Jabba the Hutt Emoji Pin (Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016/Think Geek Exclusive)

At every Star Wars Celebration they tend to have groups of exclusive items that attendees can try to collect. For example, at Celebration V it was parody cereal boxes like “Grape Hutts,” and at Celebration VI they had “Star Tots” pins. This Jabba pin is part of a collection of emoji-style pins released for Star Wars Celebration Europe earlier this year. Some of them were just available for sale, but others could only be had by visiting a particular vendor’s booth. Apparently that was the case with this pin, which was available from the Think Geek booth. Unfortunately that meant that this was more expensive than many of the other pins on the secondary market. It’s a pretty nice pin, though, and I like the emoji concept.

As an aside, the word emoji comes from Japanese, and it’s very interesting to see how it has entered the English language recently. There’s a huge amount of borrowing from English into Japanese, but relatively little in the other direction — and most of the things we do borrow tend to be directly related to Japanese culture, so it’s cool to see something like this being adopted.