Vintage Japanese Return of the Jedi Poster

If I seem to be writing about a lot of posters recently, it’s because I finally dug out my backlog of posters and took pictures of them. I was kind of excited to get this one, as I am a Japanese translator and feel a sort of connection to things from Japan. I’ll have to say, though, that as a poster this is kind of a mess. It’s just a jumble of publicity photos that aren’t even really arranged very well. And what’s with the gigantic Darth Vader standing there behind the planet? Kind of odd. It’s also very text-heavy for a movie poster, with captions under all of the photos, plus a Japanese version of the movie’s opening crawl in the upper left.

Aside from a mention of him in the opening crawl, the main connections to Jabba are the picture of Bib Fortuna among the film’s main characters in the bottom left (weird), and the shot of Luke and Leia on the sail barge. I’m kind of surprised there’s no picture of Jabba himself, but I do seem to recall hearing that they purposely avoided showing him in some cases before the movie came out, so as to not spoil the surprise. Maybe they weren’t given any shots of him to use for that reason.