Prototype Cap for Jabba the Hutt Shampoo Bottle by Omni Cosmetics

The vintage Jabba the Hutt soaky shampoo bottle is one of my favorite sculpts. There’s just something quite charming about it. It reminds me of a statue of Buddha (in fact, I repainted one in a faux bronze color scheme). So I was very interested when I stumbled upon a listing on an online antique store for a cap from this bottle that was white, instead of the usual green. There wasn’t much info about it, but it was cheap so I bought it.

It’s pretty much identical to the normal cap, but cast in an off-white plastic. It fits onto the regular bottle as you can see above, but is noticeably tighter and harder to get off. So what is this? My initial hunch was that it was some sort of first shot prototype for the original bottle cap, and I believe that is what it is. It’s not unusual for manufacturers to use non-production colors when testing out the mold for a toy or other item.

When I looked inside the cap, I noticed that there was a number: a 5 for the white version and a 9 for the production one I had. So I originally thought perhaps these were used to indicate revisions to the product.

But after talking with someone who knows a lot more about this kind of thing than me, it seems that these were to indicate which spot the cap came from in a multi-cavity mold. They numbered them so they could see which cavities might need tweaking (in this case, they might have tweaked cavity #5 to make it a little less tight). The person I spoke to did agree that it was likely a first shot. It’s definitely not something that was cast from the production product — you’d need access to the original mold to make something like this. I’ve never seen anything like this mentioned online (and neither have the people I’ve asked about it), so I thought it was cool to be able to make a new vintage-era discovery even after so many years.