This is a rock painted to look like Jabba the Hutt, created by Etsy seller StuffOnStones, who specializes in painting on stones. I imagine half of the work is finding interestingly shaped stones and figuring out what they resemble. In this case, the shape of the stone lends itself surprisingly well to a Jabba, although the tail is facing the opposite direction from what we usually see. It even sits at a good viewing angle when placed on a flat surface.
The rock is fairly large — around 7″ wide by 5″ tall and is quite heavy — it would make a great paperweight.
Since there is a sort of natural shelf where the tail goes, I thought it might be interesting to have a separate rock painted like Salacious Crumb that could rest on it, as you can see above.
A bit of the paint on his collar area chipped off in shipping — a shame, but not too obvious.
Vintage Gamorrean Guard Tube Socks by Charleston Hosiery
I posted about my Jabba the Hutt tube socks a couple of years ago, and these Gamorrean Guard socks were also part of the same series by Charleston Hosiery. While the Jabba socks I have were sold in a plastic bag along with a pair of Darth Vader socks, this pair was sold individually. They still have the plastic hang tag on them. I wonder if the characters they chose to sell together were random. It would be cool to find a package with both Jabba and the Gamorrean in it.
The original price was apparently $2.99, which seems on the expensive side, since you can sometimes get similar socks for around that today. (The $15.00 price tag was obviously added later.)
Max Rebo Mini-Bust by Gentle Giant
This is the third and final piece in Gentle Giant’s series of Rebo Band mini-busts, after the Sy Snootles and Droopy McCool busts that were released a few weeks ago. I’m not sure why they didn’t release them all at the same time. Even stranger is the fact that his edition size is apparently only 750, while Sy Snootles was 850 and Droopy McCool was 900. I would think most people buying these will be getting all three, and if someone were to only get one I would think Max Rebo would be the one to get. So I have no idea why his edition size is the smallest of the three.
Since the character of Max Rebo is inseparable from his piano, it’s understandable that they decided to include it — or rather part of it — in the bust. It looks a little odd, but I guess it’s better than not having it.
Gentle Giant has already released a full statue of the Rebo Band in a slightly smaller scale, so it’s natural to want to compare the two. These busts are supposed to be 1/6 scale, while the statue is probably 1/7 or 1/8. When I first got the mini-bust in hand, I thought it seemed rather large but when you put him next to the Max Rebo statue, the difference is barely noticeable.
What is noticeable is the difference in color. The mini-bust is a lot more blue, and I think it’s the more attractive of the two pieces in that regard. There’s also more detail on the skin, etc. However, not having the entire piano is a major liability for the mini-bust, so I’ll have to give the edge overall to the statue.
The same can be said for the band as a whole. If you compare the mini-busts with the statue, it seems to me that the statue is the clear winner. While the busts are a bit bigger and more detailed, they are (unsurprisingly) missing their lower halves, and that makes them less impressive overall than the full statue.
The mini-busts are also a lot more expensive than the statue. I’ve seen the statue sell for not much more than the price of a single one of the busts! Unless you’re a fanatical Rebo Band fan (guilty as charged!) or have a large collection of mini-busts and you want to stick with that scale and style, I see no reason to get the busts over the statue.
Power of the Force 2 Jabba the Hutt (European Boxes)
I’ve mentioned more than once that this version of Jabba is by far my least favorite, both in the movies and in toy form. But for whatever reason the POTF2 Jabba figure seems to have the most variants in its packaging. I posted about the differences between the 1996 and 1997 versions recently, and also wrote about the Japanese version (which is really just the American version with a sticker on it). But today I’d like to look at a couple of European variants. The one above has the “Star Wars” logo in three languages on the front (British English, Spanish and French).
On the back there is info in five languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch and German), so I assume that it was sold in at least those 5 countries, and probably elsewhere in Europe as well. Unlike the spitting Jabba the Hutt with 2-Headed Announcer figure that came out a bit later (which had no less than 6 languages), there is no Italian on this box. Instead, Italy got a box all to itself for some reason.
