Star Wars: The Black Series Jango Fett

 Another “Had It Forever, Finally Gonna Write About It” toy, Black Series Jango Fett is a figure I have seen at retail I think three times, including the instance when I purchased it. How fortunate for me: it seems my area is entering another blink-and-miss-it period for toys. The first Jango sighting was at my local comic shop, where I glanced at him but fairly easily walked away; I’d probably just picked up my $100+ load of over a months’ worth of comics. The second time was at a Target where I saw him, considered him, and then ultimately left him, for reasons unknown. The final time I believe was just a few days later, where I decided that I was going to buy him. And I did.

Jango Fett is a very nice figure, and one that I feel confident in saying I am objective about, since I don’t own a (real) Boba Fett. First introduced in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Jango Fett was no doubt intended to be a shout out to super popular and super underdeveloped (in the main saga films) fan favorite Boba Fett. I am certain that fans were supposed to love Jango the way they obsessed over Boba, and I myself recall greeting the news of another Fett with a pretty intrigued “Wow, there’s ANOTHER one!” See, at the time, we didn’t have Internet saturation to turn to for things like theories and spoilers and stuff; or, at least, I didn’t. Yes, back then we were able to ponder Jango’s role in the Star Wars narrative, willingly overlooking the lingering distaste of The Phantom Menace and crossing fingers in the name of that movie’s being just an aberration, a bump in the road of the galaxy far, far away. What we were looking at was a Mandalorian, possibly related to Boba, but status generally unknown. Imagine the excitement of seeing Attack of the Clones and learning that this character was . . . the . . . guy that the Clones were cloned from, because . . . he was . . . a bounty hunter and . . . got paid to be the template man. Yeah. I know that you, learned Reader, knows this, but back then, we didn’t. And it was another, ANOTHER, one of those Prequel things that we said “Ok” to, that we decided was alright, even though it really wasn’t.

See, Jango was just a man trying to make his way through the universe, and he was offered a job, so he took it. Fair; after all, he was a bounty hunter, so I’m sure that disqualified him in the hiring process for more reliable, long term jobs. But why he was chose to be cloned, that wasn’t ever really explained, and so we had our own explanations, once more. Oh, probably because he was tough and resourceful and all that stuff. Ooooh, maybe because he was a terrific warrior, right? Long story short, all the Clones look like Jango under their helmets, and they all sound like him, and there’s a small version of Jango that he named Boba, and raised (briefly lol) as his son, even though it was . . . just a small . . . version of himself, which is slightly bizarre. Boba would grow up and take up the family business of bounty hunting, wearing different armor, which I always thought was strange, but it’s also an odd idea that he’d just wear his dad’s clothes because.

Jango Fett kind of always seemed like a legacy inclusion to the Prequels, as though the movies were trying to load themselves up with as many calls to the Original Trilogy as it possibly could. And now, of course, we know that was the intent; but in the early 2000’s we didn’t know. Jango always seemed like a guy that was there to make you remember the Original Trilogy, or to try and serve as the Prequel analog for someone in the Original Trilogy. Kind of the way Count Dooku was basically intended to invoke ideas of Emperor Palpatine in a galaxy that did not yet have an Emperor Palpatine, and Qui-Gon Jin’s brief appearance was supposed to invoke the brief appearance of wise Sir Alex Kenobi. Jango was kind of a Boba Fett impersonator; and ultimately, his involvement in Attack of the Clones made Boba a Jango impersonator. It’s fairly difficult to find people who are hardcore fans of the Prequel movies, in the same sense as there are hardcore fans of the originals, and so the Black Series has largely stayed away from such characters. We’ve got Jango here, and a young Obi-Wan, and pre-suit Anakin, and Darth Maul, and I think that’s all. Oh, Clones, right, duh. But Clones are troops, so troop builder collectors are likely to jump for those, whereas face characters are still pretty rare. And for a line that produced a Greedo as one of the initial eight offerings, it seems reasonable that there would or could be more Prequel figures, at some point. Black Series Jar Jar when?

