A lesson in frugal innovation from Star Wars
Transcript of this video:
“Boba Fett and Creativity”. The “Star Wars” fandom are getting excited about a new TV show, “The Book of Boba Fett” coming at the end of the year. And I saw a documentary the other day about the origins of this Star Wars character. Years ago, George Lucas was planning to introduce to the movies, the original movies, a better breed of Stormtrooper with superior armour and weaponry.
So he had a suit designed, a suit of armor designed, and it had a number of features including a T-shaped slot in the visor. And the plan was to make 100 of these but they’d run out of money. So this prototype uniform was put to one side, but a bit later on when he was looking for a costume for this incidental character, Boba Fett, in “The Empire Strikes Back”, he had this idea of, well let’s use this prototype armor and he had someone paint it and then bash it about a bit to give it a well-worn look.
And they put it on the actor who plays Boba Fett, an incidental character who has only four lines in “The Empire Strikes Back”, a character you might easily forget.
Only around this time, he’s also making or contributing to this TV show, “The Star Wars Christmas Special” and short of material he gets a simple cartoon made and sticks Boba Fett into it almost to make up the numbers and also gets someone to put on the Boba Fett costume and walk next to Darth Vader in a parade in Marin County, where he lived, almost as sort of throwaway decisions.
And so this character gradually gets a grip in Lucas’s imagination. And although it only has four lines in the movie, becomes a cult figure to the fandom and grows and grows and grows in Lucas’s and others’ imaginations so that we get this TV show this year. And I think it’s quite an interesting origin story. And it says a lot about a kind of creative process.
It’s not a gleaming, straightforward straight-for-the-goal thing. It’s a pulsation, if you like, between sort of frustration, oh, we can’t make this work, we haven’t got the budget, and relaxation, a kind of lazy, oh, well, let’s use this, it’s a pulsation and an improvisation and it looks a bit messy and it requires a certain amount of patience.
And I think there’s a good reminder for any creative process not to get too fixated on that convergence. On quickly tidying up and agreeing outcomes and prioritizing because sometimes the broken bits, the loose ends, the things that don’t add up, are actually, might actually turn out to be important parts of something that might develop in a much more organic way.
Photo by Sean Ferigan on Unsplash
