The two of us were about to die at that point. Nobody knew about Boba Fett at that point. I think we were at the head of the parade. I’m not just talking about the suit, I’m saying that day in San Anselmo was really hot. : What do you remember about the parade?ĭuwayne Dunham: What I remember about that day is it was incredibly hot.

When the guys brought it over from England, George said “put it on.” Then it got aged up to George’s liking…I don’t even know how it came about, but someone thought with the movie coming up that the parade would be a good idea. The only reason I ever put that uniform on is because I was the right size.

He also recently directed two episodes of The Clone Wars. We talked over the phone he in California and me in a really hot car in Cleveland.ĭuwayne Dunham: Well, I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. He went on to direct the very successful Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey and Little Giants, and worked as an editor on many critically-acclaimed TV and film projects such as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. I tracked down Duwayne Dunham, who was an assistant film editor on Empire and Jedi - and the guy who wore the Boba Fett armor during its prototype run and in the parade itself. So I was really interested in hearing what it was like to actually be the first person in the world to wear the famous grey armor.

And I’m not afraid to admit (okay, maybe a little) that I spent a significant time in the early 1980s imagining that I, in fact, was Boba Fett through some radical transmogrification of imaginative magical realism. I love Boba Fett for the same reasons everyone does. Rinzler’s magnificent The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, you saw great photos from the prototype test of the armor and actual video from the parade itself (in the Enhanced Edition). So once the annual fall parade came around, it seemed to make perfect sense. So what and why was Boba Fett in a parade in a small city twenty miles north of San Francisco? For one, San Anselmo was home to the famous house at 52 Park Way, which was the galactic core of Lucasfilm at the time. Parades are usually high school bands and Corn Princesses and floats, not flamethrowers and jetpacks and helmets. He marched in the San Anselmo Country Fair parade. But before that, on September 24, 1978, Boba Fett made his first public debut. And that he predated that with a 1978 animated appearance on The Star Wars Holiday Special as Vader’s sneaky “right-hand man” (with a really cool trident). We know that his first movie appearance was in The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. We missed the first appearance of Boba Fett. As much as Star Wars fans pride ourselves on seeing the first show at midnight or hunting down rare collectibles, we all, or at least 99.998% of us reading this, missed the first appearance of one of the saga’s most popular characters.

Pride of the core star wars