Boba Fett Is a Woman Named Roberta, and Other Vintage Star Wars Theories

No, Boba Fett was a good guy! And maybe not a guy at all!

Don’t think that not having an internet kept Star Wars fans of the past from speculating wildly — or from penning the ink-on-paper equivalent of mindless clickbait. Here, from the December 1980 issue of Fantastic Films magazine, are the best guesses about the upcoming Episode VI (then still known as Revenge of the Jedi) from Bill Hays’s article “Speculation Concerning the Future History of the Continuing Star Wars Saga.”

Besides mistaking The Empire Strikes Back for a new baseline instead of a flukish high-water mark, and also presuming Lucas cared anywhere near as much as Fantastic Films readers did, Hays believed the following:

• Darth Vader is not Luke’s father. Instead, he and Luke are clones of another Jedi named Skywalker.
• The Millennium Falcon? “Designed by Jedi scientists as Skywalker’s private warship, to protect his cover identity as a smuggler.”
• “Is Obi-Wan supposed to be Jesus Christ? Yes and no.”
• Obi-Wan Kenobi is the first clone of a specimen named O.B. Think about it: O.B.1.
• “Better yet, tell me what Jedi stands for. In Latin, the plural of Jesus would be Jesi, but that’s too obvious. If the early Christians cloned Jesus to preserve his unique DNA, they might have built the Jesus Eugenics Development Institute.”
• Bounty hunter Boba Fett isn’t just a clone…Boba Fett’s a she-clone. “Boba could be a family nickname for Roberta.”
• “Luke agonizes that he could make [Leia] love him by planting the suggestion in her mind.”
• Jabba the Hutt and his pirate friends team up with the Rebel Alliance.
• The climax: “The Rebels don’t have enough ships to defeat the Imperial fleet. Han arrives at the crucial moment, leading the pirates and all the Jedis that Boba Fett only pretended to kill, and shows us Kenner’s new line of space toys for that Christmas.”

  Here’s one really good question, though.

  

Of course, all of Hays’s speculation pales next to the climax Lucas actually envisioned: As Lando and some fish-faced thing re-enact the last half-hour of Star Wars, a sleepy-eyed Han Solo beats up stormtroopers with some teddy bears.