"Boba Fett was always my favorite," Cook says. "The whole mystery of Boba made him so appealing. He's just so cool. You wanted to be in that outfit and have all those gadgets with the jetpack. After Return of the Jedi there was a long time where I would not admit he was dead. In my mind, when he went into the Sarlacc pit he fixed his jetpack and flew out 10 minutes later and we just didn't see it. It was like having to admit Santa didn't exist."
Eventually, Cook got over Fett's apparent demise, but he still hopes that one day his adult back story could be given proper attention to satisfy fellow Fett fanatics. "I always wished Boba Fett would have his own spin-off film that was just about him," Cook says. "It would be great to have him escape the pit and then we could follow him on his adventures on the Slave I. Boba is so wonderful because there was so little known about him, with his mask always on and his battered uniform and the Wookiee pelts. What has this guy done? What's his story? Is he a vicious killer? Is he a Jack of all trades? If you know anything now it's from books and comics, but the movies themselves don't reveal much about Boba."
Fett isn't the only character that fascinates Cook. "I've always identified most with Han Solo," Cook says. "As a kid, I had the blaster with the buttons on the side that made the sound effects and all that. I would get home from school and put on my brother's vest and my blaster belt. For a long time when I was really young, I thought I was Han Solo. I would sit around and wonder what Han Solo was doing that day and if he was doing a Kessel Run at that moment. I really believed these characters did exist somewhere in the galaxy."
Cook's appreciation for intergalactic smugglers and bounty hunters stemmed from seeing A New Hope as a small child with his dad. "I remember that I never sat down the whole movie. I held on to the back of the chair in front of me for most of the movie and just kept looking back at my dad in awe," Cook recalls. "I was just instantly transported to that place. Then I went home and at night before bed I would stare through my window and look up at the sky and see the stars and swore I could see TIE fighters floating around."
"Growing up, we had a pool table in our basement and I had all my Star Wars stuff set up like it was an entire planet," Cook continues. "I would come home from school and check up on all the characters. I used to mix in the G.I. Joe guys and Transformers in there too. An Amazon Barbie chick would visit the planet once in a while. I'd have a random Battlestar Galactica character that always had to die in my fantasies within 10 minutes and I had to bury him in my backyard."
"It's the first thing in my life that I remember that made me feel like I wanted to create and that I wanted to be a part of something like that," Cook says. "I truly believe that it's one of the few pieces that set me on my way in the entertainment industry in wanting to be a creative person that did something to transport people to another place. It really was one of the major contributors to my career."
