Origin of The Dent!

just a few pics from starwars helmets:

before heading into the arena

orig_Jango_Aotc04.jpg


Shooting the Critter
orig_Jango_Aotc02.jpg


Arena again:

jango3.jpg


Kamino pre dent:

Original-AOTC-Jango-Fett-001.jpg


Kamino post dent:

JANGO_31.png


Dent is not in the same place, dent is not the same shape as boba's. Dent is there on kamino, Dent is there prior to getting rolled in the arena. I suppose you could argue that the filmakers just knew a dent was in about that spot on the boba lid and did not take any time at all to research it whatsoever and just stuck it there, but I find that unlikely.

orig_Jango_Aotc04.jpg


jango3.jpg
 
This is a better image from the Enemy of the Empire Comics (which is not canon ?)
Vader deflects his blaster / laser thingy
A2FJx3d.jpg

and here you can see it more clear
enemyoftheempire_4_13.jpg

Just my two cents.
 
I think the gag Lucas and the animators had in mind, because Jango hitting his head on the Slave I door was done in post-production by the animators, was that Jango hits his head on the door often. Since Boba is an exact clone of Jango, he has inherited his father's poor depth perception while wearing the helmet.

And they further tie/retcon that into the Stormtrooper in A New Hope that first hits his head on the door on the Death Star, suggesting that this particular Stormtrooper was one of the last remaining clones created from a thinly stretched sample of Jango's DNA.
 
Streamlining everything that's been put out so far...

-Conflicting stories in the EU as to the origin of Boba's "dent" (really a crater), and how many he has
-Conflicting opinions as to when Jango's helmet acquires its dent
-EU fluff being treated as the same as explicit film canon as far as armor properties (beskar and all that)

See what I can do to concisely bash things into clear order...

Going by real-world chronology, Boba came first. Allowing for swap-out-able accessories (gauntles, pack, cape, etc.) his armor and helmet in ROTJ were intended to be the same as the armor and helmet he had in ESB. Lucasfilm Archives folks have proven several times that they can't spot the minute differences fan costumers have spotted over the years. Indeed, Lucasfilm sent the Pre-Pro 3 helmet to Master Replicas, thinking it was the ESB Hero, and refused to belive/accept they'd been mistaken when the expert MR called in to create a master for the paint apps pointed out the error. The damage and paint apps are too similar for mere coincidence to allow for the same stuff to happen in the same places.

Remember all three original films were out before home video had really fully exploded as a thing. That was still an era when filmmakers took shortcuts and had a "enh, whatever" attitude toward continuity of minutiae. Frame-flops, differences in costumes/props/sets/models/whatever were never expected to receive repeated close scrutiny. People would see it in the theater one, twice, a dozen times, and done and gone.

Later, from the novels and comics, we have no less than three separate stories of Boba's escape from the Sarlacc. One of those ended with him going back in, so one of the others could be considered to follow onto that story, but that guy has seriously got the worst luck. The EU has also given us multiple and conflicting stories as to the origin of the crater in his helmet. I'll draw attention to what's been said before, at the risk of bringing real-world stuff into it. My Mando armor is 16-gauge stainless steel. One of the chest plates accidentally got backed over in the driveway. As in, by a car. It wasn't bent, dented, scraped, ruined, or mussed in any way. I'll deal with beskar and the "duraseel is ****" stuff that got added later on in a bit. Point is, it takes a lot of concentrated, directed force to bash out an impact crater like that. There are only two possibilities that wouldn't have resulted in a broken neck for the wearer: 1) it wasn't being worn at the time; 2) It's some kind of active ablative armor, and some of the incoming kineic energy was dissipated/redirected outward in lost material, while the thinner remaining material deformed inward.

As stated before, also, the costumers for AOTC had full access to all of the Boba stuff in the archives, includeing no less than six helmets all with identical dents in identical places. If they wanted Jango's armor to be (or, rather, eventually become) Boba's, they would have made the collar and back plate overlap and lock together, rather than gap by an inch. They would have made the groin armor go all the way out to the sides and lock together with the "butt plate". They would have made the knees and gauntlets the same. And, most damning, Tem Morrison is 5'7". Alan Harris was, what, 6'2" at the time he test-fitted the armor? And Jeremy Bulloch was 6'1" when he wore it in the movies. Jango's helmet is noticeably smaller side-by-side with Boba's, symmetry issues aside. The cheekbones are also different shapes. And on and on.

