BOBA FETT

How the Mandalorian malefactor brought a spaghetti-western flavour to Star Wars

These days, if you say the words “bounty hunter”, the first thing most people will think of is Boba fett: the mysterious, battered, battle-armoured bad guy who served han solo up to Jabba The hutt. But before The Empire Strikes Back, the answer would most likely have been the cigar-chewing Clint eastwood, anti-heroically working For A Few Dollars More in sergio Leone’s grittily stylish spaghetti Western. and the two of them are connected, far beyond sharing an ill-reputed job. in fact, without one, you’d never have got the other.

George Lucas was certainly open about Empire’s bounty hunters emerging from films about “the Old West”, and confirmed that Boba fett is “very much like the Man With No Name [eastwood’s character] from the sergio Leone Westerns”. as well as the cool, laconic, money-grabbing attitude, there are hints of eastwood’s poncho in fett’s little cape, and even an echo of the eastwood squint in that iconic helmet’s T-visor design.

Which goes a long way to explaining why he stood out in that motley merc line-up on darth Vader’s deck, getting sneered at by imperial officers. although, interestingly, it was originally Vader himself who was going to be the bounty hunter. Back when he was devising Star Wars, Lucas originally conceived his head villain as “a kind of intergalactic bounty hunter in a space suit” who then evolved into a “grotesque knight” as the script developed. “The Boba fett character is really an early version of darth Vader,” he confirmed.

fett, then, is essentially Vader meets the Man With No Name. No wonder he’s proved such an enduringly popular character, despite his scant screentime. Star Wars was a patchwork myth, stitched from several different potent sources, and if you’re going to mine the none-more-mythic Western for inspiration, they don’t come any cooler, or more stylish,

than Leone’s.