I’m not sure why this is, but it’s interesting. On the front is the Italian Star Wars logo on top of the much smaller English logo. Next to the Kenner logo at the bottom right is the GiG logo, for the company that distributed the figures in Italy.
And the back is all in Italian. As a side note, in Italy they call R2-D2 and C-3PO “C1-P8” and “3-DBO.”
Both of these boxes were in significantly better shape when I won them on eBay, but both sellers thought it would be a good idea to send them merely wrapped in plastic, without any sort of external box. I had to fashion some internal cardboard reinforcements in order to get one of the boxes to even hold its shape again. Disappointing, although I did get a partial refund from the one that was really badly crushed. I must remember to request that these kinds of things be wrapped properly in the future.
I stumbled upon Alastair Eales on eBay selling some of his watercolors paintings of vintage Star Wars figures on eBay. As he explains on his website, he intends to do paintings of the entire range of Kenner figures, and he’s done a little over 20 of them at this point. Most of the figures are shown in isolation, although he’s also done some recreations of vintage Kenner cardbacks as well. Naturally, I contacted him to see if he could do a Jabba the Hutt for me, which he kindly did. I’m very impressed with it.
I understand that most of the paintings are scaled so that the figures on the page are roughly the size of the actual figures, but Jabba is somewhat smaller. The paper is about 11.5″ by 8.3″ and Jabba’s throne is about 8″ wide.
Angry Birds Star Wars Millennium Falcon Bounce Game
I like Angry Birds Star Wars. I’ve heard Star Wars collectors complaining about all the merchandise, as if it’s somehow a choice between the realistic toys that they prefer and these cartoony ones. For the most part, I don’t think that’s the case. They’re targeting different audiences. I like how the Angry Birds toys have dozens of bird and pig versions of the characters we love, all created from scratch, unlike many of the licensed products out there that just lazily reuse the same old photos that we’ve seen for years. And the apps are good as well.
That said, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. I got it partially because Walmart had it at a relatively cheap price (less than $10) and partially because one of the characters is Jabba. But it turned out to be pretty enjoyable. It comes with three pingpong balls with the characters of Luke, Han Solo and Chewbacca on them. The object of the game is to bounce the balls off the surface that the falcon is on and get them to either knock over the enemy characters or get inside part of the falcon (or both). It can be a little challenging. There is a fair amount of assembly that you have to do before you can play. The falcon must be put together and have its stickers applied, and so forth. It also comes with a number of stickers that you can use to decorate the inside of the box, which are used as a backdrop for the game to help catch the bouncing balls. The box is nice and sturdy and can be used to store the game when not in use, but you do have to disassemble the falcon to get it back in the box completely.
You get different amounts of points depending on what you manage to do, but the best is getting one to go in the center of the falcon and roll down into the cockpit. Four of us ended up playing: me, my sister, father and my 8-year-old son. Of course there’s no way we would have been playing this game if my son hadn’t been there, but I think we all ended up enjoying it (and my father proved to be surprisingly skilled at it, beating us all handily). If you play the game with at least one kid (or maybe as some sort of drinking game :)), it’s not bad at all.
I posted about the “Oola” issue yesterday (issue #45), so here’s Boushh (issue #44). It’s basically the same in structure: a few pages of background for the featured character and several unrelated articles. Still, I kind of like these magazines and their big glossy photos.
The figure is okay, although I’d have to give a slight edge to the (admittedly considerably larger) Hallmark ornament when it comes to paint and detail. Her staff had come loose in the package, but some superglue fixed that.
There’s nothing too surprising in the information provided, although it did make me think more about the whole rescue plan that the rebels devised for Han. In a lot of ways, it seemed overly complex and prone to failure. Also, Leia was supposed to be impersonating an Ubese bounty hunter who spoke a language that needed translation by C-3PO, but I wondered if she actually spoke Ubese. I had always more or less assumed that C-3PO was oblivious to the rebels’ plans because of how he acted when he was presented to Jabba. But I suppose it’s possible that he wasn’t even actually translating what Leia was saying, but was rather reciting a predetermined speech. I think I need to actually read the “Tales from Jabba’s Palace” book that I bought so long ago. Maybe that would shed some light on the subject. 😀
Here are all of my Deagostini figures so far. There’s still a Max Rebo one that I haven’t managed to track down.
