Tobar said:
Bubba Feets: Terrible at Everything
Interested to hear Tyr's reaction to this. =P
I've actually given this a lot of thought (obviously).
It's totally true that if you look at Boba's accomplishments onscreen in Empire, it's not an impressive record; he's only onscreen for a short time, doesn't have any huge explosive battles where he does cool stuff, his name is never mentioned, he only has a couple lines, he doesn't really do all that much, and if you watch that prototype video of his armour, you see he doesn't even get to use half the functions they built into it. Honestly, if he didn't look so damn cool, people would probably not like him so much, and that coolness is his complete appeal.
The thing about Boba that makes him so cool is his subtlety, and for that we have to give Jeremy Bulloch his due. He took a character that otherwise did really nothing exciting (onscreen) and turned him into a badass (beyond already looking like one), just by playing it cool and confident. And he did do cool stuff in the film; just subtle stuff: somehow knowing the Falcon was disabled and would hide in the garbage to escape, tracking it to Bespin undetected, talking back to Vader/staring him down like it was nothing, almost blasting Chewie, knowing Luke was there and almost blowing his head off, and capturing one of the most-popular main characters of the series.
I'm not going to claim Jeremy Bulloch as the greatest actor ever just because I'm a Fett fan, but I really do think his acting was the complete difference between a forgettable secondary, background character, and a fan-favourite, cult-following-level primary character with a ton of EU about him. Bulloch managed to make the character stand out by just taking a cool-looking character and complimenting that with cool-looking acting; just making very slow, very concise, very deliberate, very confident movements turned Boba from scenery into a real character that people wanted to learn more about.
Also not to be ignored is Jason Wingreen's vocal performance; Boba not only looked badass and moved like a badass, but sounded like one as well. Just the perfect gruff, hardened, gravelly voice you'd expect a guy like Fett to have.
I utterly hate that Lucas took the route he did with the whole origin story crap. Bah. Now Wingreen's great voicework has been totally replaced and I have to deal with a reminder of the prequels whenever I play a game with Boba Fett in it now, which I fupping hate. That's part of why I'm not super torn-up about 1313's likely cancellation: I was NOT looking forward to hearing Temuera Morrison (or worse, Daniel Logan) as Boba and wishing it had been a Wingreen sound-alike instead.
It's one of the worst changes of the films, honestly, regardless of your standpoint on Boba. In most games/shows/whatever, you can ignore prequel/SE nonsense, but Boba's new voice is there to stay, sadly, and will just follow us wherever we go.
