How Boba Fett Became a ‘Star Wars’ Icon

Like most kids obsessed with Star Wars in 1978, Jason Fry could hardly wait for his Boba Fett action figure to arrive in the mail. Following toy catalog instructions, he’d collected his four proof-of-purchase box seals, sent them to Kenner Products, and waited by the front door for nearly two months, anticipating his replica of the newest character scheduled to join the burgeoning movie franchise.

The only thing he knew about the intergalactic bounty hunter, which made its brief debut in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, was that he looked incredibly cool. With his identity hidden underneath a Stormtrooper-type mask, Boba Fett wore blue and yellow armor, a red cape, carried a jet pack and handgun, and roamed the galaxy without any affiliation. “He was the only good thing about it,” Fry remembers of the infamous cartoon. Once the 10-year-old had unboxed the mysterious mercenary, a year before the character’s official debut in The Empire Strikes Back, his imagination took over. “I probably thought up a hundred little Boba Fett stories using Kenner figures before I ever got to see Empire,” says Fry, who has since made a career writing dozens of Star Wars extended universe novels. “Everything about that figure was just so exciting.”

Andrew Ervin, an author and Star Wars enthusiast, recalls similar feelings as a kid. Despite Kenner’s canceling the action figure’s missile-launching gadget over safety concerns, Ervin was taken by its design. “He looked almost medieval in a way,” he remembers, referencing its purple and green metal plates with orange accents. “The color palette on the toy is pretty mellow—it kind of gives him a menace in a way.” Like Fry, Ervin crafted his own adventures with Boba Fett, projecting motivations onto a dangerous figure with a cloudy moral compass, navigating the cosmos of his decorated basement.

In 1980, when the character finally appeared on movie screens, its popularity soared. Though he had just four lines of dialogue in Empire, Boba Fett provided tons of intrigue. His dented olive green helmet suggested a violent past, and the numerous gadgets attached to his armor—shielded with a dust cape—gave the bounty hunter an archetypal iconography. “As cool as the toy was, Boba Fett looked so much cooler and more interesting on the screen,” Ervin says. “To see him come to life in that way, particularly after the cartoonish version in the holiday special, it was like seeing a comic book character walking around.”

Perhaps no character in the Star Wars canon has ascended to legendary status on looks alone the way Boba Fett has. Despite barely appearing in the saga’s original trilogy and dying in pathetic fashion in Return of the Jedi, falling listlessly into a Sarlacc pit, he’s remained a prominent figure in the extended universe and its fan base’s consciousness, fueled by the power of a design that, in Star Wars, is perhaps rivaled by only Darth Vader. Now, nearly 40 years after Boba Fett’s debut, Disney+ is staking its first Star Wars series solely on the power of the character’s imagery with The Mandalorian, which will follow a similarly styled bounty hunter. It’s further evidence that between the action figures and video games, the aura of Boba Fett and the fervor of the online cult fandom he’s attracted begins and ends with his iconic look.

The first concept artwork for Boba Fett began, like most rough sketches, in black and white. After George Lucas had established a pure villain in Darth Vader and his white-armored henchmen, he wanted to create a “Super-Stormtrooper” that could do Vader’s bidding and provide fans with another antagonist in the Empire. Eventually, wanting the character to have a bigger role in the story, Lucas rewrote him as a bounty hunter. “The Boba Fett character is really an early version of Darth Vader,” says Lucas in J.W. Rinzler’s book The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. “He is also very much like the man-with-no-name from the Sergio Leone Westerns.”

