Jabba the Hutt Drawing in Purple Crayon by My Daughter
Okay, maybe this is only special to my wife and me, but I thought I would share. My two-year-old daughter is only just starting to be able to draw things that actually resemble something. Until very recently, all of her drawings were just scribbles or a bunch of circles. According to my wife, she said this was “mighty Jabba,” which surprised us as we didn’t even know she had ever heard that phrase, but apparently my son taught her. 🙂 I like how she included the throne and gargoyles.
Upcoming: Black Series Jabba the Hutt by Hasbro
I’m very excited about this one! (Can you tell?) I had speculated in my post about the Black Series Slave Leia that a Jabba in the 6″ scale might be on the way, but I didn’t think it was necessarily a sure thing, since the line is still new and they’ve never done anything bigger like this before. But sure enough, these photos (courtesy of Rebelscum) from the International Toy Fair prove that our favorite gangster slug is on his way. The photo of him in the box is interesting, since it’s clearly a work in progress — look at all that empty space. Makes you wonder if perhaps there’s going to be something else included in the box with Jabba… 
I think he looks better in these other photos (which don’t have the harsh flash) but either way, it’s obvious that this is far and away the best Jabba sculpt Hasbro has ever produced. I think it even rivals the Sideshow figure in quality. Clearly the larger scale is helpful in this regard. It’s going to be quite a hefty figure, and unfortunately I’m sure it will have a price tag to match. I’m guessing $50 is the least it might be, and it could be more (especially if it turns out that it includes something else like a Han in Carbonite). Either way, I’m down for a couple. 🙂 
 EDIT: Here’s another higher quality shot from TheFwoosh (which appears to have just gone down as of this writing). 
Jabba the Hutt T-Shirt from Class of ’77
I never would have expected that there were this many t-shirts with Jabba the Hutt on them, and I certainly don’t have them all. This one is a bit unusual in that it uses a photo of Jabba that’s rather underrepresented in merchandise, and because it was apparently only available in the UK. I know they also made a number of other shirts in a similar style using other Star Wars characters.
News: “Carbonite Pack” for Angry Birds Star Wars II Now Available (With Jabba the Hutt & Han in Carbonite)
I posted about the Telepods figures for the characters included in this update a few days ago, and now they are finally usable in the game. When you download the update from your app store of choice, you’ll be given a few “free” uses of the characters, and you can buy more using the app’s in-game currency. Or if you have telepods figures like I do, you can use them as much as you want (although only once per level). There don’t seem to be any additional levels aside from the Reward Levels (see below), so there aren’t any levels where these characters appear normally. That means the only time you can use them is by replacing a bird or pig that would normally appear in a level.
I mentioned  earlier being curious what Jabba and Han in Carbonite’s powers would be. It turns out that Jabba basically just uses his incredible bulk to bash things, similar to the “Big Brother Bird” that is found in some other Angry Birds titles. Not super exciting, but I did find him to be fairly powerful. He sticks out his tongue while he’s flying.
As for Han in Carbonite, he freezes things, similar to the Ice Bird that has appeared in other titles. I’m not sure how useful he’ll be, but we’ll see. All of the new characters do have new Reward Levels that are unlocked by obtaining a certain number of points using that character. For Jabba it was 300,000. That turned out to be surprisingly easy to do — I unlocked his level in 5 or 10 minutes without really even trying. There’s nothing particularly Jabba-like about the level, though. It’s set on Naboo underwater, as I guess they all are. I didn’t have too much trouble getting three stars on it — the trick is to go underneath it all and into the cavern on the right, where you will hit the TNT box and set off a chain reaction that should hopefully get everything in one go.
My “Very Jabba Birthday” (Jabba Cake, Cookie and Pizza with bonus Han in Carbonite Punch!)
Image credit: BobbyBobby85
So I turned 39 a few days ago, and I’m starting to officially feel a little old. But I’m certainly doing my best to remain young at heart. One way to do this, I’ve found, is to have a themed birthday party. Ever since we started doing them for my son, I’ve realized that there’s no reason why an adult can’t have one. We didn’t go all-out this year, but I thought it might be nice to make some food in the shape of my favorite Star Wars character: Wilrow Hood! Just kidding, of course it’s Jabba!
