“Fine Art Movie Playset” Aims to Recreate an Obscure Italian Vintage Jabba the Hutt Store Display

I was recently contacted by the people behind “Fine Art Movie Playset.” They are a group of people trying to produce playsets inspired by vintage products, or in this case, store displays. One of their first products is to be a recreation of a very cool cardboard store display that was used in very limited numbers in Italian stores.

I first wrote about this display back in 2012 (here is the relevant page on the SWCA). The best photo I have of the display is below, from an auction where one was sold for some obscene amount like $20,000. So clearly this is out of the reach of the vast majority of collectors, and of course they are very limited in quantity as well.

The original display at auction

So I suppose that makes it a good choice for a recreation like this. To be clear, this is not a “reproduction” in the generally accepted sense. Rather than just trying to replicate a vintage item as closely as possible using scans and photos, they have hired an artist to paint something that is inspired by the original display, but it will not be a copy in any way. Hopefully they will also clearly mark it as a modern item just to avoid any possible confusion, but the prototype photos seem different enough to make it unlikely for someone to be able to pass this off as an original, even in online photos.

The main issue with this whole endeavor is the price. They are asking nearly $500 (including shipping from Europe) for their version of the display, and say that they have to get 150 orders for it to even go into production. I could be wrong, but I have real doubts that there are 150 people wanting to buy a product like this at any price, much less at nearly $500. I mean, I’m probably the craziest Jabba fan in the world, but I’m afraid it’s just too much for me. I would probably be interested at a significantly lower price, but it sounds like production and shipping costs make that difficult.

That said, I thought this might be of interest to some of my readers, so if you want to know more, feel free to check out their Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as their Etsy account where you can currently place a preorder for the product.