I made a 3D-Printed Jumbo Vintage Kenner Jabba the Hutt Figure

Back in July of 2015, Gentle Giant showed a prototype of a Jumbo Jabba the Hutt figure that was supposed to be released in their line of Jumbo Kenner Star Wars figures. It looked pretty impressive, and even though I knew it would be expensive, I eagerly awaited news of when it would be available for preorder. I also picked up a number of other Jumbo figures that I knew would go well with Jabba in a future display. But as the days turned into months and then years, and the momentum for Gentle Giant’s Jumbo line seemed to wane, it seemed less and less likely that they would actually be releasing this figure.

After about five years had passed, I discovered the 3D scans of vintage action figures that Desert Octopus had been making and selling on Cults3D.com. He had scans of a lot of vintage Kenner figures, and while he didn’t have a Jabba, when I reached out to him it seemed like he was open to the idea of scanning one. Maybe this was my chance to finally get a Jumbo Jabba. So I sent him one of my vintage Jabba figures, with the request that he scan it at as high a resolution as possible so that it could be blown up to a large size. The model that he created was perfect for what I wanted.

But of course printing it at Jumbo size was going to be a bit of a challenge, so first I decided to try just recreating the figure at actual size. I printed it on my Longer Orange 30 resin 3D printer, and I think it turned out really well, although even broken up into its component parts it barely fit on the print platform.

I then did my best to paint it to resemble the original figure:

After that, I got a little sidetracked by printing various other versions of the figure, including a blue “holographic” version, a red, a green, and a transparent version:

And I even turned the transparent version into a lamp with color-changing LEDs.

But of course what I really wanted was to make a Jumbo Jabba, so I started by trying to figure out how big he should be in the Jumbo scale. And this is where I went wrong at first. I had assumed that the Gentle Giant Jumbo figures were 1/6 scale, so a humanoid would be roughly 12″. But as it turns out a lot of them are quite a bit taller. Their Jumbo Bib Fortuna, for example, was around 13.5″ tall! So unfortunately my first attempt at a Jabba was too small. I printed the Jumbo versions using a traditional FDM 3D printer (the Creality CR-10 S4 and S5).

You can my first version and my final version below, with an original Kenner figure for scale:

I made a video about the process of printing and painting the figure, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But I think it turned out rather well in the end. Here he is with all of my Jumbo Kenner figures, and an actual Kenner Jabba for scale: