Star Wars Holiday Special(1978)

Despite only having a total of five lines in the original Star Wars trilogy, bounty hunter Boba Fett remains a popular favorite among fans. Boba Fett enjoys the healthy, adventurous life of an anti-hero in dozens of authorized Star Wars comics and novels, as well as many unauthorized fan-created films on the Internet. Creator George Lucas filled in much of the bounty hunter’s back-story in the recent film Attack of the Clones. Yet comparatively few fans know that Boba Fett first appeared in – of all things - a television cartoon, which lands him firmly in Animation – American and Japanese territory.

The cartoon was the highlight of a 1978 TV special entitled, appropriately enough, the Star Wars Holiday Special. Lucas apparently had next to nothing to do with the TV special (aside from licensing his characters), and has steadfastly blocked its official release on home video. While the Star Wars films are proof that Lucas’ tolerance of improbable plots and awful acting are higher than that of most humans, the Holiday Special was so dreadful that even Lucas can’t stand it. On the other hand, the cartoon sequence is terrific. Animated by Nelvana, the same Canadian production company that would later bring the Lucas-approved cartoon series Droids and The Ewoks to television a few years later, the fully-animated cartoon is far superior to most of the science-fiction animation on American TV at that time. Rather than mimic the watered-down comic book look that Hanna-Barbera and Filmation would use in their cartoons, Nelvana forged a flaky yet sophisticated amalgam comparable to that used in the better sequences of the Heavy Metal movie in 1981.

Clocking in at only around nine minutes, the short has the illusion of merely being an episode in an imaginary cartoon series. That’s part of the fun, as a family of Wookiees watched the cartoon on their TV as part of the Holiday Special. The plot, as such, is fragmentary, and serves mainly to introduce Boba Fett as a mysterious masked man who may or may not be a friend or foe to the Star Wars lead characters. When first Han Solo and then Luke Skywalker fall ill to an Empire-created virus, Boba Fett comes to the rescue and offers to bring an antidote. Naturally, Boba plans to double cross the heroes at the first possible opportunity, and it remains for Luke’s loyal robots R2-D2 and C-3PO to alert their master of Boba’s deceit. Oddly enough, considering this is a Star Wars story, no light sabers are used!

Unlike the rest of the Holiday Special, the characterizations of all the characters are true to the spirit of the original Star Wars movie. Even the lead voices are dubbed by the original actors, and it’s especially fun to hear Mark Hamill doing the voice work for Luke Skywalker, given his later extensive experience doing voice acting for the Batman animated series. Boba Fett has more dialogue in the cartoon than in the entire Star Wars series, and the uncredited voice actor doing his voice did an excellent job of portraying the character’s ambiguity. After all, unlike a straightforward villain like Darth Vader, the opportunistic bounty hunter Boba Fett is only a few degrees different from space smuggler Han Solo; they even shared a former employer in Jabba the Hutt. Fett’s voice, is oddly calm and controlled, and it’s easy to believe that the heroes would mistake him for an ally.

As the Holiday Special hasn’t been aired since 1978, there are only two ways to see the Boba Fett sequence. The first way is to locate a bootleg video, an easy enough task if you have a comic book store in the area or attend a comics convention – the "no bootlegs" rule is rarely enforced. However, given that the rest of the special is abominable, a quicker and cheaper route is to simply download the cartoon off the Internet. Given that the ultimate source materials are late 1970s home video recordings, the quality is about as mediocre as you’d expect. But that’s a small price to pay to enjoy the cartoon, and older anime fans remember how fuzzy third generation dubbed tapes can be and won’t mind. I was able to find the video in a matter of minutes using Google’s search engine and the words "Boba Fett Cartoon" and you should, too. While I don’t advocate piracy, in this situation there seems to be no other alternative. Boba himself would probably be pleased with this.

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