Under the Helmet: The Legacy of Boba Fett

Boba's ship, when it starts up, is something like this.

Wait a second.

Let's see if this'll...

Here it is.

Boba Fett, only four lines of dialog...

As you wish.

He's no good to me dead.

What if he doesn't survive?

Put Captain Solo in the cargo hold.

...and six minutes 32 seconds of total screen time...

Boba Fett? Where?

...and this somewhat unceremonious introduction.

- Bounty hunters. We don't need that scum. - Yes, sir.

So how did this become this?

The universe's most famous bounty hunter,

Boba Fett.

It's Boba Fett.

Whoa!

Dude, it's Boba Fett's ship.

Look, the Giant Chicken is Boba Fett.

Boba Fett, you didn't know who he was, you didn't know where he came from.

He didn't get much screen time.

I never thought they'd be talking about him after 1980.

Despite his lack of screen time,

next to no dialog, he's everywhere.

You a big fan of the Fett?

He signed it for me. Dude, look at that.

Okay, we'd like to introduce Boba Fett. And here he is.

A new character.

Uh, can you speak to us, Boba?

Certainly.

Star Wars had become this phenomenon.

Now we had to top that.

Nobody wanted it to be just another sequel.

We had to do something that was better.

We sort of jumped in on Empire.

We felt like we had to hit the ground running.

Because there were more shots and there were more complicated designs.

Ralph McQuarrie and I had traded sketches back and forth

and sort of had a direction for this prototype suit.

And it evolved into Boba Fett.

I liked the design. I don't think we even changed that much of him.

There were different versions of it.

Each character, when we do it,

we do other alternative versions of it to see where we go.

The design for the character, the armature and all the gadgets and weaponry,

is something we've never seen in Star Wars before.

One thing that stood out above the rest is his "T" visor.

Medieval in its styling,

it's something that speaks to, you know, the days of sword and sorcery.

It just gives him that added dimension of magic and mystique.

I don't remember if Ralph added the "T" shape or if I did it,

or if George came by and said, "Hey, give him a 'T' shape."

I don't know. I don't remember where that came from.

But during the whole process of evolution,

a lot of stuff like that would happen where somebody would suggest something

and the other guy would take it and say, "How about this?"

It shows you the power of a design.

Anything out there that resembles that visor is just Boba Fett.

The Boba Fett suit itself

was originally intended to be an army of what George called Super Troopers,

and the plan was to build 100 of these suits,

and to have them sort of be the Empire's upgraded stormtroopers.

They wanted to show what Boba Fett looked like to the crew in England.

And I made a, kind of, stand up,

you know, introduction. "Here's the new character, Boba Fett"

Boba has sort of a radio voice. There's a speaker built into him here.

And also, there's a certain amount of telemetry going on.

And certain amount of feedback for some reason.

It was just a show-and-tell of the character,

but it was a very functional costume.

This is a range finder. This is... This tilts down here.

There's a flamethrower here.

This is a dart-throwing device.

Very deadly.

These also shoot some sort of darts, projectiles from each knee.

Sure, have him turn around and get a shot of the jetpack.

Can you do it, Duwayne?

We put the costume on Duwayne Dunham,

who was part of our editing team.

I just happened to be the size to fit that costume.

And George said, "Hey, why don't you put this on him?"

"Okay."

George is standing there and he's looking, and he says, "You know, we need a cape."

I said, "George, there's a Star Wars towel right there in the garage.

"We use it when we rinse off after a volleyball game at lunch."

That was the first introduction of Boba in some sort of physical form to us,

months before the film went into production.

But apparently, there was a budget issue.

And once the original suit was built,

George decided that we didn't have the money to turn them into an army.

But we had this one suit.

And George said, "Let's make him a different kind of a character.

"Let's make him a bounty hunter."

So the first thing I did was I painted the entire thing silver,

so that when I put the subsequent layers of paint on,

it would look like something hit the suit and broke the covering away,

whether it's paint or some kind of metallic finish,

and you would see the metal underneath.

And from that, I just started mixing rail road colors

and just painting it up and damaging it.

I would take a heat gun,

I heat the plastic, and I think I had a rock or something

that I would then press into the hot plastic to make a dent.

George never came by and said, "I don't know, I don't like that orange on there."

You know, he said, "Just take it and run with it."

There was no sort of interim stage. He went from white plastic to Boba Fett.

I said, "This is a good character. People like the bad guys."

And then later, they were doing this holiday special.

And there wasn't much of our involvement.

But I came up with the idea,

"Why don't we take the Boba Fett character and put him in that?

"Make a little movie out of it?"

I am Boba Fett.

Follow me, friend.

Boba's first appearance in film.

So he really predates by a couple of years

the actual release of The Empire Strikes Back.

Beautiful work, very stylized.

It's just very simple, kind of fantasy storytelling.

Chewbacca suspected all along there was something bad about Boba.

How did you know, Chewie?

It wasn't until the last ten years that any of us realized

that a month before the Star Wars Holiday Special came out,

Boba Fett was actually in this Marin County parade.

George Lucas, who lives in the town,

wanted to do something very local that was exciting about Star Wars.

And so, they put Vader

and this strange character, Boba Fett, that people didn't know, into the local parade.

It's hard to imagine a local parade

where Star Wars characters, not just like people in costumes,

the actual screen-use costumes are walking down the street.

But that's exactly what happened.

Duwayne was inside it at the time.

And it was a strange sight because Boba hadn't been put on film yet

and become well-known.

At first glance, you didn't say, "Oh, that's a stormtrooper."

You said, "Whoa, who is that?"

Vader was a known quantity at that point.

But the fans definitely responded to Fett.

And that's where it really started.

You know, and then, over time, we put him in the movies.

I think what made Boba Fett really popular was that he was a mystery.

Like Darth Vader, the helmet was his face.

I liked that we didn't give him any backstory when he showed up.

He was just one of the bounty hunters.

George never worried about stuff like that.

He never felt like he had to give you a big backstory.

...but I want them alive.

No disintegrations.

As you wish.

Less is more with Fett.

He's enigmatic. We don't know what to expect from him.

He's encased in this battle-worn scorched armor that we just know nothing about.

And all of these mysteries

form kind of this amazingly cool vision of who this guy is.

He wears the poncho. It's just like Clint Eastwood.

He is an icon drawn out of George's appreciation for Westerns,

and, I think, the gun fighters of Sergio Leone's films specifically.

I mean, I jokingly said at one point, "If Boba Fett is a bounty hunter,

"why can't he wear spurs like we hear in the Westerns, you know?"

Although I said it half-jokingly,

Bob Rutledge, who was in charge of the foley,

actually took my suggestion of spurs like these and did foley footsteps for Boba.

Within the DNA of Star Wars

is a deep appreciation for movies that George liked,

that he was inspired by, of different genre.

And so spurs make absolute sense when you think of it that way.

As surely as, you know, Obi-Wan looks like a samurai.

That makes perfect sense if you understand who the creator of Star Wars,

the person that devised it all is, George Lucas.

It's just part of the appreciation of the art form really.

Boba Fett in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi,

that was Jeremy Bulloch.

His half-brother, Robert Watts, was a producer,

and he called Jeremy one day and said,