Mark Hamill says he pitched George Lucas on Boba Fett being Luke Skywalker's mom
Aux Features Boba FettEarlier this year, Mark Hamill worried that there might be just a few too many Star Wars movies in development, a concern that Disney eventually came to share. Hamill, however, might still have been bummed to hear that James Mangold’s Boba Fett movie was one of the casualties. Why? Because that may have been Hamill’s last shot at getting someone to bring his own vision for the character to life. Hamill revealed on Twitter this weekend that he once pitched George Lucas on the plot twist that Boba Fett was not the ruthless bounty hunter we thought, but actually a disguise adopted by Luke Skywalker’s true mother.
“Then there was the time I pitched Boba Fett as Luke’s mother,” Skywalker himself tweeted. “I have always been more than willing to generously share my many, many terrible ideas in the off-chance we might stumble across one that could actually be useful. At the time, I didn’t even know Leia was my sister.” He added that, for him, it was “the only way we could top Vader being my father. I envisioned her as a double-agent working clandestinely for the Rebels. SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t like my idea.”
The reveal was prompted by an inquiry from Tatooine Suns: A Star Wars podcast, who, in discussing the fan theory, found one of their hosts attributing it to Hamill. That host might have been recalling a 2004 interview with CHUD, when Hamill (presumably) first shared the news publicly.
“It seemed to me that after revealing that Vader was my father they desperately wanted to top that, which you can’t do!” he said at the time. “The audience is expecting the unexpected. I kept thinking that Boba Fett would take off the helmet, shake out her hair, and it’s my mother! You would go, ‘Wow, a double agent!’
In that same interview he said that, like many fans, he thought “they jettisoned Boba way too arbitrarily. He was built to be this awesome bounty hunter that was badass and everybody was afraid of him, and what, you flip a switch on his backpack and whooo!”
While Lucas never capitalized on Hamill’s idea, he did almost give Fett a family connection to the Skywalkers while in the prequels. As revealed in Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas, the creator considered making Anakin Skywalker and Fett stepbrothers, but eventually scrapped the idea. Thankfully, the bounty hunter lives on in the Star Wars Legends expanded universe, and one can imagine his presence will no doubt be honored, if not directly referenced on Jon Favreau’s upcoming The Mandalorian.
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He was built to be this awesome bounty hunter that was badass and everybody was afraid of him, and what, you flip a switch on his backpack and whooo!Was he? I mean, I’ve seen Empire and Jedi less than 500 times, so I might have missed something, but it seems to me that he was built so Darth Vader wouldn’t look weird talking to nobody. At no time do the movies imply that he is anything other than a delivery man, and certainly not a badass.
Yeah but he looked cool and nerds get excited easily.
We call that a Boba Fetish
The “No disintegrations!”, “As you wish…” exchange in Empire implies that Fett is a particularly violent bounty hunter, who “brings ‘em back alive” only as a last resort. On top of that, there was the animated sequence in the Christmas Special (pretty much it’s only unironic bright spot), which did set him up more elaborately as a bad ass. I believe the special is “non-canon” now, but hadn’t been expressly disavowed at the time of the original trilogy.I’m not sure I would have considered “Mama Fett” a great idea at the time, but looking back I’m highly amused by the idea that Luke’s mother wouldn’t have been a figure in some overwrought romance, but kind a regrettable one-nighter for Vader…“What can I say? I’d knocked a few back at the Cantina… She shot a grapple around me…”
The idea that Boba Fett has to be told not to kill his bounties doesn’t mean he’s a badass. It means he’s really bad at being a bounty hunter.
An unsustainable business model is little comfort to the disintegrated.
Or just pragmatic.Hey, I’d take a slightly reduced bounty if it meant getting the job done more quickly with as few complications as possible.What you lose in profits in the short term, is made up in spades when quickly moving onto the next bounty.
Most people put bounties on people they want back, tho. It’s not supposed to be a hit.
Consider Star Wars the Wild West in space. Most towns didn’t care if they were brought dead or alive. They were just going to hang the bastard anyway, so if the bounty is brought in dead, they just saved the sheriff a whole lot of trouble and paperwork.
It is true, returnability is the key disctinction between a Bounty Hunter and an Assassin. And Disintegration even removes the corpse as proof of death. All in all, Bounty Hunters should never use Disintegration, and i have to assume that the exchange in question was a kind of dry humour being shared between a 12th Level Neutral Evil Bounty Hunter and his 16th Level Lawful Evil Sith Lord employer.
