Boba Fett

Intergalactic bounty hunter, Boba H. Fett. The 'H' stands for Herbert.

Oh that Boba Fett. Next to Han Solo, Fett was my favorite character. I guess it was because he was the Empire's version of Solo: he was out for himself rather than the bureaucrats, he embraced maverick tactics, he was a man of action, and he could talk back to Darth Vader without fear of getting force choked (note Han didn't get force choked either; they had to resort to traditional torture methods on Bespin).

Fett spoke little, but made up for it with a nod here, a Wookie scalp there. (See? There's another similarity: Both Solo and Fett are not afraid of Wookies.) His action figure was way cool. It began as a special offer between Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. You sent in force points and shipping and received a plain box with Boba Fett figure inside 4 to 6 weeks later. I got one primarily because the character looked cool. Armor. Menacing helmet. Rocket pack. Yeah, I definitely had to have one. Empire wasn't out yet and the only exposure I had to Boba Fett was the short cartoon in 1978's Star Wars Holiday Special. I knew nothing about him except that he looked like a badass.

When I opened the box, there was a note from Kenner, the toymakers. The rocket-firing rocket pack had been changed for safety reasons. I was sad initially, but then I never really understood the value of a rocket shooting straight up and charring the back of one's helmet and shoulders. You're supposed to bend over and shoot it horizontally? And if you crane your neck up so you can see what you're shooting at? Your head gets launched with the missile? No sir. That's pretty shoddy engineering.

At the playground, rumors swirled that a child had died by shooting Boba Fett's rocket into his mouth prodding Kenner to change all the subsequent toys. Invariably, schoolyard Star Wars fans would claim the friend of a cousin of their half-brother got the rocket-firing Fett prior to the change. Hell, I believed it for a very long time. Turns out, it's bogus. While Kenner manufactured rocket-firing prototypes, the final toy sent via mail order never had the firing rocketpack.

What had happened was that a 4-year-old Georgia boy fired a missile from a Battlestar Galactica ship (the Colonial Viper) into his mouth, asphyxiated and died. On the death certificate, however, the coroner wrote, "Star Wars toy put into mouth - missile ejected into bronchial area" under 'How did injury occur?' (which explains the 'cause of death' in more detail). Reportedly, the toy belonged to an older sibling. This was post-Christmas 1978. The mail order Fett shipped in 1979, sans firing rocketpack. (Weird side note: in the ensuing legal action against Mattel (makers of the Battlestar Galactica toy line) the list of defects alleged in the manufacture of the toy in question stated, "Also, the toy is shaped in such a fashion as to be very similar to a penis which almost beckons small children to put the toy in their mouth..." No, I didn't make that up. Don't believe me? The Star Wars Collector's Archive has the snippet from the actual legal document.

Yeah, anyway, I had the Boba Fett Underoos too. Those were top notch because it wasn't just an undershirt with a picture of the character. The Underoos were designed like Boba Fett's armor. Bad ass. It's my most favorite-ist underwear ever.

The downside to Boba Fett came many years later when I learned that he was the favorite non-central character of 96 percent of all Star Wars geeks (the other four percent are all over Wedge). That took the shine off the polish.