still pretty bitter about the changes in general.
Delivery Man [reading from mailing label]: Mister… Feet? Mister Bob A. Feet?
Boba Fett [standing in doorway wearing robe and bunny slippers and holding a coffee mug]: Sure, whatever.
Robot Chicken’s extended take on the character is likely to prove more entertaining than any serious film version.
Maybe because he’s the only bad guy who isn’t a cartoonish excess. Even in the back alleys of Mos Eisley, you know you aren’t going to run into Vader, Maul, Palpatine or Peter Cushing. Boba Fett, totally, and it would scare the crap out of you even if he just walked by.
This is the plot of the movie: I’m Boba Fett and I’m looking for this guy, but I’m willing to look the other way for twice as much.
Because, of course, the marketing/merchandising department had as much say as the creative team. From Lucas not knowing what to do with the merchandising rights for SW before it was ANH, the process has suffered severe disneyfication.
In one of the EU stories, Han won the Millennium Falcon from Lando in a sabbac game.
That’s actually straight from “The Empire Strikes Back”, except for the sabbac part:
Your ship? Remember you lost her to me fair and square.
And they’re also close enough to share clothes.
Are you kidding? Lucas was a genius about the merchandising for Star Wars before it was ANH. Saying to Fox “I want to keep the rights to make little dolls from my movie characters” and having Fox say “Little dolls? Knock yourself out.” has made Lucas more money than the movies themselves ever did. And one of the biggest marketing mistakes a company has made, right up there with Mars telling Spielberg that E.T. wasn’t allowed to eat M&Ms.
Lando (and Chewbacca, of course) are both in the as-yet-untitled Han Solo film, on which production is now underway.
As for Boba Fett, speaking as a longtime SW fan, yes, he’s pretty darned popular, considering his limited screen time in the actual films. I play the Star Wars MMO, which is set about 3600 years before the films; in the game, there are a lot of players who are very much into playing Mandalorians and / or bounty hunters, and Fett is the ultimate source of that aspect of SW fandom.
When I saw the original trilogy in its first run, he made virtually no impression on me. He’s a very minor character whose face you never see and who has a total of four lines in the entire trilogy, all in The Empire Strikes Back.
I can’t recall anyone ever quoting him.
He also has a “Wilhelm scream” as he falls into the Sarlacc in Revenge of the Jedi. That’s it.
When he started to referenced decades later, it took me some time to figure out who he was. I am still mystified why he became so popular with so little character or presence.
As for “more popular than Vader” all I can say is :dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious::dubious:
Yoda. Lucas deliberately gave a “hands off” order for EU writers and Yoda’s backstory. I don’t know about general audiences, but a Yoda backstory movie would be gigantic with the fan base.
Myself, I want a buddy road movie with Ephant Mon and Amanaman. (Possibly trying to get Max Rebo’s band back together on a mission from The Force.)
In the interim between the original trilogy and the prequels (and after the prequels as well), a metric buttload of EU stuff came out, and the creative sorts mined every possible point of the movies for stuff to write about.
The bounty hunters in the “no disintegrations” scene all ended up with fleshed out backstories. Boba Fett just happened to be one of the ones whose popularity took off. IG-88 was the other. Why? Probably because those two have the coolest looks, and the “no disintegrations” line gives him a kind of mystique. Apparently he’s exasperated Vader before and lived to tell about it. He must be some kind of badass.
Nobody really cared or cares about Dengar, Bossk, or 4-LOM.
Seriously, just look at the nerds who are not Boba Fett and IG-88. Dengar (the one on the far left) looks like he just climbed out of a laundry hamper. Bossk’s lizard costume is ridiculous even by 1980s standards. And 4-LOM is… some kind of bug robot?
Without reading the actual entry to confirm what I’m about to write, this is the winner.
I am/was smack-dab in the middle of everything Lucas wanted when it came to Star Wars. I liked em when I was a kid, was in the perfect age group for the Special Editions (5th grade) and was a bit old for the true target audience for the prequels, I was still there.
Boba has always been my favorite character because of all the EU stuff I read about him. The “Tales of the Bounty Hunters” followed him from his first attempts at capturing Han, all the way through his eventual escape from the Sarlacc. There were also EU books like “The Essential Characters” and “The Essential Ships” that, overall, just made him a badass. Flamethrowers and grenades, illegal cloaking devices and scanners, plus a bunch of history of the Mandalores and all that stuff…he was an unstoppable machine in the EU.
Ret-conning him as the son of Jango Fett was a weird move that I never really understood since it clashed so much with his already-established backstory.
Also, don’t count out the fact that he won. He was the one who caught Han and delivered him to Jabba, so he’s automatically #1 right there.
ETA: Damn! Kinda-sorta ninja’d by Johnny Bravo. Although the picture you listed cuts out poor Zuckess!
Mostly, Boba Fett looks really cool, has a very costume-friendly look, and is enough of a badass not to flinch when Vader’s in his face. There was the hype with his action figure that’s been mentioned, but I think it really comes down to him being a tough guy that looks cool and isn’t a fate-chosen space wizard or weird alien.