Star Wars: Dave Filoni Revealed Boba Fett Almost Dueled Cad Bane in The Clone Wars

While Star Wars Rebels fans are enjoying the Original Trilogy-near timeline and the Ghost crew, the show that kicked off the animated phenomenon in Star Wars: The Clone Wars also proved to be a beloved, canon-acknowledged animated offering to the franchise. However, Rebels executive producer Dave Filoni reveals details of now-nixed plans to depict a showdown of bounty hunters between Boba Fett and Cad Bane!

During a Star Wars Celebration panel on Thursday titled, Dave Filoni: Animated Origins and Unexpected Facts, Filoni, also a primary visionary behind The Clone Wars during its 2008-2015 run, explains nixed plans for a potentially classic confrontation between the movie franchise’s stoic, helmeted, Mandalorian-cloned, Sarlacc-bound bounty hunter Boba Fett and the Duros alien, retro-western-styled gunslinger bounty hunter Cad Bane, a prominent antagonist throughout The Clone Wars series. Filoni proved this by showing the unfinished sequence as is, which was destined for a season of the series that ultimately never came to fruition.

The clip, inhabited by high-resolution rough models and fully voiced by Daniel Logan’s Boba Fett and Corey Burton’s Cad Bane, depicts Boba as a young upstart bounty hunter attempting to carry on the legacy of his late father Jango Fett. Helmeted and fully decked out in a version of his signature green armored getup, Boba is feeling a bit confident as he tries to protect a group of innocents being held hostage by Cad and a group of fellow bounty hunters. Thus, Boba and Cad settle their differences in western cinematic style with a proper quick-draw duel; one that apparently sees both men go down. While we don’t know what happened to Cad, the well-aimed shot that Boba sustained was absorbed by his helmet, leaving the signature dent (seen in the above image,) that’s visible in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Filoni states that this would-be piece to the Star Wars canonical puzzle regarding Boba Fett’s helmet dent was pitched by George Lucas himself. It’s certainly no surprise that Lucas would have notes on the idea of dueling bounty hunters on Star Wars television projects, since the era just before the franchise’s acquisition by Disney centered on plans for a live-action television series called Star Wars: Underworld, which would have taken place on Coruscant, focusing on the seedier “scum and villainy” who dwell in the continuity, notably bounty hunters. However, with Star Wars: The Clone Wars abruptly wrapped up in 2015 in streaming form to make room for Rebels, the sequence was just never meant to be.

Star Wars Rebels Season 4, is, however, very much meant to be, with a premiere set for an unspecified date later in 2017.