“At Jabba’s Mercy” 2013 Holiday Keepsake Ornament by Hallmark

One thing I find fascinating about Star Wars collecting is how broad it is. There’s just so much stuff out there that you can have quite a large collection even if you choose a relatively specialized niche, such as holiday ornaments. I’ve heard of a number of people who have had to get separate trees just for their Hallmark Star Wars ornaments. Until now, the only Hallmark ornaments I had were the Rebo Band, which I like quite a bit.

Unfortunately, this piece is not in scale with the Rebo Band. C-3PO is roughly 2 inches tall, while the band members are closer to 1 inch. I suppose it depends on how big you think the band members should be (since we don’t really have a clear frame of reference for their size) but to me they seem clearly too small to fit in with this piece. One other difference is that the Rebo Band have excellent paint jobs despite their tiny size, while the paint on this looks pretty bad.

The sculpt is well done, but the paint job really lets it down. There’s lots of sloppy areas, and the stone parts of the throne aren’t painted at all, but rather cast in stone-colored plastic. This really makes it look plasticky and cheapens the overall feel.

But the worst part has to be C-3PO’s face. Sure, it’s tiny, but come on! I’ll admit that it doesn’t look this terrible in person due to the small size, but when I look back at how perfect the paint jobs on the smaller Rebo Band were, I can’t help but think that Hallmark is getting sloppy.

When you press the button on the throne, it plays a single audio clip from Return of the Jedi. It’s surprisingly long, at nearly 30 seconds, but it appears to be too high-pitched, since C-3PO’s voice is noticeably higher than it should be.

Overall, while I’m happy to get a Jabba ornament, I’ll have to say I’m disappointed with this piece. At $32.95, you should get more. Heck, the Walmart-exclusive Jabba & throne set was only a couple of dollars more than this, but was many times bigger and came with so much more.