We got several new EU sources telling conflicting stories after AOTC of what Boba did with his father's body, armor, and helmet. Anyone who's done metal armor knows it's far easier to just make a new set of plates than go to the trouble of resizing existing ones. The outlines won't necessarily match, let alone any mounts, sensors, padding, internal systems, etc. Plus, Mandalorians have a reputation of being a practical people -- I doubt Boba would ruin his dad's armor by making it small enough for him to wear... for a few months until he outgrew it. Then what? As for the helmet... Even if Boba hadn't done blowed it up to try to kill Mace, they are so heavily personalized for the wearer, it's just simpler to get one of your own set up for your own preferences and eyeline and whatnot. Notice, in the EU, whatever else is done with the body and the armor, the grave marker is, wait for it, the Mando's helmet. Left to gather bird poop and mud.

Now, cultural in-universe timeline.

The Clone Wars has given us Mandalore and its "moon" Concordia. Last I checked, if a mon had the same mass and gravity and atmospheric density as its primary, it's not a moon. They're co-orbiting trojan planets. Concordia sure seems a lot like the Mandalore we see in the comics and novels set later on. The "Mandalore" we saw in the series is a good match for a desert planet in the system shown in the Atlas named Kalevala. My massaging of things to make it all fit is that some thousands of years ago, the Taung found these trojan planets with the catalogue names of Kalevala and Concordia and they settled them. After the events chronicled in KOTOR and TOR, he Republic smacked the Mandalorians down hard, turning their primarily-settled world, called Mandalore, into a desert.

This would have been the birth of the New Mandalorians, and it would have been an ongoing point of contention for centuries. By about 50-60BBY, the New Mandalorians had gained the ascendancy and outlawed the wearing of the armor. Out on Concord Dawn, the chief of the Protectors tried to enforce this and was killed by his subordinate, Jaster Mereel, for not being a true Mandalorian. He rallied others who felt the same to his cause and it was shaping up to be a coup of the New Mandalorians back on Kalevala-Mandalore until more conquest-minded True Mandalorians split off and formed the Death Watch. They fought. One of Jaster's old comrades who had toed the party line and shelved his armor gave Jaster sanctuary. The Death Watch killed him and his wife and took his daughter. His son helped Jaster escpae, and was adopted by Jaster. That's Jaster Mereel's family crest on Boba's right chest plate.

That kid was Jango. The last Mandalore we know of for sure was Mandalore the Uniter, who was ambushed and murdered around 100BBY. I haven't seen anything that says Jaster or Jango claimed the title, even if they were acting as such. And, while the mask of the Mandalore had been passed from one to the next in antiquity, that tradition was broken long before this time.

By the time we get to the Clone Wars years later, the Death Watch has been quietly rebuilding on Concordia, for much of this time a sparsely-populated world mostly just used for mining. Something seems to have happened to Kalevala by the time the Empire had annexed the system, as we don't see it at all, and Concordia is now recognized as the planet Mandalore, now being strip-mined by the Empire. This is the world we still see decades later in the Legacyof the Force books.

Meanwhile, in between there, after the Clone Wars, Boba had gone back to the Mandalore Sector and tried to have a normal life as a Protector on Concord Dawn, himself. Got married, had a daughter. That lasted about three years -- but that's where we first see him having his own armor and the dented helmet.

BobaAndFamily.jpg


The stories of him getting the dent from Vader or one of the Emperor's Guards' force pike butt or whatever are either misinformation put out there by Boba himself or stories told about him in hushed tones around blazing garbage bins in back alleys wherever hardened spacers gather to swap tales of terror. *heh*

All this -- all. this. -- to point out we still don't know where Boba first got his famous dent, that even if he has multiple backup armor pieces, he wore but one helmet in ESB and ROTJ (despite the folks at Lucasflm either not knowing or not caring if they grabbed the right helmet/armor), the helmet survived the sarlacc and he wore it for decades further until finally being browbeaten into accepting a new one in the Legacy of the Force books, and that none of that is what we saw Jango wearing in AOTC.

Deal with it. :p

--Jonah
 
Great information, Perigrinus, and I can certainly appreciate the amount of work and revision that your post took.

That said, I hate this discussion.

Prior to the prequel trilogy, Fett's dent was cool and a sweet little detail. After the prequel trilogy, it became a 'gag'. The stormtrooper in ANH became a tie-in to the prequels, with Jango hitting his little head on the Slave I, which itself was robbed of some of it's intrigue. It's amazing to me, on the production side of the prequels, that so much effort (pertaining to Boba Fett) was spent on 'tying-in' various aspects of the original trilogy (the markings on the clone troopers' helmets, rangefinders, even the visors deeply resembling Fett), yet Jango's costume was so vastly different. The overall design is similar, but why not just use the existing armor? Or make copies? Why are there ZERO markings on Jango's armor? Yet Boba had several 'symbols' all over (chest, shoulder, helmet ears, jetpack)? The entire character of Jango Fett makes my stomach turn, from his mannerisms to his lines, costume, etc. He WOULD at least look cool, if he wasn't a poorly-conceived and poorly-written character, and in my opinion his design isn't a fresh take on the idea of Mandalorian armor, it's just a ripoff of my favorite character. And that's to say nothing of the ridiculous obsession of the prequel trilogy to make EVERYTHING TIED TO EVERYTHING ELSE. The prequels made everything about Boba Fett just a hand-me-down version of Jango Fett. Ugh.
In the events of The Empire Strikes Back, Boba Fett comes in, essentially out of nowhere, and changes the course of the trilogy. His backstory, even years after the end of the trilogy, is simply that he's run into Skywalker, Solo and Calrissian a few times, and he doesn't like them. That's it.

