Star Wars Xcavations Creature Crates Hutt Skull by Uncle Milton

As some of you may know, I became very interested in 3D printing a while ago, and doing some printer reviews on my YouTube channel has allowed me to build up a fairly large stable of printers for my projects (such as a life-size Jabba statue!) One of these projects was printing some Star Wars-themed skulls from 3DKitbash, who started a Kickstarter to sell the printable STL files. I made a few videos about those, but after a while I started getting messages from people who said you could no longer buy the files. After a little investigating, it turned out that 3DKitbash had partnered with Uncle Milton to create a series of blind box toys based on their 3D designs, so they had to stop selling the original files. That’s a shame, since they were a lot of fun to print (I even printed a gigantic version of their rancor skull as part of my review of the Creality CR-10S5 large-format printer. But I have been very interested to see how these toys turned out, so when I heard that they were showing up at Walmart stores, I went on the hunt.

It turned out that they were searchable via the Walmart website, and the closest store in my town listed them as being in stock, so I went there. It took a LONG time to find them, since they weren’t in the places I thought most likely (anywhere near the Star Wars section or the collectible/card section near the front of the store). At my store, they were at the outskirts of the toy aisle next to other random blind boxes. They come in plastic crates that are actually pretty sturdy and well designed. Inside is a sheet talking about fossils and comparing the Star Wars skulls to actual skulls from Earth (remember that these are ostensibly educational toys). There are also some assembly instructions, since each of these skulls seems to come in 3 pieces. The skull parts themselves are packed in a kind of kinetic sand, and while it is a bit of a pain to get the sand out of the nooks and crannies in the sculpt, it is much better than fossil toys that make you chip away at a block of plaster.

I found out that there are codes on the bottom of the plastic cases that allow you to know which skull is in which crate, so I picked up the Hutt skull. By the way, all of these designs are based directly on the 3D printable files I mentioned earlier, with the exception of the Hutt — there was no Hutt included in those files, but as one of the Kickstarter backers, I did request one, and they seemed interested. Maybe it wouldn’t even exist if I hadn’t done that — who knows?

As you can see in the first photo at the top of this post, they chose the Hutt skull as the sample one that you can see in the display box, which is kind of cool. But the box only holds 12 crates (including the space for the sample). This means that there is only room for one Hutt that you can actually buy, while there are two of every other character. That will likely mean that the Hutt will be a lot harder to find than the others.

The skulls seem to be around 2 inches wide, and don’t appear to have been painted or weathered at all, but they look pretty good just with bare plastic. Overall, I think these are pretty cool little toys, and the box is marked “Series 1” so presumably there will be more if these sell well. The $5 price tag seems kind of high, although you do get a fair amount of kinetic sand in addition to the skull. I’m hoping that I may get a full box of these to review on my YouTube channel, and am also very interested to see what the full skeletons (Rancor and Tauntaun) will look like!