It’s been some time since I posted about the Deagostini figurine collection. I posted about Jabba, Bib Fortuna and the Gamorrean Guard back in 2010, but there were actually several other Jabba’s Palace characters that I hadn’t managed to get at the time. Here’s one: Oola. Like all of the entries in the series, it comes with both a thin magazine and a painted metal figure of the featured character. The magazine isn’t entirely devoted to that character, though. In Oola’s case it’s just three pages of background, plus a page about the creation of the figure.
The figure isn’t bad, really. There aren’t that many Oola collectibles out there, so it’s nice that they made her. The face doesn’t really look much like Femi Taylor, though.
Reading the background story was rather depressing. I hadn’t really given a lot of thought about the implications of her presence in Jabba’s palace, but it seems that she was kidnapped by Bib Fortuna and forced into slavery in Jabba’s palace. According to the background, there was actually another Twi’lek dancing girl named Sienn’rha who had been kidnapped by Bib. Luke actually managed to intercept the girls while they were being transported to Jabba’s palace and tried to save the girls, but Oola, convinced that she would have a life of luxury with Jabba and distrustful of Luke’s intentions, refused to go with them.
Of course, when she arrived at Jabba’s, she found that she had been deceived. She ended up being eaten by the rancor only days after her arrival at the palace. Poor kid.
Star Wars Sleep Pants by Briefly Stated
I have a secret ambition to get every possible article of clothing in a Jabba design, but pants have been very elusive (as have underpants, but that’s another story). So I was happy to find that Briefly Stated, a company that has released a variety of character sleepwear and underwear, had made these sleep pants that feature Jabba rather prominently. It’s not quite the same as having a pair of pants that are completely Jabba-themed, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Still, by my count there are 16 Jabbas on these pants. Not bad!
The design is a little on the… busy side. Still, they have a lot of iconic scenes and characters from the original trilogy. They’ve basically used stock photos, but their color palette has been reduced so that some of them look a little odd. Han Solo appears to be wearing lipstick, and Jabba has blue eyes.
I like that they have character sleepwear and underwear for adults these days. It’s a subtle sign that being a geek is a bit more socially acceptable than it might have been 10 or 20 years ago.
Custom Burgundy Cape Bib Fortuna Statue (Gentle Giant)
Lili Ledy, the Mexican manufacturer of vintage Star Wars figures, had a number of variations in their figures. One of the most well known is the burgundy-caped Bib Fortuna figure. Unfortunately there are a lot more fakes than genuine examples of this figure. That (and the expense) has put me off of buying one for myself. But I decided to make a little tribute to the Lili Ledy figure using a Gentle Giant Bib Fortuna Statue.
These statues were originally offered as a mailaway promotion for people who bought both the Jabba the Hutt and Max Rebo Band statues. That’s how I got my first one. But when I preordered my Ree-Yees mini-bust from Redfordfilms.com last year, they were running a promotion where everyone who made a Gentle Giant preorder would get a free Bib Fortuna statue. So I got an extra Bib when Ree-Yees shipped. Apparently Gentle Giant made way too many of them, since I got the impression from the Redford Films customer service people that they have stacks of Bib Fortuna statues in their warehouse — most likely bought in bulk from Gentle Giant. You can still order them for $14.99 if you so desire.
I think it looks rather nice. It may actually be better than the actual color scheme, which you can see below. I only painted the cape and left the rest of the statue untouched. The statue came with a nice black base with magnets in it, which you could use to display the statue on its own. I don’t think very many people did that since the Bib Fortuna statue was ultimately just an accessory for the Jabba statue, but now I can actually use the base.
I take most of my pictures outside because the light is better, and this time just as I finished, a gust of wind came up and slammed my backdrop down on both of these figures, breaking off two fingers of each! Worse, one of the red caped one’s fingers was completely lost somehow. I was not too happy about that, but I can fix it. I’ve already resculpted the finger and will repaint that part later. At least it wasn’t an expensive statue…
Mighty Jabba's Collection 