This Kenner Star Wars J-Slot Rocket Firing Boba Fett represents the most significant example offered to the collectible market, in terms of its stunning pedigree, provenance and direct relationship to the testing process that resulted in the figure’s ultimate cancellation.
It’s one of the few legitimate company used item from Kenner’s Product Reliability Test Lab from the time that the Rocket Fett was undergoing scrutiny that would determine its future. As such it exhibits some wear solely attributable to its place in the testing of this figure inside Kenner in early 1979.
Notations on Rocket Fett and its provenance support this. All paint applications on the figure, save for its chest plate are in near mint condition - a feature that strengthens its pedigree and history as a Kenner internal test piece.
The J-Slot Rocket Fett originated from the collection of the sole Kenner employee responsible for Rocket Fett reliability testing, who in 2016 provided a detailed backstory that gave dramatic evidence of figure’s link to its ultimate cancellation. Poigniantly, it’s also the exact same final version of the prototype figure that was to be mailed to consumers. The figure's COA includes the V2 designation, which reflects that CIB compared it to other known examples, and then ultimately supported the Kenner employee’s claim.
It's one of the very few J-Slot figures to have Kenner penned notes on its feet, indicating that it was the number 6 figure from the original testing batch; and it has also had the tiny plastic tab that was added to prevent the missile firing accidentally, broken off.
The break is indicative of the exact same issue that saw the Rocket Fett cancelled during testing, since it produced a small plastic sharp that could enter the rocket chamber and ‘fire’ alongside the missile; posing a considerable safety risk to children. Since the Kenner employee who owned it indicated that the figure was from the exact grouping that caused the figure to be cancelled at the time he sold it in 2016; it is more than likely that the break happened during testing at Kenner.
It is graded an AFA 50 or Very Good, and exhibits some wear that is almost certainly from testing use. While it does have some wear, 95 percent of it is located on the figure's chest plate and rocket pack. The other paint applications remain almost completely untouched.
As such it remains very much a significant piece of the considerable folklore surround Kenner’s cancelled Rocket Firing Boba Fett narrative.
Context
In early 1979 Kenner’s tooling and safety engineers were running out of time. The Rocket Firing Boba Fett figure that the company had advertised broadly, was in trouble due to safety concerns, and they were leaving no stone unturned in efforts to try and fix it.
The solution they settled upon, was to add a small section of plastic at the bottom of the figure’s firing slot. While this move initially held promise, testing would render it a failure since the small piece of plastic broke easily, and worse still, could fall into the mechanism and become a projectile.
Kenner’s company lawyer Jim Kipling indicated in 2015 that it was Product Reliability and Testing that had cancelled the Rocket Firing Boba Fett in 1979, and not him as had been the general assumption previously. It was initially believed that the figure was pulled at the tail end of its promotion because of several tragic incidents surrounding Mattel’s rocket firing Battlestar Galactica toyline in the late 1970s. But this was incorrect, according to Kipling. “I would have been too scared to cancel it, because Bernie (Kenner’s president Bernie Loomis) would have killed me,” Kipling explains. “It didn’t pass our internal testing.”
This J-Slot Rocket Firing Boba Fett has a direct and established link to this decisions, and its one of the very, very few that can substantiate such a claim.