5 Years ago today this website opened its doors! It has been a blast and so much has changed in that time, but it is awesome to see that we are bigger than ever and still growing!
Many of you have read this before, but for those who have not, here is a brief history:
The Dented Helmet’s history began in early 2001, at the Replica Prop Forums (the RPF) with a thread dedicated to the details of Boba Fett’s costume. That thread grew to over 300 posts, which was legendary at that time. Due to the massive amount of useful information it contained, the thread was archived and a second thread was created. This thread too grew to over 300 posts, followed by a third. It was quickly becoming obvious that Boba Fett’s costume was too complex a subject to be contained within a few threads.
In August of 2001 a new ez-board was created for the express purpose of scrutinizing Boba Fett’s costume and making that information readily available to Fett fans. The board was called “As You Wish” (AYW) as an homage to one of Boba’s most memorable lines. A forum for the new character “Jango Fett” was also created at AYW. Unfortunately ez-board was not the ideal platform for a high-traffic discussion board. It was very sluggish and overrun with pop-up ads making it almost impossible to use. Within a few months of AYW’s creation talks began of creating a new forum based off the same software as the RPF and hosted on a private server.
With the help the help of Cliff Wright and Nikki Burdett, the software used at the RPF was customized to suit the needs of the new board. The domain name www.thedentedhelmet.com was purchased on Jan 30, 2002 and on March 1, 2002, the Dented Helmet Discussion forums (TDH) officially opened to the public. Credit for the name “The Dented Helmet” goes to Chris Skidmore, who suggested it as a joke. All the posts from AYW were transferred and AYW was permanently shut down.
The lead graphics designer of TDH was Dallas Poague, an avid Zam Wesell fan and the creator of TDH’s official shirt designs. As a favor for all his hard work in helping create the look and feel of TDH a forum for Zam Wesell was added to the new board.
Unfortunately, only 6 months after opening TDH, it exceeded the capacity of the hosting server. TDH was temporarily shut down. Fortunately, Nikki Burdett generously offered to host TDH on the same server as the RPF.
In Januray, 2005 The Dented Helmet struck out on its own server and upgraded to vBulletin as its platform. TDH now had a safe and stable environment in which to run. Today it is THE premiere archive for Boba, Jango and Zam costuming information.
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Originally Posted by bobagoat 
Happy B-day!!
George Lucas, Santa Clause, The Wizard of Oz? No! is it the Sniffer?
DANG, you beat me to it!!
