Vintage Jabba the Hutt Pajamas by Wilker Bros. (And Mighty Jabba’s Collection Turns 3 Years Old!)

When you’re a collector, you tend to have a list of a few “grail” items that you’d love to have but just can’t get. It might be because they’re expensive or rare, or both. In my case, the item that frustrated me the most was the vintage Jabba the Hutt pajamas. You wouldn’t think they would be so hard to find, but I scoured eBay for the better part of 3 or 4 years and also posted want ads in collectors forums with zero luck. As I’ve mentioned in the past, vintage clothing items are often rather difficult to find. They don’t generally sell for a lot of money (certainly nothing compared to vintage toys), but they can actually be a lot harder to track down, probably because they tended to get worn out and thrown away, rather than saved as toys were. (Take my Jabba the Hutt tube socks, for example. The ones I bought are the only versions of these I’ve ever seen come up for auction, in or out of the package.)

Still, it’s not that hard to find mint-in-package examples of other vintage pajamas, and yet for some reason the Jabba pajamas (and the matching Rebo Band version) seem to be extremely rare. Maybe they just didn’t make as many of them. In any case, you can imagine my excitement when I saw this come up on eBay a while ago. (Something about saying I get excited about used kid’s pajamas doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean…) Sure, it was only the top (it should come with bottoms that match the sleeves in color) and it was a bit worse for wear, but beggars can’t be choosers. I’m still going to watch out for an in-package version, and for the version with the yellow sleeves, but who knows how long it could take to find them? In the meantime, I finally have something to go with my vintage Jabba the Hutt robe (also by Wilker Bros.). A rather dapper ensemble, don’t you think?

There are several things I like about these. First of all, character pajamas really take me back to my childhood, and ultimately nostalgia is behind a lot of my affection for Star Wars. But also, the fact that they chose to put Jabba on these pajamas really amuses me. At first glance, it seems rather odd that a kid would want to wear pajamas with a hideous alien crime lord on them, but with Star Wars in particular, the villains have often been as popular as the heroes. There’s certainly no shortage of merchandise with Darth Vader’s image on it, and yet he was a terrifyingly evil character in a lot of ways (particularly before we learned about his redemption in Return of the Jedi, and especially before the prequels). For some reason, we fans have a lot of affection for the baddies, and I can’t help but think that these pajamas are related to that phenomenon.

In any case, I thought this was a fitting item to post on the 3rd anniversary of the creation of Mighty Jabba’s Collection (although technically it isn’t until tomorrow). It encapsulates a lot of what I find attractive about collecting Star Wars merchandise in general and Jabba merchandise in particular. Here’s hoping the site will continue long into the future.