As Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opened this weekend, it made me think about how the Star Wars Universe captivated my imagination as a young kid. I first saw Star Wars in 1977, in a Denver theater equipped with Dolby sound, and I can remember thinking it was the loudest and biggest movie I had ever seen. (Keep in mind that the majority of my movie-going experience was at the Roscommon Theater, with a screen the size of half a NYC porno theater's screen, and a floor half as sticky.) After seeing it a few times, I gorged myself on the merchandise like a good little consumer -- the light saber, the trading cards, the bedding -- with a special love of the Kenner action figures. For posterity, R2D2 (for $1.99!) was my first figure, but certainly not my last. In a word, I was hooked.
So imagine my surprise in 1979 when Kenner announced a new mail-in-only figure called Boba Fett. (Boba Fett had his first appearance in the Star Wars Holiday Special, but that wasn't exactly canon even then, so he might as well have been a blank slate.) For the sum of four action figures, a kid like me could have this new entrant into the SWU without any preconceived notion as to his place in the SWU. All I knew is that he was a bad-ass bounty hunter who would appear in the upcoming eagerly anticipated sequel...and his figure would shoot a rocket out of his back pack! After the anxiously endured 6-8 weeks allowed for prompt shipment, Boba Fett finally arrived at my mail box on a dusty dirt road outside of Roscommon in a small cardboard package, and I couldn't wait to get to playin'. The fact that his rocket was glued in place was but a small setback to the imagination, as he soon became a central figure in whatever adventures were dreamt up.
Why exactly did Boba Fett -- a character with minimal screen time, a character who dies a rather quick and pointless death (or, in the words of one of my friends, "he died like a bitch!") -- so strongly resonate with so many kids of that generation, including me? Firstly, Boba Fett -- at least, the prototype pictured in the above ad -- was the only figure in the Kenner SWU that every kid desired but never received, given that the rocket launcher never fired a single rocket for anyone. (I'm sure all the possible lawsuits kept Kenner at bay.) Secondly, as there was no clear backstory for Boba Fett, it was up to the kids to fill in the blanks, as creatively as possible.
I'm sure there were landscapes of play across America where Boba Fett was female or African-American or Asian or any and all of the above. In the absence of an established canon, the kids created every possible scenario and identity for the blank slate that was Boba Fett. And there is no more potent universe than that which you make for yourself, alone in a poorly insulated bedroom in the middle of northern lower Michigan, while the Seventies transitioned into the Eighties. Boba Fett, for a moment, was everything to every kid that had the figure, and that's a recipe for history.
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