For years, I had an idea for a Star Wars story. Ideas bouncing around my head, but never put down in pixels or on paper. It had nothing to do with any Skywalkers, little if anything to do with The Force (especially the Light Side vs. the Dark Side, that’s for sure). It’s one of the biggest failures of my life to never put more time to sitting down and writing out more than random images that pop into my head that could have been stitched together into a pretty good story. I am glad, however, that someone else has a pretty close idea to what I was thinking and actually got Disney to do something about it. But I’ll get back to that. First, what was my idea?
I was a kid when the original Star Wars Trilogy happened. I couldn’t get enough of Darth Vader and lightsabers as a kid. I watched the movies, read the novels and comic books, played with the toys. One Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times comic section there was an ad for a sweepstakes: Grand Prize winner would be flown out to watch the premiere of Revenge of the Jedi (this was before they changed the name even!). No, I didn’t win that. What I DID win was a runner-up prize of every damn toy Kenner produced for the new movie. Several times that summer it would be like Christmas when the UPS driver pulled up to our house and unloaded boxes upon boxes of toys that would end up filling an entire closet of ours in the basement.
For a while I started playing baseball and listening to rock music and watching other movies. The Prequels came out and the anticipation for those was incredible, only to be somewhat let down after watching them. I thought the Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader transformation was an opportunity for some fantastic story telling, and count me as one who thought Lucas really dropped the ball there in his execution. But that’s an entirely different topic.
What got me thinking about my own story was shortly after Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney. The idea of picking up the final Trilogy of the Skywalker Saga was interesting, but they also had plans to explore other stories in the Star Wars universe, and THAT’S what got me thinking. They had announced Rogue One, a possible Han Solo movie, and a possible Boba Fett movie.
Boba Fett. That bad-ass action figure who, outside of delivering Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt we never really see him do much of anything else in the original movies. But there was the mask, he didn’t talk much either. How can you do a really good movie about him?
The it hit me. What other icon really doesn’t talk much in movies but is a fantastic character? Monco. Blondie. The Man with No Name. Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. That’s what a Boba Fett movie should be about. Morally ambiguous characters living in between the cracks of the Galactic Empire and the Rebellion. Lucas once said one of the inspirations for the original Star Wars movies was Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. If he could borrow ideas from Kurosawa, I could borrow from Sergio Leone.
My favorite of Leone’s movies was The Good The Bad and The Ugly because of it’s characters Blondie, Angel Eyes, and Tuco. So instead of doing just a Boba Fett movie, make one with him and two other characters searching for some kind of treasure McGuffin treasure to move the story along.
As much as I’d want Boba Fett to be The Good, he does probably fit The Bad profile better. Hell, put the Mandalorian mask of Fett’s next to a picture of Lee Van Cleef, and I don’t know about you but I see resemblances. So who would be good? Could introduce a new character here, which is what many of the new Disney movies are doing–using established characters and stories to introduce new characters to build off of with other movies or series. Or, could fall back and bring in Han Solo to fill in for the good. Not a far leap to connect dots between characters formally played by Ford and Eastwood here.
But what about The Bad? I loved Tuco. His humor is what really appealed to me most in TGTB&TU. Who is ugly? Who is funny? Again, someone new? Or someone old? Someone, perhaps, that we’ve seen, but don’t know much about? A smuggler or bounty hunter we’ve already seen? Yeah… DENGAR.
If you sneezed watching Empire Strikes Back you probably missed him in the bounty hunter line up Vader tasks with finding the Millennium Falcon. But he got an action figure. And I even remember him making an appearance in a Marvel comic book when I was a kid. Don’t remember him being very funny, but he was ugly, and we can work with that.
So a story about Solo, Fett, and Dengar double crossing each other trying to find something they’re searching for (a cache of Imperial Credits? a chest of kyber crystals? who knows…). This could work.
I got as far as the introduction to the movie, which would have paid more than its share of homage to the opening of The Good The Bad and The Ugly, especially when we first see Angel Eyes (Boba Fett) on his first mission. Dengar paying tribute to Tuco was going to be the most fun (“There are two kinds of people in the Galaxy, my friend…” and “If you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t Talk” scenes). But I never got any further than that.
Jump forward to 2019, and Disney looking to cash in on an iconic Star Wars figure, decide to go in a different direction with their Boba Fett stand-alone movie (good idea). Jon Favreau pitches the idea for a series built around another Mandalorian (one with NO NAME as I’m aware of yet), the story taking cues from Sergio Lenone’s westerns and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (INJECT THIS INTO MY VEINS RIGHT NOW WHY DON’T YOU). In conjunction with Star Wars television series vet David Filoni, Favreau wrote the story, got people like Pedro Pascal, MMA fighter Gina Carano, Giancarlo Esposito, Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog (!) to star in it, and people like Filoni, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Taika Waititi to direct episodes. You’d think this can’t miss will all those names involved.
I was at the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago and attended The Mandalorian panel at Wintrust Arena. I can say, after listening to them talk and seeing some advanced footage, they sold some DisneyPlus subscriptions that day. I’ll be one of them. So happy to see this idea have legs and someone actually follow through and make it. Cheers, Jon.
