How Boba Fett Changed My Life

In my early youth, Star Wars was my favorite franchise of all and Obi-Wan Kenobi was my favorite character. Though I loved the franchise as a young kid, it wasn't until much later in my teens around the time the Force Awakens came out that I delved much deeper into the overall mythos and enjoyed it on even more intimate levels.

It was around the time that Rogue One was about to be released in theaters, and the week leading up to it I wore a different Star Wars every day to school to commemorate the occasion. On one of these particular days I wore a Boba Fett shirt I'd gotten for my 16th birthday the year prior. I even made sure I wore gray jeans and a green jacket to kind of sink it all up together color wise.

Upon arriving home from school I felt led to learn more about Boba Fett. It was as if the shirt had some how seeped into my soul during the day I'd worn it. I ended up heading to youtube (like I did every day) in search of some Boba Fett related content.

I stumbled upon an IGN video about the character alongside some others. It was through watching these videos that I grew even more curious about the character. I'd always thought he was cool, but upon closer examination he just had that more edge to him. The tragic part of this was the fact that he only had so much screen time in the OT but it was still just enough to make you want to see more of this swaggerific, almost silent, BA, who was a homie with Darth Vader.

One of the videos I watched mentioned the fact that Boba Fett was partially inspired by the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name character from the Dollars Trilogy. Intrigued by the idea of seeing something similar to the cool Boba Fett character from my favorite franchise, I rushed over to Amazon to add it to my wish list for Christmas that year. I then texted my family members saying "This is what I want for Christmas."

Christmas day came, and to my joy I had received the Dollars Trilogy on Blu Ray. My mother and family chuckled in the background at the fact that me of all people would be the one to want old westerns from a bygone era of film. But this was all just part of the process in making more varied than i'd once been.

Over the course of the following Winter and Spring I finished the whole trilogy and sought to learn about more westerns in their entirety.

I scoured the web in search of best of lists to try and figure out what would be good to buy. The funny thing was that while reading many of these lists I kept seeing a name pop up in almost every one of them.

Akira Kurosawa.

I'd heard the name before in a video talking about how Samurai films influenced the making of Star Wars, but had no real interest in seeking them out. Out of curiosity and that Star Wars connection this was all sourced from I started learning more about him and his films.

Not only was I now getting into Westerns but Samurai flicks as well, leading me to go and pick up an Akira Kurosawa autobiography to gain more insight into his mind. The mind that helped inspire my favorite franchise, whose film Yojimbo was the source material for A Fistful Dollars whose main character was The Man With No Name, the inspiration for Boba Fett.

A year later I still find it funny that the character with the one of the smallest amounts of screen time in the Original Trilogy somehow changed my life. Upon learning more about the Westerns and Chanbara/Samurai flicks I grew even more passionate about film as a whole, searching out even more classics. Alongside buying Criterion Collection films (on sale), and deciding that I wanted to create a wealth of story knowledge in my brain, I was firmly being put on the path to creating even more stories than I had in the past. Stories with the power to change more lives and in turn be the spark to even more creators.

Rather than just sticking to watching superhero films and Star Wars, I had to realize there was so much more. I also realized that if I hoped to be any good as a creator I needed to have a variety of stories in my system.

To quote Kurosawa:

"Unless you have a rich reserve within, you can't create anything. That's why I often say that creating comes from memory. Memory is the source of your creation. You can't create something out of nothing. Whether it's from reading or your own real life experience, you can't create unless you have something inside yourself. In that sense it's important to read a variety of things. Current novels are fine but I think people should read classics too."

Thanks Boba Fett.

"As you wish."