The Black Series Jango Fett is really thick. His legs are very sturdy, and his entire torso feels meatier than many other 6” figures. Not even the prototype Boba Fett is as large as Jango is, and the only other figures I own that feel close to this are the Vaders and Captain Phasma. Jango could hold down important documents on your desk, that’s for sure. He comes with his two blaster pistols, each of which fits into a hip holster; his rocket pack and a removable helmet. Jango has the normal range of motion for a Black Series figure, unencumbered by extra armor pieces or anything, although the legs, due to their thickness, are a little hard to move into deep knee bends or real drastic positions at the hips. The solid nature of the legs greatly aid in standing, so that is definitely a positive.

All the details on Jango are different from the Boba Fett figure. The rocket pack is different, with the stubbier short projectile on the top, almost more a cone than a rocket at all. The helmet is different mainly in that it is removable, and so is hollow. The face sculpt is very nice, and it makes me wonder if there’s not a removable helmet Clone Trooper somewhere down the pipe, since the sculpt exists. The blaster pistols are nice, but I’ve never been a fan of their design, always preferring my Fetts to be armed with the EE-3 rifle that Boba carries. But, the pistols here are real thin, and that means their barrels bend with any amount of pressure. This means that even inserting them into the holsters will cause them to be slightly curved upon removal; however, this does not seem to be a lingering condition, as after literal seconds in hand, they tend to straighten out. The holsters really made me happy when I first opened this figure. I think more figures should come with on board accessory storage, and the holster has always been a great option for that. But I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. Holsters, scabbards for swords, whatever. This is not really the most important of details, but even Jango’s boots are different from Boba’s. I am super impressed by a thing like this, because in honesty, I had been expecting this figure to just be a repainted Boba Fett with a different head sculpt, and I was not prepared for the level of variation between them.

That amount of difference leads me to judge this figure as a success, despite its being largely superfluous and out of place in my collection. I bought him because I like the look of him, but like most Prequel characters, there’s not really enough meat on his story bones to make him a real factor, and at best, he is related to my collection habits because I collect Clones. When he finally made it in to my shopping cart all the way to the checkout line, it may have also been one of those periods where I hadn’t bought anything for a while either because nothing of interest was out or because we hadn’t been paid for a while, I don’t remember honestly. While I do not regret buying Jango Fett at all, discovering all of the differences between he and Boba was a real fun experience, and made owning Jango feel so much more rewarding.

So great was my enthusiasm for Jango, in fact, that I began to think that now I would have to buy the other available bounty hunter figures. I’d seen Bossk a few times, and always thought he was cool; a Walgreens in the area had an IG-88 for like 15 years, and another Walgreens had Bousch disguise Leia forever as well; and damn it, how many years did I see Greedo en masse in stores and laugh. Ha ha, who wants Greedo? Well damn, now I was going to want Greedo, and ultimately I was going to have to shell out big for a regular Boba Fett. I started pricing figures online, and was working on this for a few days, scoffing at this price and bookmarking the page for that one, resigning myself to maybe making bounty hunter Black Series figures my C2E2 marks for 2017. Then I realized: I don’t really want a shelf of bounty hunters. And like that, the urge to collect them vanished. When I was spending the amount of energy that I was in efforts to justify hunting for them, I realized that I was going in the wrong direction.  

Hello, good lookin'.

In December I moved my Black Series figures into a Detolf, where they currently take up two shelves. Were I ever to consolidate them, and afford them only one shelf, thus needing to put some of them in storage, Jango Fett would be one of the early candidates for it. He is a very nice Black Series figure, and one that I’m glad to own, because he is the kind of figure that seems like it always ends up being real expensive on the aftermarket, so it’s kind of better to have him now than really, really want one later on and have to pay high about retail for it (hello, Sandtrooper Commander). He’s also part of a wave that was pretty sparsely distributed, made up of some The Force Awakens leftovers like the old Han Solo, so I think there’s a real chance that Jango Fett is going to wind up being scarce. All of that aside, this is a very nice figure, as most Black Series figures are, and one that, if you enjoy Black Series figures, you’d no doubt enjoy. I think he’s worth it alone for the fact that he’s a totally new figure rather than just being a reuse of the Boba Fett body.