Sorry for the rant.

As far as the analysis of the armor itself, I agree that if a person was wearing it when the dent was made, that individual would have died instantly!

Regarding reshaping/modifying the armor, I seem to recall in one of the "Tales" books (not sure if it was Jabba's Palace or Bounty Hunters), that it says that the cost of a set of that armor is roughly equivalent to the cost of a Star Destroyer. That seems ridiculous, but I remember reading it. So, in that regard, resizing would be much more cost-efficient, albeit a waste of time, since Boba Fett would grow into it too quickly to justify the modifications that would be necessary for sizing.

I don't mean to come off as a hater, it just makes me sad of how Boba Fett has been treated by his creators.

And I CAN'T STAND Wango-Bango-Jango (just ask dynamic1).
 
I feel exactly the same way. It doesn't have to be tied up in a neat little bow.

Jango was originally going to have his armor painted the same colors as Boba, but when George saw the bare-metal look of the freshly cold-cast and polished plates during a test fitting, he liked it a lot and said to leave it like that.

In-universe, I've always felt that the armor was whatever was under the flight suit. A pressure/anti-g suit like what early astronauts wore, or what Fenn Shysa wore in his debut issue -- incidentally, while in a fight. Had his helmet on, had his gauntlets, had his belt and ammo pouches, had his cape and a jetpack. No flight suit or body armor. We know Star Wars has stuff like "armorweave" fabric. By my lights, what makes Mando armor so awesome is that it's like the Star Wars equivalent of a fremen stillsuit (from Dune). There are other manufacturers, but the stuff they make is the most advanced, efficient, lightweight, unhindering, whatever, one can get. Armorweave fabric, something like anti-ballistic gel, perhaps enclosed plate rinforcement at high-impact points like shoulders and knees... That's the Mandalorian armor. The flight suit keeps it from getting dirty or snagged on stuff. The flak vest is another layer of armorweave protection, as well as being a plate carrier. And then the familiar torso armor is just an outer, easily-replaceable ablative layer. The first line of defense.

The gauntlets are self-contained weapons/equipment platforms, easily swap-out-able for specific mission needs. Likewise the knees and jetpack are interchangeable, depending. To say nothing of accessories like sash, belt(s), sidearms, tools for pockets, utility pouches, cape/poncho, trophies, etc. The helmet is likely the piece of hard kit least likely to be replaced. This, to me, is a perfect in-universe explanation for why Boba's body armor is a different shade of green, with a different color of primer under it, than his helmet. His helmet is original-issue. The plates are replacements. Again in-universe, while the fitting and individualization of the armored pressure suit might be the equivalent of a small car in cost, the outer plates will never be that expensive (unless they're made of beskar and blah blah rarity and Mando smiths). Even with compact tractor beams and readouts of whatever systems the chest display is displaying, and possibly-exotic impact-absorbing padding materials lining them, those plates would never be more than maybe the equivalent of a couple thousand dollars, plug-n-play ready. Probably less.

My favorite, air-out-of-the-sails theory as to "the origin of the dent" is... Boba showed up on Concord Dawn a couple years after the Clone Wars ended and tried to live a normal life, signed up as a Protector, who were rebuilding their ranks after being wiped out almost to a man toward the end of the wars. I like to think that, when he completed his apprenticeship and made Journeyman, he was given one of the helmets of a Protector who had taken a bit of shrapnel in the head during the Clone Wars that had snapped his neck on impact. Y'know, tried on one then another until they found one that fit right. Luck of the draw, "inherited" from an unnamed, unlucky Mandalorian Protector who didn't duck fast enough. :)

--Jonah
 
This is a question that I as a Fett fan always wanted to know and if you remember in the Clone Wars TV show, Boba used Jango's helmet as a bomb. Then after it blew up, only the right side of the helmet remained. This could be that Boba Fett came back to get the remaining piece of the helmet. Boba Fett may have made changes to the helmet like the ear right piece for example.
 
Start at the beginning of the thread and read through. There is tons of info in this thread. They are not the same helmet. But both helmets have dents.
 
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