An Epic Rap Battle Retrospective, Supplementary Material: The Boba Fett Roundtable

 

Where we last left our heroes Peter and Lloyd of the Epic Rap Battles of History, they had just potentially bit the hand that fed them by portraying Walt Disney as a despot who runs an empire that cranks out joy on an assembly line.  Whether it’s the next Marvel or Star Wars movie, a revival of The Mighty Ducks, or one shots like Flora and Ulysses, Disney sure puts out a lot of material.  And I mean a lot of it.  What they don’t immediately own, they buy.  Have you browsed Disney+ lately?  A lot of stuff is showing up that had been on Netflix just a few years ago, stuff you wouldn’t immediately think of as Disney because they had no hand in actually making it, they merely own it now.

With “Jim Henson vs. Stan Lee” being the season four finale, if the plug had been pulled there, I don’t think anyone would’ve been surprised.  However, that December, another rap battle was made.  This was the first time a bonus battle had been released, although the timing would suggest that this was meant to be their somewhat annual Christmas battle, even though neither character were particularly associated with Christmas (one of them debuted in a non-canon Holiday special, though).

 

Deadpool vs. Boba Fett

This battle debuted at the end of 2015.  The Star Wars acquisition happened in 2012 and the Marvel acquisition happened in 2009, although Deadpool as a cinematic character wouldn’t fully be under Disney’s control until the merger with Fox in 2019.  Still, Boba Fett’s appearance in this battle feels like proof Disney didn’t care what the humble folks at the Epic Rap Battles of History did in “Jim Henson vs. Stan Lee” as long as no copyrights were violated, so for all intents and purposes, the series could continue.

Perhaps this is also why it was that video and not the massively epic battle between philosophers that ended the season.  They may have wanted to make sure that if they were retaliated against, they’d at least have all the rap battles released first.  Nothing would piss off fans more than hearing about a big corporation preventing the release of finished battles.

As I pondered this rap battle, I began to wonder at the popularity of Boba Fett.  I know why he’s popular nowadays, since he’s used in so much stuff and has a massive presence in both the official canon and in the Expanded Universe.  However, in the original trilogy, he only shows up in A New Hope thanks to George Lucas’s edits.  He has a massive influence over the plot in The Empire Strikes Back, but in Return of the Jedi, he seems to have lost all his experience in battle, like Sora being reset in every single Kingdom Hearts game ever.

The biggest reason I was thinking about this is because I thought about the ERB Curse, that silly thing that I invented and then debunked, and what it might mean for a battle between the guy who literally can’t be killed and the guy who the fandom rescued from the Sarlacc Pit before it was made canon that he escaped.  I figured that, technically speaking, Deadpool did die in Deadpool 2, but Cable pulled some time travel shenanigans to reverse his heroic sacrifice without reducing the effect it would have on the future.

Then I thought about Boba Fett and realized Deadpool’s right.  There’s not a lot of readily accessible canon regarding the bounty hunter, prior to 2015.  Even now, it sort of feels like there’s three different canons.  There’s the original trilogy’s canon, there’s the prequel trilogy’s canon, including the television show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, all of which got attached with a hammer and nail to the original trilogy, and there’s The Mandalorian‘s canon, which does feel like it’s trying to pay homage to the original trilogy and not just hang there like bad DIY, but depending on your opinion of where Disney took the franchise since buying it, your mileage may still vary.

The most baffling thing about Boba Fett’s popularity is that for the longest time, there wasn’t a lot of official canon being released for Star Wars.  The Expanded Universe did most of the heavy lifting for the character, especially since one of the most memorable scenes from the original trilogy was… well…

“Boba Fett?  Boba Fett?!  Where?!“

Hmm, was the entire Star Wars classic trilogy just full of unintentional cringe and cheese, and I just didn’t notice until now?  Maybe I need to rewatch the trilogy.  I finally saw it in the theatre when the original version of George Lucas’s special editions were released.  Wow, the CG used to make Greedo shoot first was bad.  It looked as bad as the CG used to make the cats in Cats dance in that film’s trailers.  Since then, George Lucas has managed to fix some of the damage he did to that scene, but the damage he did to the fandom will likely never be healed, now that there are debates about whether or not Greedo did shoot first (he did not).

