Something that you have to understand about Boba Fett is that the character appeared as an adult in just two of the so-far eight main Star Wars films, and his entire screentime in the two films comes in at under 20 minutes. That's split between two films! Not only that, but in the two films, Boba Fett doesn't even really do much! The most action he sees is in Return of the Jedi, where he is seemingly killed by a blind Han Solo who accidentally damages Boba Fett and sends him into the Sarlacc Pit!
So for a guy who barely appeared in the original Star Wars trilogy and did not have all that many cool moments, why is he such a beloved character? And make no mistake, he clearly is a beloved character. The answer sure seems to come down to how cool he looks. The armor that he wears in the film might not have kept him from getting punked in Return of the Jedi, but it sure made every viewer in the audience think he looked awesome while failing miserably. With an armor this famous, there must be a lot of strange facts about it out there, and sure enough, here are 15 weird/gross facts about Boba Fett's famous armor.
15 CARRIES AROUND WEIRD TROPHIES
For what is otherwise a very high tech suit of armor, it is conspicuous that Boba Fett has a braid of hair hanging from it. The gross truth about the braid is that it is actually a trophy. As we saw from Empire Strikes Back, with Han Solo stuck in Carbonite, Boba Fett is very much into the idea of having trophies of his past successes, and the braids are just that.
They originally were meant to be hair from Wookiees that he killed over the years, but in the current continuity, it is either made up of Wookiee hair still or perhaps the hair from Jedi Padawans that he has killed. The braid does look a bit more like human hair than it does Wookiee hair.
14 EYES IN THE BACK OF HIS HEAD
In the world of mercenaries, it pays to have as many views of a situation as you possibly can. We saw the problem firsthand when one of Boba Fett's peers, Greedo, tried to collect the bounty on Han Solo's head from Jabba the Hutt. Greedo didn't realize that Han Solo had a gun on him under the table and that lack of knowledge led to Greedo's death.
Boba Fett wasn't about to have something like that happen to him, so he had a special helmet that gave him an extremely advanced head's up display (HUD) that provided him a 360 degree picture of an area, keeping him from ever being surprised from an attack from behind him. He still ended up getting taken out by a blind guy, but at least he saw him coming!
13 TOO MANY WEAPONS
It is simply amazing how many weapons Boba Fett manages to fit into his armor. He's like a walking, talking Swiss Army Knife. He has a flame thrower built into his armor, he has a wrist launcher, he has a sonic disrupter, he has knee pads that also serve to shoot metal darts out of them, he has spiked boots and, of course, on top of all of this, just for extra measure he has a blade stuck in pocket near his boot.
When you add the weapons that he fires by hand, you would expect that it would be difficult for Fett to control all of these weapons at once. This is why he has a computer system that allows him to activate weapons in his armor via a voice command. That allows him to keep his hands free for his rifle and his pistols.
12 WHERE DID THE FETTS GET THEIR AWESOME ARMOR?
Boba Fett's gear is known as Mandalorian armor. His father also wore the stuff. This, naturally, led people to believe over the years that the Fetts were Mandalorians. However, that turned out to not be the case. George Lucas felt that the fact that the Fetts were so different than the rest of the Mandalorians in their set-ups that he thought it would be better if they were non-Mandalorians who just happen to use Mandalorian armor.
Under this new continuity, Boba Fett was a regular bounty hunter for many years until he could afford to buy himself a Mandalorian armor like his father (the young Fett had his father's helmet from when his father was killed by Mace Windu, but Boba Fett lost it when he tried to turn it into a bomb to kill Windu).
11 SARLACC COULD NOT DIGEST BOBA FETT
As noted earlier, the most infamous aspect of Boba Fett's history is that in the first piece of extended fighting that we see from him in the original Star Wars trilogy, he is defeated by a blind Han Solo and ends up seemingly eaten by a giant Sarlacc (or so we assume). Naturally, the expanded Star Wars universe has managed to show that Boba Fett has survived the Sarlacc.
In most versions, the key point to his survival came from his armor. His armor kept him from being digested by the Sarlacc and allowed him the opportunity to cobble together a way to blast his way out of the Sarlacc (some versions have him escaping only after his armor has been mostly disintegrated). However, in at least one story, Boba Fett's armor survived the Sarlacc and managed to never be digested at all!
10 BOBA FETT'S ARMOR AND DARTH VADER
It is more than just an awesome coincidence that the two most popular villains from the Star Wars trilogy, Boba Fett and Darth Vader, both wore armor. In fact, that they are both armored villains thanks to Darth Vader, who, as originally conceived, basically was Boba Fett!
When George Lucas originally conceived the character of Darth Vader, he saw him as an intergalactic bounty hunter, sort of like an outer space version of the cowboy who would go from town to town collecting bounties. When he then moved on to make Darth Vader a lord of the Sith, Lucas then translated the bounty hunter concept to another armored character, Boba Fett! At one point, Lucas even considered making Vader and Fett brothers (it feels like Lucas considered making everyone related to everyone in the Star Wars universe at one point or another).
9 BOBA FETT: THE FIRST DESIGNER
The most famous designer in the history of the original Star Wars trilogy was clearly Ralph McQuarrie, who worked on all three films. However, most of the most notable designs by McQuarrie were the ones that ended up being used in the initial Star Wars film.
So while a bunch of McQuarrie designs made it into Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas also used other concept artists, one of whom was Joe Johnston, who is mostly credited with being the guy who came up with the armor design that became Boba Fett. Johnston then went on to become a successful Hollywood director, directing the first Captain America film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America: The First Avenger. He also stayed in the world of jetpacks (like the one he designed for Boba Fett) when he directed The Rocketeer in 1991.
