Vintage Polish Unlicensed Photo of Jabba the Hutt

This photo is around 3×5 in size and is printed on card stock. It might not look like much, but it represents a rather fascinating corner of Star Wars collecting (see this website for the full story about Star Wars products available in Poland — it’s pretty interesting). Back when the original Star Wars films came out, Poland was still under Soviet influence, making it difficult to get much in the way of Star Wars toys or other products. Still, there were quite a number of bootleg toys available, and these are coveted by collectors today. Photos were apparently quite popular as inexpensive ways to have a representation of the characters from the film. Most of the photographs were reproductions from magazines, so the quality leaves something to be desired. It’s kind of mind-blowing to think that some of the photos were actually shots of Kenner toys from catalogs. While I was playing with Star Wars figures, some poor kid in Poland had to be satisfied with grainy black & white photos of them.

This particular photo has the message “Pozdrowienia z Poznania ! Hey!” (“Greetings from Poznan. Hey!”) written on the back. Not sure why they wrote that there, but it does at least tie this item definitively to Poland. I just love unearthing this kind of item.