I was at college with Boba Fett.

Last week, via the wonders of Facebook, I discovered that I went to college with Boba Fett.

I was contacted by a guy I knew at foundation art college. A fellow Essex boy, (the college was in Hornchurch just next to my home town of Romford), he was the year above me and we both eventually went on to do an Animation Degree course at Farnham in Surrey. After Farnham I lost touch with him.

So, after re-connecting on Facebook last week we had a bit of a catch-up and I asked why his profile pic showed him getting dressed up as Boba Fett (it looked like an old pic to be fair, as he seemed quite a bit younger in it than his more recent photos). I remember him being a massive Star Wars fan, but was he such a fan that he was one of those guys that had made or bought a complete set of replica armour?

No.

It turns out that around the time they were making the Star Wars Special Editions (mid-nineties?) he was working as a creature animator at ILM. It was known among his workmates that he was a huge Boba Fett fan, so when it came time to shoot footage of Fett to go into the infamous re-instated Jabba scene in the Special Edition of Episode IV it was my old mate Mark from Essex who got to play the coolest Star Wars character of all. In an actual Star Wars film.
Okay, it's one of the Special Editions - and it's arguably one of the nastiest added-on bits of Star Wars ever - but for a few on-screen seconds he was Boba Fett.

Lucky bastard.