8 THE ARMOR WAS BUILT TO FIGHT JEDI
The distinct helmets of the Mandalorians go back to the days before the Old Republic, but their famous armor was so well known that both Jango Fett and Boba Fett sought them out. However, they were actually designed for a rather unusual purpose -- fighting Jedi! You see, the Mandalorians' technology were rapidly advancing and this distressed the Jedis, who sought to take care of a future threat to the Republic.
The Mandalorians then designed armor that they could use to take on Jedi. This led to a long Jedi-Mandarlorian War that went on for many years. Sadly for the Mandalorians, the war eventually ended with their home planet being ravaged by the Jedi. Still, the lasting legacy from the war was the introduction of the famed Mandolarian armor.
7 WHITE DID NOT LOOK GOOD ON HIM
As we mentioned, Ralph McQuarrie was Lucas' initial go-to guy when it came to designing characters for the Star Wars films and that went for Empire Strikes Back, as well, at least initially. One of McQuarrie's designs was for an idea that Lucas presumably had for a group of "Supertroopers" that would be more advanced versions of the Stormtroopers from the first film. Obviously, eventually stylized Stormtroopers were made.
However, the design for these "supertroopers" were considered so good that they figured they would pivot to making just one version rather than a bunch of them and this is where Joe Johnston stepped in for the distinctive design of Boba Fett, while still keeping the character white. Eventually, Johnston began to develop a more colorful version of the character and that became Boba Fett.
6 THE ORIGIN OF THE ARMOR'S DESIGN
The reason that the Mandalorians started creating their own armor was to fight against the Jedi, but that was only the beginning of the development of the Mandalorian armor. The next big step was the creation of the distinctive designs that Boba Fett followed in the creation of his own personal design. That occurred during the Mandalorian Civil War.
There was a major division among the Mandalorians over whether to become pacifists or to be war-like people. One group, the Death Watch, hated the peaceful pursuit of the original winner of the Mandalorian Civil War. Eventually, the Death Watch came under the control of Darth Maul and they re-designed their armor to look like him. Boba Fett took a lot of the Death Watch design into his armor.
5 HIS ARMOR WAS LIKE A JUNK COLLECTOR
The fact that George Lucas saw Boba Fett as an outer space version of a Western bounty hunter really influences the design of the character if you keep that in mind. After all, Fett even seems to sort of be rocking a poncho like the Man With No Name from Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. However, the distinct design of Boba Fett's armor is mostly due to the fact that he is a bit of a scavenger.
Lucasfilm's Dave Filoni explains, "He's added a few things that our Death Watch guys don't have because he's a bounty hunter and much like a gunslinger in the old west, would shoot someone and take their hat or take their guns or, y'know, you win a victory over another warrior and you take something of theirs -- Boba Fett's armor probably is made up of different pieces of found Mandalorian gear."
4 THE TOY ARMOR THAT WENT TOO FAR
In the world of action figures, there are two words that draw fear into the heart of every toy designer -- "choking hazard." That was the concern when Kenner decided to design a Boba Fett action figure in 1979 with a backpack that could actually fire a little plastic rocket. Eventually, Kenner thought better of the venture and decided that either the firing mechanism was too difficult to mass produce or that kids could possibly shoot the plastic choking hazard into the mouths (and throats) of other kids.
Thus, Kenner dropped the figure. The problem was that the producers had already promoted the figure at the 1979 Toy Fair, so it has become this Holy Grail of Star Wars collectibles, with the current owner looking to get $150,000 for the original prototype figure.
3 THE ORIGIN OF THE DESIGN OF THE HELMET
One of the most distinctive aspects of Boba Fett's design is actually the least distinctive aspect of the armor's design (in Star Wars continuity, that is) and that is the T-shaped visor at the front of Boba Fett's armor. As it turns out, this design goes back to the early days of the Mandalorian people, when the original "Mandalore" carved out a mask titled, naturally enough, the Mask of Mandalore.
The mask was handed down to Mandalorian leaders for centuries before it was lost for centuries. It was eventually found and used to unite the Mandalorians for their war against the Jedi. This is why most Mandalorian armor is equipped with helmets that have designs similar to the Mask of the Mandalore. Of course, Boba Fett doesn't really care about their history, he just likes their armor.
2 DURASTEEL DOES NOT KEEP ON TICKING
The most famous metal in the Star Wars universe is definitely Durasteel, which is a combination of carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium. This was the metal that Darth Vader's armor was made out of. It was also what both Jango Fett and Boba Fett used to create their own distinctive armor.
However, it is the not the metal that true Mandalorians prefer to use, if they can, in their armor. They like to use a metal called Beskar, which is also known as Mandalorian Ore. It is rare, though, so not all Mandalorian armor is made out of it. Durasteel, as we have seen, can be destroyed (like when Darth Vader's armor was damaged in Return of the Jedi). In one version of the continuity, Boba Fett eventually re-made his armor out of Beskar.
1 WHERE DID THAT DENT COME FROM?
Speaking of different versions of continuity, there are a number of versions that people have come up with over the years to explain that iconic dent that Boba Fett has in his helmet (a sign, of course, that his helmet is not made out of Beskar). The Clone Wars cartoon series seemingly showed the answer in a special clip that was made for the series that didn't end up being used before that show ended.
It depicted Boba Fett getting into an Old West-style shoot out with Cad Bone and Fett getting shot in the head, hence the dent. An earlier Star Wars series, Enemy of the Empire, showed the dent as coming from Darth Vader using his lightsaber to deflect a laser blast right back at Boba Fett's head.