Preproduction “Kenner Standard” Jabba the Hutt with 2-Headed Announcer by Hasbro

At first glance, this looks identical to the normal “Spitting Jabba” set that Hasbro released along with its other Phantom Menace toys.

But turn it around and you’ll see a very conspicuous green “Kenner Standard” tag. These were used for quality control, perhaps to report an issue with the product that needed correcting before it would go into production, or maybe just giving final approval to a design. From it we can learn that this set was referred to as “Creature #204” and that the vendor who manufactured it was called “Sunshine.” It’s dated June 1999, which is more than a year after the dates on the preliminary drawings I have, and just before  its release. (As a side note, it’s interesting to see that they were still using the name “Kenner” in places years after Hasbro took over the company.)

If you look at the right side of the box, you can see that a sticker has been placed over some of the text.

The retail version looks like what you see to the left (but the text is part of the box and not on a sticker). I just had to know what the sticker was covering up, so I carefully removed it to find the version you see to the right. (It actually came off with no damage and can be reapplied.) It turns out that they were correcting a missing apostrophe in the word “JABBA’S.” Not quite as exciting as I had hoped, but still kind of interesting. It’s possible that this box is the only one that has this mistake on it, since it never actually went into production this way.