DALLAS, TX.- It’s almost that time, so let Heritage Auctions be the first to say: May the 4th be with you.

This year’s will be a particularly special Star Wars Day, too, with today’s launch of the May 31 Star Wars Signature® Auction, which features the most coveted Star Wars toy never made in 1979: one of the two surviving hand-painted, missile-firing Boba Fett action figures pulled from the production line. Man, oh, Mandalorian.

This 3¾-inch Boba Fett stands tall among this event’s nearly 175 lots, including the lightsaber Luke Skywalker and Rey shared in Star Wars: The Last Jedi; a Lucasfilm-sanctioned Darth Vader helmet, armor and chest box made for early 1980s promotional tours; early, rare (and even cast-signed) posters; and one of the scant few surviving sealed copies of the original Star Wars videocassette that came in the coveted drawer box.

The event spans the beginning of the beginning of Star Wars, as represented by a revised fourth draft of George Lucas’ script when the movie was still titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from the “Journal of the Whills” (Saga I), to the modern-day sequels and streaming iterations. There’s material fromthe movies (Death Star panels! Ewok heads! Darth Maul’s lightsaber!) and material made to promote the movies, including the only known gem-mint Han Solo and Princess Leia stickers from Topps’ first series of Star Wars trading cards. Whether Rebel or Imperial, this is the auction you’re looking for.

It begins with the little bounty hunter with the hefty price on hishead, the Boba Fett action figure that has achieved what ABC News once called “mythic, unicorn-like status.”

At first, the figure was intended as a giveaway: “FREE BOBA FETT,” exhorted the in-store displays, the action-figure packaging and TV ads in 1979, shortly after the armored (and, then, animated) figure debuted as “Darth Vader’s right-hand man” in the Star Wars Holiday Special. All a kid — or their parents — had to do was provide proof they’d purchased four other Star Wars action figures. In return, within six to eight weeks, they would receive Kenner’s 21st Star Wars action figure with the “rocket firing back pack.” Even better, said the promos: “Boba Fett not available in any store.” To a kid for whom the force awakened their collecting bug, that sure put the bounty in bounty hunter.

Except, quite famously, that rocket-loaded Boba Fett never arrived in the mail — or anywhere else — after reports surfaced in early 1979 that competitor Mattel’s Battlestar Galactica plastic-missile-firing toys had become choking hazards. When he finally did arrive in a plain white box, the rocket had been glued into place, and there was a “Note to Consumers” explaining why the change had been made: “The launcher has been removed from the product for safety reasons.”

Some Kenner employees spared the rocket-firing Boba Fetts destined for the Sarlacc pit. That’s how the few surviving prototypes became the most sought-after Star Wars toy in this galaxy or any other — what Entertainment Weekly’s Andrew Breznican once called “the fulfillment of a broken promise.”

“Projectiles were always touchy subjects,” says former Kenner engineer Jacob Miles III, an original member of the company’s Star Wars team tasked with keeping that rocket safely in Boba Fett’s backpack. “But when Battlestar Galactica had their issues, we immediately just shut it down and destroyed everything. We were concerned about disappointing kids because we had shown that thing [the rocket] taking off. But we had a much bigger concern if we shipped it.”

This Boba Fett has the L-shaped latch in the back, of which there are some 70 known examples of the surviving 100 (or so) prototypes. As longtime Star Wars expert and dealer Brian Rachfal notes in his letter of provenance, “it’s uncertain exactly how many Rocket Firing Boba Fetts were created” or survive 45 years later. But this is absolutely among the rarest.

“One of only two examples known, this hand painted figure is still unique in its class,” Rachfal writes, as it’s the only one with its head and appendages painted gray. This AFA-graded, CIB-authenticated figure has been so thoroughly examined that hobby historians can pinpoint where it was made (“Kenner’s 10th floor at the Kroger building” in Cincinnati), how it got out (“it was salvaged from a box of discarded toys deposited there for employees to take home”) and where it eventually landed (with Justin Kerns, revered among Boba Fett-ishists as he once had nine unique survivors from the discarded lot).

The diminutive Boba Fett figure — which Kenner kept small so kids could collect them all — is an imposing figure in an auction full of centerpiece offerings, among their considerable ranks is a Mandalorian helmet Pedro Pascal wore in Season 2 of The Mandalorian and during his appearance on The Book of Boba Fett or his IB-94 blaster.

Acolytes will take particular pleasure in perusing the armory filled with iconic lightsabers that glow like kyber, among them the Jedi’s weapon built by Anakin Skywalker that Obi-Wan Kenobi handed over to Luke before it was thought lost (along with Luke’s right hand) during Vader and son’s duel on Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back. This is the so-called Skywalker Lightsaber kept by Maz Kanata that beckoned to Rey in The Force Awakens — the saber that binds the Skywalker family and the Star Wars franchise in a bolt of blue.

Every saber in this auction has countless stories attached to it, whether it’s Kylo Ren’s so-called crossguard lightsaber from The Last Jedi, Darth Maul’s saberstaff famously wielded in The Phantom Menace or the shared stunt saber used by General Leia and Rey in The Rise of Skywalker. Each is more than just a prop from a movie; each holds the weight of an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Then again, so too is the limited-edition Mandalorian pinball machine.

As a wise man likes to say: This is the way.