George Lucas Considered Showing Boba Fett Survived The Sarlacc in His RETURN OF THE JEDI Special Edition
Remember when George Lucas went back and added a bunch of stuff to his original Star Wars trilogy? Of course, you do! Those are known as the Special Edition versions of the films and he actually almost included a scene in Return of the Jedi which would have shown Boba Fett survived the Sarlacc Pit.
I’m sure some of you already know this, but there are a lot of younger people out there that probably haven’t gone back and watched the film with Lucas’ commentary on the 2004 DVD release of the Special Edition version of Return of the Jedi. It’s there that Lucas shared the following information:
"In the case of Boba Fett's death, had I known he was gonna turn into such a popular character, I probably would've made it a little bit more exciting. Boba Fett was just another one of the minions, another one of the bounty hunters and bad guys. He became such a favorite of everybody's that, for having such a small part, he had a very large presence. And now that his history has been told in the first trilogy [Lucas' Star Wars prequels], it makes it even more of a misstep that we wouldn't make more out of the event of his defeat because most people don't believe he died anyway."
"I'd contemplated putting in that extra shot in [Return of the Jedi] where he climbs out of the hole, but I figured that it doesn't quite fit, in the end."
It’s crazy to think that they didn’t see Boba Fett at the time as such a big presence in the Star Wars universe! He’s not only a badass bounty hunter, but he’s also one of the coolest-looking characters in the franchise!
The character is finally being explored in his own series on Disney+, and we are getting his backstory of what happened after he fell into the Sarlacc Pit, which is great. But, it certainly would have been cool for Lucas to play with that a little bit in his Special Edition films.
Hell, the guy added all kinds of things when revamping his films, a lot of things the fans didn’t like! Showing Boba Fett crawling out of the pit would have been huge! It would have been one of the most exciting things for fans to see! It’s crazy that after adding everything that he did, he opted not to add that. The fans would’ve flipped the freak out! I think they would have loved it. I would’ve!