Beginning in 1977, concept artist Ralph McQuarrie outfitted what the design team called its “supercommando” in all white, morphing a Vaderlike helmet into a signature T-shaped visor. A year later, art director Joe Johnston took the reins on Boba Fett’s exterior technology. His early sketches showed off the wide array of gadgets the bounty hunter had at his disposal, including a rangefinder readout, shoulder guards, rocket-pack nozzles, high-velocity armor-piercing projectiles, luminous flares, laser weapons, a flamethrower attachment, utility pouches, rocket darts, and extendable kick blades. In more developed and detailed illustrations, Boba Fett sported aquamarine coloring along with a dented helmet, a woven hide belt, and a wrap-around cape stolen right out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Five months after those sketches were made, assistant editor Duwayne Dunham posed inside the white prototype suit for the first time, modeling all of its features with a Star Wars beach towel instead of a cape. “They tried the flamethrower thing and it almost burnt his arm to a crisp,” says Rinzler, an executive editor at Lucasfilm for 15 years starting in 2001. A few weeks later, Johnston painted the entire suit, built by a few crewmembers, with a rusted look, accentuating its various structures and attachments. “I … tried to make it look like it was made of different pieces of armor,” he recalls in The Making Of. “It was a symmetrical design, but I painted it in such a way that it looked like he had scavenged parts and done some personalizing of his costume; he had little trophies hanging from his belt, little braids of hair, almost like a collection of scalps.” Sandy Dhuyvetter, who painted three Boba Fett costumes for Empire, worked off Johnston’s instructions. “I went to, and spent much time in, the Army and Navy Surplus stores in Santa Cruz, picking up patches, belts, tarps and little accessories to make Boba Fett look the real deal,” she told Boba Fett Fan Club this year. “I went to horse shops and bought horse hair from tails and braided it to look like part of the armor. I also remember dying gloves, belts and the suits to make everything look well used and worn.”

In true opposition to today’s extravaganza character unveilings, Boba Fett’s first public appearance came unceremoniously in late September 1978 at the San Anselmo County Fair parade. Without any fanfare, Boba Fett walked side by side with Darth Vader in near-100-degree heat, giving unprepared fans their first official look at the bounty hunter. “I just love it. It’s such a throwback,” Fry says. “Nobody even knew who this character was. Anyone who was at that parade who was a Star Wars fan, they’re the all-time OGs.” Around the same time, the toy company Kenner—which in 1976 signed an exclusive merchandising deal with Lucas—began advertising an action figure version of Boba Fett for its winter sale, just ahead of the Holiday Special, building more anticipation for the sequel. “It was a way to introduce a new action figure and just keep money flowing into the coffers because Lucas was financing the film himself,” Rinzler says. “Even when I worked [at the Skywalker Ranch], it was a mom-and-pop shop.”

It’s only a brief interaction, but Boba Fett’s on-screen introduction leaves plenty to the imagination. As Vader walks down a line of bounty hunters, instructing them to find the Millennium Falcon and return Han Solo alive, he pauses in front of the dinged and dented contract collector and waves his finger. “No disintegrations,” Vader warns him, suggesting a history of quick triggers. “As you wish,” Boba Fett replies in a threatening computerized growl, voiced by Jason Wingreen (while actor Jeremy Bulloch wore the suit). “He taps into something [that’s] part of Star Wars secret sauce, which is this idea that this universe is lived-in, and nothing is shiny and new,” Fry says, alluding to Boba Fett’s scraped armor. When Vader eventually traps Solo and disarms him, thanks to Boba Fett’s tracking device, the bounty hunter walks around the corner, his spurs jingling like a space cowboy, to admire his capture.

Though he’s an accessory for the Imperial Army, Boba Fett skews closer to Han Solo, an individual out for himself. “He’s obviously associating with the bad guy and so he becomes a bad guy, but he’s not fully in one camp or the other,” Ervin says. “That added some excitement that, wait a minute, this whole thing isn’t just good and bad. There are going to be nuances. That filled out the whole world, the whole galaxy, in really great ways.” Boba Fett was also just good at executing his job, and importantly, he looked good doing it. “He’s fearless, more or less,” Rinzler says. “He’s got secret weapons like James Bond … and he also has a really cool ship.”

