Hasbro Tries Crowdfunding a Jabba’s Sail Barge Vehicle with HasLab

It’s been six years since I first posted about the “Bring on the Barge” petition that someone started to encourage Hasbro to release a Jabba’s Sail Barge vehicle in the 3 3/4″ scale, but now it looks like it may actually happen, albeit in a way that the people signing the petition probably didn’t expect. Instead of releasing this as a traditional vehicle available in stores, Hasbro is trying out a crowdfunding approach similar to Kickstarter.

People who want to buy the vehicle are asked to sign up at the HasLab site and commit to paying the $499 price tag. If 5,000 people sign up before April 3, 2018, the vehicle will go into production and will be available in early 2019. If not, I guess it just won’t get made and people won’t be charged anything. I assume they thought they wouldn’t get enough sales releasing it in the same way as the “big Millennium Falcon” or AT-AT vehicles, and decided to see if a smaller run at a considerably higher price would be viable.

The vehicle looks quite impressive in renders. It’s more than 4 feet long, and it will supposedly have some higher-end features than you might have been able to expect if this had been released traditionally. I’m intrigued by the level of detail that they are claiming will be included, and most of all by the Jabba figure that is going to come with it. I really hope that they are going to be making a new Jabba and are not just going to be including the one from the Toys R Us-exclusive Rancor Pit set from 2015, but maybe that’s too much to hope for. In addition to the vehicle, you will also get a 64-page book immediately after the project is funded, which is apparently meant to give people something concrete to tide them over until the vehicle is actually released.

As impressive as it is, $499 is a very high price tag (although it does include shipping, which is probably fairly hefty on something of this size). I of course signed up immediately, but are there 4,999 other people in the world willing to $500 for this? I guess we’ll see. At the time of this writing they had around 1/5 the target number, but it had only been a couple of days. If you’re interested, I suggest you check it out.

HasLab Star Wars / Hasbro Lab site