For a certain subsect of kids born in the seventies, Star Wars action figures were a defining childhood property. If you’re anything like me, you can remember with perfect clarity that first moment you caught sight of a display stocked with Star Wars figures. My first experience didn’t take place anywhere as predictable as a toy aisle. Oddly enough, I first saw them at a hardware store, where my parents were buying gardening supplies.
It wasn’t exactly unusual to find toys in a hardware store, but the toys were usually along the lines of toy tractors, dump trucks, or other metal-and-plastic vehicles a kid could play in the dirt with. But action figures? Very unusual. The reason for this was simple: nobody really believe this odd little sci-fi property would ever amount to anything, so why not cram the toys in whatever nook they could and forget about them?
Whatever the reason, seeing those little toys for the first time in a place I equated with extreme boredom opened up a deluge in my head. The main difference in these figures was the fact that the packaging of the toy depicted real people, not the usual comic or cartoon illustrations that accompanied toys. It gave the idea of this larger, broader world that was happening just outside the window — a world of jet-black armor, shiny gold robots, shimmering swords made of light, and odd-looking aliens. It had, of course, already happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but I didn’t know that. Not yet. I had yet to see the movie these figures came from, after all. This was something new.
Flash forward to my more-or-less adulthood, and these figures hold a powerful connection to childhood and nostalgia for me. There’s trend I’ve noticed of trying to turn nostalgia into the equivalent of a four-letter word sometimes, that it’s better to look at the things we loved as kids through the clear-headed and analytic eyes of an adult, to see only the flaws with none of the joy. Minimally articulated toys, simplistic plots on cartoons, questionable acting in our favorite shows and movies… we can’t enjoy these things now, can we?
Bollocks.
Maybe as a reaction to that mindset, maybe as a desperate stranglehold on the part of me that is still as a child, maybe a lack of ability to substitute “disliking things” for “good taste,” or maybe just a systemic inability to hate the things I once enjoyed, I still feel a powerful connection to anything and everything that brought me childhood pleasure. To disrespect that would be to disrespect myself, and I can’t bring myself to do it. Outgrowing is just a frame of mind.
Long-winded setup aside, I had been aware of Gentle Giant’s large scale replicas of those early Star Wars figures of the seventies and eighties, but had never given them much thought. They’re fairly pricey, and there’s always something to buy. But when I saw that they had put out Boba Fett, I was struck with that powerful urge. Boba has always been one of my favorite characters, even before the internet decided that anybody who liked him was just following everyone else. And pitting Boba against anybody and everybody gave me hours and hours of enjoyment as a kid. What better way to pay tribute to that time of my life than with a bigass chunk of vintage Boba?
Right away, the packaging hits you with that warm hardware-store-peg feel. They could have gone in any direction, but to have this 12-inch Boba Fett on a perfectly scale-accurate version of his original blister card means you can practically envision it hanging off some gigantic metal peg somewhere where children are four times the size they should be. I’m doubly glad they made it resealable because this is a perfect display piece.
Free from his shell, he’s exactly as I remember him. With a whopping five points of articulation, Boba is adept at standing at attention, pointing his arms, turning his head a bit, doing a goose-step sort of walk and not much more, but back then that’s all we needed because GI Joe hadn’t shown us that smaller-scale toys could do a bit more than these could, and that was okay. We had imagination to fill in the gaps that toy science lacked. Get off my lawn!
Making an exact replica of a 3 and ¾ inch toy is one thing, but they also nailed the colors. The bluish gray is exactly how I remember it, and the green of his chest armor looks dead-on. Minimal painting. Minimal sculpting. Maximum memories.
Boba’s original figure never got his signature firearm. Instead, he got the same gun that Stormtroopers got, and bigger Boba gets a bigger version of that same gun. It’s even a little loose in his hand, just like the original was. I remember biting the hands of several of my figures to ensure a snugger grip. Maybe that was my first attempt at customizing. This hand is too big to bite.
One difference in this figure is that, unlike in the safety-conscious seventies, bigger Boba is fully equipped with a rocket-firing backpack that really works. The initial Boba Fett was going to be a mail-away exclusive and featured an actual firing rocket… but the man decided kids needed their eyes, so Boba was scrapped and the rocket became part of the sculpt. Testing this larger version out, there’s no way it could take out an eye, so I think we’re all safe from harm. For now.
Boba is authentic right down to the “1979” and “HONG KONG” stamped into the plastic. 1979 was, of course, one year before his debut in The Empire Strikes Back. He would make his debut in animated form in the much maligned Star Wars Holiday Special (something I’ve still never seen), and had not yet proclaimed to that punk-ass Vader that Han was, in fact, no good to him dead.
So was this figure the nostalgic jolt I was hoping it would be? I’ve bought a lot of cool toys, and more and more are being made each year. But holding this 12-inch version of one of my favorite childhood toys, I can safely say I don’t regret it at all. I just hope I can somehow confine myself to one. The other bounty hunters are looking extremely tempting now.
And as always, discuss on the Fwoosh Forums!