I suppose you could say that things started the day before, when I was playing with my two-year-old daughter. We were making shapes out of my son’s Jenga Tetris blocks, when she asked (I swear!) for me to make a Jabba. I think it’s surprisingly recognizable, given the limited shapes and colors we had at our disposal.
On the day of the party, my sister helped me make a Jabba cake. Longtime readers of the site may recall that I had a Jabba cake four years ago, which was made by a friend of the family who is an expert in using fondant. Since we thought it would be pretty hard to compete directly with that, I decided to go for a more simplified look. My sister was to handle the actual baking and much of the frosting, while I would take care of the design and cutting of the cake, and some of the detail work. I did a sketch for us to work from, loosely based on a sketch from Katie Cook that I got a while ago.
The actual cake turned out pretty similar, in the end. It’s a combination of one rectangular sheet cake and two round cakes, all cut up to get the appropriate shapes. The frosting makes it look like it’s all one piece. The gargoyles on his throne are just circles of cake I punched out.
The icing was peppermint buttercream, and the cake itself was Devil’s Food. It was delicious!
But I wasn’t satisfied with just a cake. We had some leftover sugar cookie dough, so while the cake was baking I decided to try my hand at making a Jabba cookie. I think it turned out pretty well.
For the main course, I decided it would be fun for us to make homemade pizzas, and of course I couldn’t resist making mine a little more “interesting.” Luckily, most of my family likes olives.
Of course, you need some liquid refreshment, so I decided to finally get some use out of the Kotobukiya Han Solo in Carbonite DX ice tray that I got a while back, and make some punch. The mold is around 12 inches tall, or roughly 1/6 scale. The idea was to fill the mold with grape juice and then float it in the punch like an ice ring. The punch bowl ended up being too small for this to work quite the way I had envisioned it, and it turns out that grape juice doesn’t hold detail as well as ice, so a lot of the fine details were lost. Still, it was recognizable.
After a while, when the grape juice had melted a bit, we were able to scrape some of it off into the punch, making it a very nice slushy texture.
Most of my gifts didn’t have anything to do with Jabba, as there’s really nothing Jabba-related that I don’t already have, aside from some very obscure and difficult to get items. But I did get a hand-embroidered Jabba handkerchief from my sister.
Plus, my son made this card for me:
All in all, it was a great (if a bit tiring) birthday.
Link: Bill Hader Does a Spot-On Impression of Jabba the Hutt Dying
This video from CNN.com shows Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader doing an incredible impression of Jabba the Hutt dying (it’s really the lines in Huttese beforehand that sell it). His dying Taun-taun is also not to be missed. 🙂
It’s only been around a week since I first heard about these figures, and now I have them in my hands. As I mentioned before, it seems that these have not yet even been officially announced, and it may be that they aren’t supposed to be in stores yet, since they don’t work in the app yet. In the thread where I first heard about them, a poster who found them in a store indicated that Hasbro was “extremely concerned” about how the figures had gotten into his hands and was conducting some kind of investigation. But the fact that they later put them up on eBay makes we wonder if they weren’t just trying to drum up interest. In any case, a number of these have cropped up on eBay from various parts of the country since then, so it seems that they are making their way into retail. Luckily, I didn’t have to pay much of a premium to get them, although some sellers have been asking very inflated prices.
This pack consists entirely of original trilogy characters, which I like a lot. But of course the main reason I’m interested is that they’ve included new Jabba and Han in Carbonite figures.
The Jabba the Hutt pig figure is a completely new sculpt from what we saw in previous sets (see here and here). I think it’s a cuter design and a bit more Jabba-like than the previous one, due to the tail that extends to the side. There is also more paint on the new one (although not a huge amount more).
