REPORTS OF HIS DEATH WERE GREATLY EXAGGERATED. STAR WARS’ ICONIC BOUNTY HUNTER IS BACK FOR GOOD, AND AS THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT I S ABOUT TO PROVE, THERE’S A LOT MORE TO THE BURGEONING CRIME LORD THAN KICK-ASS ARMOUR

WORDS BEN TRAVIS

Boba’s back! Temuera Morrison as the titular bounty hunter in The Book Of Boba Fett.

Director Robert Rodriguez gets stuck in.

DAVE FILONI REMEMBERS the moment he first played with Boba Fett. It was 1979, not long after the character debuted in animated form in the Star Wars Holiday Special, and a year before the Mandalorian-armoured bounty hunter would make his live-action debut in The Empire Strikes Back. With hype for the sequel already approaching lightspeed, George Lucas and Kenner toys were about to punch it into overdrive, releasing the Boba Fett action figure as a ‘mail-away’ freebie. Simply post off proof of purchase for four other Star Wars figures, and after a torturous wait, the coolest new toy in the galaxy far, far away would be yours.

Eventually, the five-year-old Filoni’s bounty arrived. “We had come back from a family trip in North Central Pennsylvania, and this little white box was there in the mail,” he recalls. “And you’re thinking, ‘What is this?’ And you open it up and it’s Boba Fett.”

For some fans, the toy that showed up was a disappointment — last-minute safety concerns about kids poking their eyes out meant that the rocket-firing figure couldn’t actually fire its rocket. Filoni didn’t care. “It was probably better that it didn’t — you know, I was allowed to keep it then. And it was just awesome.”

Since nobody knew what Boba Fett actually did in the upcoming movie, the imagination of the boy who would grow up to become George Lucas’ Padawan and eventually control his own corner of the Star Wars universe began to whirr. “You didn’t really know a lot about him,” says Filoni, who stewarded animated shows The Clone Wars and Rebels before branching into live-action. “Apart from Vader, the toy line had stormtroopers and bizarre aliens from the Cantina, but you didn’t really have another supercapable bad guy of note, so Boba Fett was key. There was a lot of awesome going on from Boba Fett immediately.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the United States, a young Jon Favreau and Robert Rodriguez were also eagerly anticipating the big-screen debut of Star Wars’ most exciting newcomer.

Rodriguez regularly staged epic battles with his toys and stashed Boba in his school desk, while Favreau still remembers the rising hype. “I went for the whole ride of the build-up, the excitement, the curiosity,” he says.

The excitement, alas, couldn’t last. Come 1983’s Return Of The Jedi, the figure once foretold as the (second-) most badass character in the galaxy — who didn’t shrink from Vader, whose bounty-hunting notoriety was evident, whose armour looked unstoppable — went out like a chump. Just 34 minutes in, an accidental jetpack-prodding from Han Solo sent Fett flailing into the gaping maw of the Sarlacc pit with a comedy scream, there to be slowly digested for a thousand years.

Or not. Because as the second season of The Mandalorian — a Favreau and Filoni joint — made clear, the bounty hunter is dead no more. The Robert Rodriguez-directed ‘Chapter 14: