Rant: If you’re going to make an item with Jabba’s picture on it, please don’t use a photo of the Sideshow Collectibles figure

This is something that’s been bothering me for some time. I’ve seen quite a few unlicensed items that use stock photos of the Sideshow Collectibles 1/6 scale Jabba to represent Jabba the Hutt. Now the Sideshow Jabba is excellent, but it’s clearly not Jabba from Return of the Jedi. I don’t know if these people really don’t know the difference (I imagine that is true in at least some cases) or if they’re just being lazy and using the first high res photo that they find on a Google image search. Either way, it looks silly. Allow me to show you a few examples. I won’t be providing links to these products since I don’t really like them and don’t want to give their creators free publicity.

Take this mug for example. It’s not a bad parody of the Starbucks logo, but then they go and stick a photo of an action figure in the middle. Silly.

Or this “Jabba the Pimp” “art print” that someone is charging $40 for. I could whip this up in Photoshop in a matter of minutes. In fact, I did using nothing but images found in short Google searches. It’s art!

Or these “wine glass charms.” They used stock photos for everyone but Jabba (aside from Vader, which is a digital painting), so I can only guess that they thought this was really him.

There’s more where these came from, but you get the idea. If you want to make something like this, take a second and find a decent image of Jabba. There are quite a few around.