Kevin Smith, the writer, director and comic book writer from New Jersey, offered his own thoughts on the new Star Wars movies.
In a rather touching guest-editorial for The Hollywood Reporter, Smith recollects his childhood Star Wars adventures with his now deceased friend, Peter King.
The two played as youths with the Star Wars action figure line, with Kevin Smith advising Disney to use their idea of a Boba Fett time travel story.
It’s part Star Wars part Quantum Leap and would feature all the Star Wars characters.
With no access to the actual Star Wars films until the VCR was made affordable to the average consumer, we’d create our own Star Wars adventures. The best story (and the only one outside of the movie canon that we’d repeatedly play) wasn’t about Luke and Leia: It was about inexplicable fan-fave Boba Fett — the intergalactic bounty hunter who brings a carbonite-frozen Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt. The plot of our backyard adventure: Boba Fett gets trapped by robotic gunslinger IG-88 in a Star Wars universe time loop, sending him through all the movies as well as moments only referenced in the flicks. In some eras, he’s a hero — even getting to kiss Princess Leia instead of Luke (this was before Return of the Jedi made ’em relatives). Other times when the chrono-belt pulled him into another era, Fett’s the villain he’s always known as in the flicks. The time-travel plot allowed us to touch on the well-told stories of the movies we so adored, but it also gave us a chance to mash ’em up with the funkier flights-of-fancy Pete and I would manufacture. It was like an episode of Quantum Leap before that show ever existed, and it was our favorite Star Wars adventure.
If Disney wants to make another cool billion dollars like it did with The Avengers last summer, all it needs to do is make a Boba Fett time-travel flick. It would center on a character everyone digs and allow for a greatest hits of Star Wars while playing with an already-established timeline, a la Back to the Future. You could use every living (and dead) actor from the previous Star Wars films, no matter what their age — which means Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford can come and play as well. It’d be a dream come true for any Star Wars fan — particularly those of us who opted out of the boring-ass real world every summer for galaxies far, far away.
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