Black Series Jabba the Hutt Figure by Hasbro (6″ Scale)

I was very excited back in February when we first heard about Jabba the Hutt coming to Hasbro’s 6″-scaled Black Series of figures, but how does he measure up now that he’s finally starting to appear in stores? (I got this one at Amazon, where they seem to be restocking a little bit at a time. If the price is higher than $42.99 then it’s probably out of stock at the moment and a third-party seller is being displayed instead. They’ve also been sighted at Target stores.)

The packaging is a little odd in that there’s a large amount of empty space in the box. It just seems like something should have been there next to him. It just underscores the fact that you get absolutely nothing but Jabba himself in the package, unlike the SDCC-exclusive version that I will be adding to site soon. For the $40 price tag, it sure seems like they could’ve thrown something else in.

That said, I think this is a fantastic figure — hands-down the best Jabba that Hasbro has ever made. Seriously, it’s not even close. The sculpt (which I recently discovered was done entirely digitally) is nearly perfect. Perhaps the best sculpt of Jabba ever, in some ways. I think I actually like it better than the Sideshow Collectibles 1/6 scale figure, believe it or not. The paint isn’t quite as good as the sculpt, but for a mass-market toy it’s pretty darned good, and has more of an orangey color than Jabba figures have generally been (this is a good thing).

The entire figure is made of somewhat soft plastic, but the head portion is made of a softer and thinner material than the body. The reason for this is the action feature, which makes his mouth open wider whenever you move one of his arms downward. The rubbery material stretches when you do this, more or less like skin would.

The arms have a sort of ratchet system so that no matter what position the arms are in, moving them down will open the mouth, as shown below. I could live without this feature, but I do like that the interior of his mouth is fully detailed, including a tongue. And as action features go, it’s a pretty good one since it doesn’t take away from the figure in any way if you don’t use it, unlike some figures… It’s not possible to have his mouth completely closed as they showed with the prototype figure, however.

Here’s a shot of all of the Jabba figures that Kenner and Hasbro have put out over the years. He’s definitely quite a bit larger than the others (as he should be). He dwarfs the Walmart-exclusive Vintage Collection Jabba from 2010, and his body is also a lot taller, showing just how squished down that version really was (I had to add stuffing when making my repainted version to help correct this).

Another view. I think this should underscore how much better the sculpt is than the others (the vintage Jabba may actually be in second place — at least for me).

Here he is with the Black Series Slave Leia figure. This figure has gotten kind of a bad rap (and the fact that it’s currently clogging up store shelves along with Greedo hasn’t helped). But next to Jabba she looks pretty darned good. She can sit down relatively well without having to resort to a second pair of “sitting legs” like a previous figure used.

They did include Jabba’s arm tattoo (below) but curiously omitted the tail scar that was included on the Vintage Collection figure.

In conclusion, I’m extremely happy with this figure, but it would’ve been much better if Hasbro had been able to include the throne, or at the very least the hooka, railing and Salacious Crumb figure that they are bundling with the SDCC-exclusive set. I will be using those, along with a scratch-built throne to create my own custom version, but given my current work schedule this could take quite some time.

EDIT: Here’s a video review I did of the regular and exclusive versions of the figure.