A recent Cracked column got me thinking about this. Anyway he doesn’t really appear to do much in the movies.
When I first saw him I didn’t think, "Cool, what a badass.’ He was just another minor Star Wars character. In fact I didn’t even remember anything about him at all after I first saw Empire Strikes Back.
I can recall seeing someone wearing a Boba Fett t-shirt sometime in the mid-90s (about the time the movies were re-released) and wracking my brain trying to think who he was, what he did, and even what movie he was in. It wasn’t until I saw Empire again that I remembered, “Oh that’s right, he’s the guy who brought Han Solo to Jabba the Hut.”
And then of course he ended up falling into the Sarlaac pit.
All in all, I don’t think the guy had 15 minutes of screen time in the original trilogy. So what gives? Why is he so beloved among Star Wars fans? Is it stuff that he does in the expanded universe that makes him such a legend?
You’re right. His bad ass reputation is taken as a given but on no more qualification than his job, his cool armor, and a menacing voice. I’m sure that lots has been written since to show him administering some tough beatdowns. But nothing in either ESB or ROTJ.
I think Lucas caught lightning in a bottle in regards to Fett. He got a little lucky, made a cool character and marketed it early and well. I remember the action figure came out well before Empire Strikes Back was released, so he got that pub. You could even tack on the fact that they had to change the missile backpack because kids were choking on the projectiles (allegedly).
So they made a cool character who proved to be pretty badass in ESB and the rest is pop culture history.
Of course, they fracked him up immediately after ESB by turning him into a flying Shemp in Return of the Jedi for the sake of a burp gag, then inserted more footage of him into the special editions which did absolutely nothing for the character except watered him down. Then he made Fett a whiny clone kid in the prequels.
Someone really should just go up to Lucas and say “You know George, you did a great job with Star Wars and Empire. Why don’t we take it from here?”
I seem to remember that it is because, in the movies, he is the only character (apart from Palpatine) to directly confront Darth Vader and get away with it. Something to do with Han Solo after the latter’s capture, if I remember correctly.
Directly confronting Darth Vader and not getting immediately force-choked would make a memetic badass out of you, I guess!
Boba claimed “He’s no good to me dead”, and Vader agreed to compensate him if Solo died during the torture. Vader didn’t really care - he was just torturing Solo to get Luke.
And Tarkin stood up to Vader as well - “Vader, release him!” when DV was force choking someone else.
IIRC (I was 11 at the time) the Boba Fett action figure was available via mail order ONLY before ESB came out, and you had to collect some number of proofs of purchase from other figures to get it. Then they delayed it after the projectiles incident (which again, IIRC, wasn’t the actual Boba Fett figure - I think it was Micronauts that were choking kids, or putting their eyes out, leading to all toys with projectiles being pulled from the shelves). I recall when I got my Boba Fett, there was a black sticker on the back of the packaging - if you removed it very carefully, you could see the instructions for the backpack missile.
This is exactly my recollection along with what Intergalactic Gladiator said.
It took a long time to arrive and I spent most of that time staring at the Boba Fett picture from the order form. To my 9 year-old self, Boba Fett was the coolest because he had that awesome suit. He was locked into legendary status before his first movie appearance. Although the pre-release comic helped too.
Even his idiotic looking spaceship couldn’t tarnish his image.
I was disappointed to see him get dispatched so easily in the muppet movie; what a waste.
Hell, all he did in ESB was track the Falcon to Bespin, then call the Empire in before Han landed. If he was a real bounty hunter, he’d have captured Solo all by himself.
And now, the best thing about Boba Fett is the Robot Chicken segments.
In the EU he survives the Sarlaac, confronts KDY shipyards and the Bounty Hunters Guild (in a stolen ship since Slave I was destroyed) and comes out by the skin of his teeth. He’s an antihero, who ends up getting fanwanked (authorwanked? What’s it called when an author falls in love with a character?) to death in the latest series by an author who hates the Jedi… But in the end, it all works out to the characters benefit.
Just to pick nits, I’m pretty sure Vader agreed to compensate Boba Fett if Han died as a result of being frozen in carbonate. (Which was basically a test run before trying to freeze Luke the same way.)
This is the reason. His action figure was a special order that you could not get in stores but instead had to send away “Proof of Purchase” labels from other action figures to Kenner in order to get him. Having done so was a status symbol of a “big” Star Wars fan, because you had not only the stuff you could buy in a store, but something special direct from Kenner. That made the character “cool” despite his very small role in the subsequent films.
Disagree, the cartoon was great, but the Fett portrayed in it is vastly different from the one we all know. In the cartoon, he is more of a villain lieutenant, Darth Maul style, whereas in the movies, he was way more of an independent character, with a “Man with No Name” bad ass attitude.
I saw Return of the Jedi in theatre when it got released, at the age of six, had never seen any of the other Star Wars movie, hadnt really been exposed to any SW marketing, and even with all his clumsiness in ROTJ, I thought he was uber cool.
For me it all had to do with the knowing nod Fett gives to disguised Leia when she pulls her thermal detonator stint. From one bad ass professional to another. That gives you an immediate ten points boost on your charisma scale.
This just goes to show that Kenner picked up on how cool he was just by appearance. They wouldn’t have done this with just any old figure. Only one that had a huge instant appeal.
Lucas could have increased his income from Kenner royalties if he’d put a simple rank marking on a few storm troopers. Kids would have been foaming at the mouth to get the “sergeant” trooper with the black strip on the helmet or the “specialist” with a black shoulder pad. George made sure to do this with the clone troopers, with different colors and armor variations to keep the product diversity high.
My own personal favorite recollection of Boba Fett was from alt.fan.warlord, a group dedicated to mocking absurdly long ASCII graphics in other posts. (It is archived here. Might take a while to load; I think it’s backed up on stone tablets.)
I guess for me, it was because the Boba Fett large sized action figure had a “telescopic” lens in his eye you could look through… a bad ass rifle blaster and a “missile grapple backpack” that he could zipline along. All that Luke had was a utility belt and a lightsaber… Boba Fett was just a more “action” action figure. His Toy ship was also pretty cool, not as good as the Millenium Falcon, but definitely better than the tie fighter.
Boba Fett was also the only one of the bounty hunters that Vader assembled that figured out how Han Solo evaded the Imperial Navy, so he had a certain aura of competence to him.