Anyway, the question persisted for me.  Why was Boba Fett so popular a character?  Why did someone who was accidentally defeated in such a manner resonate with so many people, to the point that he was rescued from his fate in both fan and canon material?  Fans will do that for beloved characters that they feel had been done dirty by the official source material.  See also Charles “Trip” Tucker from Enterprise, killed off in a rather hasty and stupid manner in the series finale, only to have his death retconned in the books almost immediately.  Other than Star Trek: The Animated Series, which itself has a somewhat not straightforward relation to canon, “These Are The Voyages” is, as far as I can tell, one of only two episodes of the entire franchise that has been declared non-canon by the fans and which the staff acknowledge as non-canon as well.

I turned to my fellow Damage Control writers for help answering this question and here’s what we came up with.

 

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Geoffrey Barnes: I thought Boba Fett just looked super cool as a kid, to the point that I didn’t care how active he was in the movies. Maybe this applied to a lot of kids who were my age.

Joseph: What do you think, Drew? As someone who has probably also seen more Star Wars stuff than I (I’m pretty sure Geoff has seen more than me, too), why do you think Boba Fett is popular?

Drew Young: There is an absurd amount of love for bad guys in Star Wars.  And Boba Fett was the third best bad guy.

Geoff: It wasn’t until I rewatched the Star Wars movies in college that I realized how much of a chump he was. (But I still liked him.)

Joseph: So that puts him… ahead of Jabba the Hutt, then?

Drew: Yes. Jabba has even less screen time, and is more difficult to cosplay, but I think people like Boba because of empire, not Jedi.

Joseph: Well, his “canon” appearance is difficult. But I imagine people could cosplay Jabba 1.0.

Drew: Guy legit outsmarted Han Solo.  Boba in 5 is mysterious and dangerous.

Joseph: Doing research, I discovered the original plan as developed would’ve had Boba Fett as the villain for Episode VI but after Lucas changed his mind about making so many films, his involvement became what it was.

Drew: In 6 he’s just waiting around for his embarrassing death scene.

Joseph: And Boba Fett ended up being accidentally defeated by Blind!Solo.  So I guess his popularity is because in Episode V, he was being written according to the original plan.

Drew: More impressively, Blind!Solo defeated Sarlacc.  I also think that the kind of person who likes Boba Fett is also the person who hates Return of the Jedi in general.  Love for Empire Strikes Back can reach fetishistic levels.  But remember, this is the “Space fascists look cool” fandom.

Joseph: To be fair, one space fascist in particular does look rather cool.  Which is funny because it’s a life support system first and stylish armour second.

~ ~ ~

 

In one of the original drafts for the Star Wars saga, George Lucas was going to make Boba Fett a major villain and thus The Empire Strikes Back was written with that characterization in mind.  So it’s no wonder fans embraced the character and, when he was launched into the Sarlacc early in the next film, it was likely seen as an insult to a character with an awful lot of potential, especially since he was defeated by accident.

Thing is, you can intend to make a character a major evil presence in your series and then change your mind but dispatch him in a magnificent manner that fans still applaud.  In the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a young child was turned vampire and became The Anointed One, an immortal being that was going to help the season’s main villain, The Master.  Upon The Master’s demise, The Anointed One was going to take over as the main villain of season two.  The problem here was that the child actor was still growing.  Rather than come up with a reason why an unaging and immortal being was clearly still growing, The Anointed One was suddenly killed off by new villain Spike near the beginning of the season, thus setting Spike up to be an even greater threat.

In conclusion, Boba Fett was cool in The Empire Strikes Back and there was a lot of potential for him to be an amazing villain, but according to research, it was George Lucas’s fatigue with the Star Wars franchise he’d created that caused four movies worth of ideas to be condensed into one.  Sadly, his prowess as a writer has begun to be questioned, especially after the prequel trilogy, and perhaps it was his treatment of Boba Fett in Return of the Jedi that should’ve been our first clue.