I kind of got the impression that Fett has an impressive reputation (that he likely builds up whenever he gets the chance) but is actually just a space-bro. I seem to recall a scene at Jabba’s palace where he’s doing the little chin chuck move to some attractive lady bystander. It’s just one gesture, but it locked in my mind the idea that he has a lot of swagger and likes to big-note himself, which I always associate with guys who aren’t as impressive as they think they are.
I mostly get the impression that there might have been a comic book in a cereal box that had all this backstory, but that cereal was Grape Nuts, so nobody read it.
In many fan’s heads, he was built to be this awesome bounty hunter that was badass and
everybody was afraid of him, and what, you flip a switch on his backpack
and whooo!
Fixed.
THANK YOU.That fucking helmet and backpack are treated like they’re important and it’s tiresome.People lost their shit over the idea of a black stormtrooper becoming an important new character when at least that character was given a real story IN MOVIE CANON (not some freaking novel or comic or whatever).Boba Fett in ALL the films for 5 minutes total (maybe) and a toy and this is supposed to make him “awesome”? Bullshit.
When some of us (older folk) first got introduced to the character he was riding on the back of a space dinosaur! That’s pretty bad ass.
It really would have taken so little from the movie to give Boba Fett his reputation. It’s really telling that they didn’t. One scene where Han says, “Boba Fett!? Nobody said anything about Boba Fett!!” And boom, instant legend.
I can speak from my own experience. Between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, when Kenner was heavily marketing their Star Wars toys, there were commercials in heavy rotation advertising a deal where if you bought 4 or 5 Star Wars figures, you could mail in to receive an unavailable (at the time) Boba Fett figure. Boba Fett hadn’t been introduced in the movies yet, and I don’t think he had yet even made his appearance in the Holiday Special. These constantly running commercials seemed to hype up Fett as a really big deal, so it was a surprise to see him dispatched so quickly in ROTJ.
“Luke.. I AM YOUR FATHER!” “That’s not true! IT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!”“Luke.. I AM YOUR MOTHER!” “That’s.. kind of unlikely?”
My god. The fan fic that this could have generated…
I’m sure it would’ve been…fine. But would it have had Sonic the Hedgehog? ‘Cuz I just can’t understand people who sit down to write fanfics and don’t throw a little Sonic H. in. It only takes a second — he’s super-fast!
He also had this idea that Aunt Beru was the original wearer of the Slave Leia outfit but, you know, that job kinda opened up.
“Also, C3Po was actually a pair of Jawas wearing a costume the whole time.”
Fuck Boba Fett. In the movies for, like, 5 minutes total and now we’ve got him shoved down our goddamn throats constantly because the fanlings can reference novelizations, comics, cartoons, god knows what else, and demand his and his fucking families inclusion, just like with Phasma, even though us who only ever go to the films are, like, “Who the fuck is this? And, hell no, I’m not giving my money for an origin film on some piece of shit bounty hunter nobody.”
If Hamill truly thought this was a good idea, he owes Rian Johnson an apology.
It was the late 70s. There was a LOT of cocaine going around.
Not the worst idea he’s ever had.
Oh, so Lucas was too good for this idea, but he greenlit two Ewok adventures, Jefferson Starship holograms, “Jedi Rocks”, Jar Jar Binks, and a major villian named “Count Poop”, and made Anakin’s dad “The Force”? Please. This is a clear example of insidious anti-Hamill sentiment at work.
I like this idea. It could have saved us a whole hell of a lot of fan boy crying decades later.
Hell, Ostrander slightly pillaged it for Morrigan Corde/Nyna Calixte, in Legacy!
I think George liked the idea of a masculine bounty hunter revealing themself to be female though since Leia does that in Return of the Jedi.
It worked out all right in How To Train Your Dragon 2.
Now all I want in the world is James Mangold’s Boba Fett movie starring Natalie Portman.
Natalie Portman removing the Boba Fett helmet, shaking out her hair. Yeah, I can work with that.
“I also had this idea that it was Palpatine on the grassy knoll who shot Kennedy. Look, it makes perfect sense when you read my fan-fic.” *pulls out 7,000 page manuscript*
In a loosely related note, I just want it canon that Greedo was female.
But then there’s no way she shoots first.
Star Wars Saga Blu-Ray> Return of the Jedi> Alt. Commentary> Yoda’s death scene. I’ve known this since 2009. Before twitter was a thing.