With just four lines of dialogue in Empire, Boba Fett had fans eager to see his role expand at the conclusion of the trilogy. Instead, in Return of the Jedi, they got one quick action scene—effectively a shrug. Right before the mercenary shoots his laser at Luke, a blinded Solo spins around and accidentally pierces Boba Fett’s jetpack, sending him sailing and wailing to the ground, where he tumbles to his presumed death in the Sarlacc pit. “I was like, that’s it? We finally get to see him, and then he’s gone in five minutes in this really awkward way,” Fry says.

But as unflattering as Boba Fett’s death looked, it marked a pivotal moment for the expansion of the Star Wars universe. Boba Fett was one of the coolest-looking characters, and his swift exit provoked an intense desire in devoted fans and writers to bring him back. They weren’t done with the bounty hunter. In true narrative-correcting form, Marvel Comics writers indeed resurrected Boba Fett in 1984, and he later appeared in the Dark Empire comic series in the early 1990s, where artists seized upon his scraped-together armor with beautiful detail. He reentered the canon in Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones, which explained his origins as a clone and son of Jango Fett, filling out his Mandalorian background. And thanks in part to Rinzler’s hand in outlining a young-adult Boba Fett fiction series, the bounty hunter resurfaced in The Clone Wars animated television show during its second season in 2009. “I have been in meetings with George where he confirms that Fett survived,” Rinzler wrote during a Reddit AMA in 2014. “If it comes from George, then it’s true!”

Naturally, Boba Fett has also become a familiar figure in the past two decades of Star Wars video games, including notable titles such as Bounty Hunter (which primarily features Jango) and the Battlefront series. His look and accessories made him a valuable commodity for game players, finally able to try all his weaponry. “We obviously knew he was a fan favorite and definitely one of the heroes we wanted to include,” says Viktor Blanke, an associate art director for 2015’s Battlefront. “His jetpack was also an early gameplay mechanism that was prototyped for that game. Including the Slave I as one of the first Hero ships, alongside the Millennium Falcon, was another conscious choice in the Fighter Squadron game mode.”

Before the most recent Star Wars trilogy under Disney began in 2015, a Boba Fett movie was initially rumored. That eventually morphed into The Mandalorian, the marquee series for Disney+, which focuses on a lone bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy after the fall of the Empire. Though the show won’t explicitly feature Boba Fett, its iconography and story inspiration are bound to him. In an interview with Good Morning America, the show’s executive producer, Jon Favreau, said he “never felt like he saw enough of Boba Fett in the earlier films,” even though there was “so much hype.” Now, he and writer Dave Filoni will continue the bounty hunter’s legacy, albeit with a Fett-adjacent character, renewing the fan base’s undying fascination with him.

Looking back, the masked mercenary’s blink-and-you-miss-it presence could have made him a forgettable figure, but his intriguing aesthetic offered countless storytelling possibilities. “We never see behind the mask, and so that gives us the opportunity to project our own hopes and dreams and desires onto the character,” Ervin says. “Boba Fett looks like all of us.” Though Lucas knew that Boba Fett’s popularity had increased after Empire, Rinzler believes the creator never wanted to pander to his audience. Lucas had considered adding a shot of Boba Fett crawling out of the pit in new editions of the movie, “but that doesn’t quite fit in the end,” he told USA Today in 2004. “[George is] very good at doing what interests him, and he’s gotten a lot of flak about that,” Rinzler says, “but in the end, because he’s true to himself, his stories are much more interesting.”

Though McQuarrie, who died in 2012, and Johnston—whose designs and framework have continued expanding and shaping the prominence of the bounty hunter and his Mandalorian world—never could have guessed the long-lasting impact of their creation, each slick and practical detail covering Boba Fett offers more questions and intrigue. Those obsessed with the series are still exploring Boba Fett today. “You get the feeling there’s a story behind everything on that costume,” Fry says. “As a kid, I was dying to know what some of those stories were, and as an adult fan, I still feel the same way.”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.