The Han in Carbonite bird is also a new sculpt, and this time it’s actually been painted, which helps the look considerably.Â
These are Telepods figures, which means that they have little codes on their bottoms that allow you to activate the associated characters in the game. If they’re like the previous ones we’ve had, these characters will still be available to you even if you don’t have the figures, but having the figures lets you use them more, and in levels where they might not ordinarily appear.
When I first heard about this concept, I couldn’t figure out how the figures were actually scanned by your device, since they don’t include any kind of reader, like those used for games like Skylanders. Their solution is really quite clever. The codes on the bottom of the figures are read by the device’s camera. To scan a figure, you have to place it the included plastic stand, which has a lens in it.
Presumably just placing it over the lens naked wouldn’t work, as the camera can’t focus that closely, and the light would also be blocked by the figure itself. The process is surprisingly quick, though, only taking a couple of seconds to register the character you’re scanning.
As I mentioned before, these figures do not yet work in the game (see below) — presumably they will be added in a future update. I will post when this happens, as I’m very interested to see what kinds of attacks Jabba and Han in Carbonite might have.
Upcoming: New “Jabba the Hutt Pig” and “Han in Carbonite Bird” Telepods Figures Coming For Angry Birds Star Wars II
I recently stumbled upon a thread over at the AngryBirdsNest Forum where someone was asking about a set of Angry Birds telepods figures that they couldn’t get to work with the Angry Birds Star Wars II app. At first people thought the guy was just confused, but (assuming his story is legit) he apparently managed to buy a set that is not only not supposed to be released in stores — it hasn’t even been announced to my knowledge. Some cursory web searches haven’t shown any references to this set.
This “Rebels vs. Villains Multi-Pack” includes brand new Jabba the Hutt pig and Han in Carbonite figures. These are not only newly sculpted figures, different from the ones we have seen in the past (see here and here), but they also have telepod functionality, allowing you scan the figure to use it within the game. I’m looking forward to seeing how they use Jabba in the game (and Han in Carbonite, for that matter) since he hasn’t really had an active role in the app until now.
I never wear baseball caps, but somehow I keep adding them to my collection as I discover more with Jabba on them. This one was apparently sold at Spencer’s Gifts and features a variety of Star Wars villains in a sort of comic book-inspired pop art style.
The characters are Darth Vader, Boba Fett, stormtroopers (on the bill), IG-88, Greedo, another stormtrooper (on the back) and Jabba the Hutt.
I don’t know if these are actually taken directly from comic books, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were. Jabba is relegated to the back, and you can only see part of his face, but it’s nice enough art.
Jabba the Hutt-Like Trinket Box from Surprise It’s A Box (S.I.A.B.)
“Surprise It’s A Box” was British company (or perhaps a line of collectibles made by another British company — it’s been difficult to find any information about them). As the name suggests, they made trinket boxes that look like statues at first glance, until you remove their lids. From what I can gather, they probably stopped producing these in the late 1990s.
I’ve posted about a lot of things that were clearly parodies of Jabba the Hutt in the past, but this probably falls more under the “was probably inspired by” column. I don’t have any evidence to suggest that the artist (Michael R. Tandy, according the name inscribed on the lip of the box) was intentionally imitating Jabba, but it’s hard to deny the resemblance. When I took it out of the box, my two-year-old daughter cried “Jabba!” (We like to start ’em young at our house…)
It’s possible the character of Jabba was just a subconscious influence on the artist, or perhaps the resemblance is entirely in my mind. “Jabba” in this case appears to be an undersea creature of some sort who has been dumped by his sweetheart. A mermaid is attempting to comfort him with some “broken heart tonic.” She gives me a little bit of a “Slave Leia” vibe as well. It’s about 3.75″ tall by 5″ wide, and fairly heavy — I understand it was made using a mixture of crushed marble and resin to achieve a kind of faux ivory look.
If you lift the lid (consisting of the creature’s head and upper torso) off, you’ll see his broken heart inside, along with a note from his beloved reading, “Dear Limo, Sorry my love for you had to end, Mez.” I’m not sure if there was any more detailed story that went along with it, or if were just supposed to fill in the blanks with our imaginations.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 
