From its inception, Star Wars has always been heavily influenced by classic film genres of the past. Even in the 1977 original, director George Lucas sought to create a melting pot of epic storytelling elements and archetypes into a cohesive galaxy in which to explore, resulting today in a franchise that is able to tell any kind of story it wants and pull from influences both traditional and contemporary. One of the clearest and most fundamental inspirations on the Star Wars galaxy is the western genre. Between lawless desert towns, lone gun slingers, bounty hunters and cantinas ripe with unsavory characters, Star Wars is just as much an old-fashioned western as it is a sprawling visual effects space opera.
Star Wars’ western roots have been made the most evident in Disney+’s The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. In telling the story of Temuera Morrison’s notorious bounty hunter and his rise to power among the sands of Tatooine, Robert Rodriguez has depicted the galaxy far, far away with the same lawless grit and tension as any of the genre classics from directors John Ford or Sergio Leone. In "Chapter Six: From the Desert Comes a Stranger", the episode ends with a climactic shootout that not only echos that of a spaghetti western, but also reintroduces the galaxy’s most fearsome bounty hunter with the heaviest western inspiration of any Star Wars character.
Created by George Lucas, writer-director Dave Filoni and co-writer Henry Gilroy, Cad Bane first appeared in The Clone Wars animated series’ Season 1 finale “Hostage Crisis” in 2009. In the episode, Bane leads a motley crew of mercenaries to hold a group of republic senators, including Padme Amidala, hostage in order to free Jabba the Hutt’s cousin, Ziro the Hutt. From then on, Cad Bane would appear regularly throughout the following three seasons as a recurring antagonist and formidable foe against the galactic republic and the Jedi order, taking on jobs from the likes of the Hutt Cartel, the Separatist Alliance, Count Dooku and even Darth Sidious. Such jobs included stealing a holocron from the Jedi Temple, kidnapping force-sensitive children and holding the supreme chancellor hostage on Naboo.
A Duros bounty hunter, Cad Bane is the closest the Star Wars galaxy has to a genuine cowboy. Bane’s mannerisms, dialect and visual aesthetic evoke the kind of cold-blooded western killer seen riding the ranges of the old frontier, right down to the hat, holsters, jacket and boots. Legendary voice actor Corey Burton, who voices Bane in animation and live-action, based his performance on the villains of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, as well as Alien’s Lance Henriksen and Casablanca’s Peter Lorre, resulting in a voice that is equals parts sniveling and resonantly intimidating.
Across each of his appearances in The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch and various comic books, Bane’s greatest strength as a villain is his ruthlessness. He lives his life in the Outer Rim as a fearlessly wanted man and is the kind of gun-for-hire that will do any job if the price is right. He is also an expertly experienced mercenary with next to no conscience or moral compass to hold him back from taking on and completing any job, whatever it takes. A deadly marksman with dual blasters, rocket boots, thermal detonators and multi-purpose gauntlets that put any utility belt to shame, Bane has the experience, skill and strength necessary to take on any opponent to earn his credits, including master Jedi.
What made Cad Bane a particularly powerful adversary during the Clone Wars was that he specialized in the killing of Jedi, which he had made quick work of in The Clone Wars series. Along with an arsenal of weapons to immobilize force users, the tubes on his face are connected to a breathing apparatus that make him unsusceptible to force chokes. Paramount to all of his weapons and skill, Bane has the mental fortitude to resist even interrogation through Jedi mind trick from Anakin Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobi and Mace Windu all at once, as seen in The Clone Wars episode “Children of the Force."
The appearance of Cad Bane in The Book of Boba Fett as a hired enforcer shows that the Pyke Syndicate means to take a serious claim on Tatooine’s criminal underground for their spice operations. As Boba Fett and Fennec Shand prepare for war in Mos Espa, they will soon face the fiercest gun in the galaxy. However, this will not be the first time either Fett or Shand have crossed paths with Bane.
In an abandoned arc of The Clone Wars initially unproduced seventh season, young Boba Fett, voiced by Attack of the Clones’ Daniel Logan, would face off against Cad Bane in an epic shootout that would have ended in the death of Bane and given Fett’s helmet its iconic blaster dent. In the 2021 series The Bad Batch, Bane makes a surprise appearance at the employ of the Kaminoan cloners to return the female clone Omega (Michelle Ang) back to their facility, only to face off against Fennec Shand (Ming Na Wen), who is also after the bounty on the young clone.
Both The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have seen the return and live-action debut of many characters from the Filoni animated series, but the arrival of Cad Bane in particular has benefited not only the attentive fans of the franchise, but also the genre styling the series at present is striving for. The Book of Boba Fett is more overtly a western than any other Star Wars installment. Joseph Shirley’s acoustic-infused score and Rodriguez’s spiritually grounded direction paint the sands of Tatooine with a gritty intensity and desolation that harken back to films like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and High Noon. It is in a series like Boba Fett that a character such as Cad Bane feels most natural to appear in. Much like the villains the likes of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood's silver-screen legends would go up against, Bane’s character represents the Star Wars galaxy's underground at its most ruthless and whatever he and the Syndicate have in store for the desert planet will be all in a day’s work for Cad Bane.