Celebration VI Exclusive “Jabba the Hat” Knit Hat
I couldn’t make it to Celebration VI in Florida earlier this month, but I did make arrangements for someone to pick up some of the exclusives that they were selling there. I was going to do a post about the Jabba-related ones, but for many of them I couldn’t find detailed info, or even pictures. For this hat, for example, there was only an illustration. So I’m happy to say that it looks a lot better than I had expected. The details are all embroidered and it seems like a pretty high quality hat.
Of course, it says “Jabba the Hat” on the back. I kind of wish I had bought two of these so I could wear one.
Vintage Return of the Jedi Mini-Puzzle by Cromy (Argentina)
I posted about Cromy’s Return of the Jedi card game a little bit ago. This is also by Cromy of Argentina, and is actually more or less the same size as the card game. When I bought it, I had assumed it would be similar in size to the other vintage puzzles I had, like the one shown below from Waddingtons UK. So I was surprised that it’s the size of a pack of cards or an audiotape box, but I actually like this better.
I mentioned in my post about the ROTJ card game that most of the images they used for the cards were horizontally flipped, and the same is true of the image for this puzzle. Compare the Waddingtons puzzle with the Cromy one to see the difference.
On the back of the box are the other Cromy puzzles, also with their images flipped. I’d love to get the one with Jabba on it, but these are pretty tricky to find.
“Please Knock Before Entering My Galaxy” Door Knob Hanger with Jabba the Hutt by Scholastic
A white ago I posted about the “Reading Is For Everyone” poster from Scholastic that features Jabba reading a book. This door knob hanger was also put out by Scholastic using the same image (although just with Jabba this time). I’m including the other hanger showing the rebels, since these came attached to one another as a sort of set.
It’s kind of funny — I’ve had this door hanger on my want list for some time (at least a couple of years, since reading about it in one of my Star Wars price guides). So I was happy to see these finally show up on eBay. And then the very next day, a completely different seller also listed some. I ended up buying both sets since they were cheap, and I thought it would be funny to actually use one on my office door. 😀 But it just goes to show that you never know what will pop up on eBay.
Link: Roxy the Rancor Has A Facebook Page
I couldn’t make it to Celebration VI, but one thing I really would’ve like to see was the 17-foot, full size rancor they had there. It looks amazing, and may actually be the first time that a full-size rancor has been created. They certainly didn’t have one for Return of the Jedi — all they made was one hand to grab Mark Hamill. The rest was a model. They’ve made a Facebook page for the rancor (affectionately known as “Roxy”) that has all sorts of people posing with it, including George Lucas, Steve Sansweet and Seth Green. But I think the shots with Mark Hamill are the best.
Upcoming: Jabba-Related Items From Disney
One announcement at Celebration VI that I had missed was from Disney. They announced a line of Star Wars/Cars mashup vehicles, which should be interesting, although there is no Jabba as of yet. They also announced several Jabba-related items that I will talk about below. All of these photos are taken from Inside The Magic.
Disney’s Vinylmation line consists of Mickey Mouse-shaped vinyl figures painted to resemble various characters. I’m pretty excited to see that they’re adding a Jabba and Salacious Crumb. The Jabba will be a jumbo 9″ figure, which the Salacious will be 1.5″ tall. I quite like how they creatively used the feet and ears on the figure to depict the throne and the archway behind Jabba, since it would be hard to get them to fit in as part of Jabba’s body.
I’ve been watching Disney’s line of figures depicting Disney characters as Star Wars characters to see if they’d ever add a Jabba. No luck on that front so far (not sure which Disney character would be appropriate to play Jabba, either). But they are at least going to make a Sarlacc Attack boxed set.
They also announced a “Hot Potato” game using a thermal detonator, which looks interesting.
Finally, and perhaps most intriguing of all, is this latex Salacious Crumb figure. I know they made a latex Yoda figure that was around 18″ tall and cost about $40. Someone who saw the actual Salacious at Celebration said he thought it was more like 13″ tall, but that’s probably sitting down. In any case, I’ll definitely have to keep an eye out for this one. It sounds like it will be posable, which should open up possibilities for costumes, jokes, etc. Here’s a shot of it that Shropt from the Sideshow Freaks board posted. I’d say the likeness looks a little bit off, but it might just be the paint.
As I mentioned some time ago, Gentle Giant is coming out with a Gamorrean Guard in its line of jumbo vintage figures. It was announced as a PGM exclusive, so it would only be available to members of their Premier Guild (which costs around $70 a year). Yesterday, Gentle Giant announced that they were changing the figure from the normal Return of the Jedi version to the Power of the Force version, complete with a 3″ coin. The regular Return of the Jedi version is now going to see regular release, so it will be available at normal retailers.
The POTF Gamorrean is a relatively rare and valuable figure, so in some sense this is cool. But I’m a little annoyed by the way they handled this. I joined the Premier Guild specifically for the Gamorrean figure, since I knew it wouldn’t be available anywhere else. Now that’s no longer the case. I suppose I’ll end up getting both, but it would’ve been nice to know about this before I joined.
Vintage Return of the Jedi Card Game by Cromy (Argentina)
Finding unusual foreign Star Wars items is one of my favorite parts of collecting. That’s particularly true when it’s something completely unique, rather than just a foreign language version of something released in the US. I had never seen this item before, or heard of the company that put it out — Cromy. Obviously, the box has seen better days. I tried deciphering the rules, but I’m still a little fuzzy on the details.
Each card has a photo from Return of the Jedi along with some explanatory text. For example, the Google translation of the caption on the first card below reads (with a little editing):
Visit to Jabba the Hutt
Jabba the Hutt is a horrendous monster living in a fortress who dominates Tattooine and has kidnapped Han Solo, who is held captive in a block of carbonite. While the droids offer a message, Jabba listens.
One interesting thing is that almost all of the photos on the cards are flipped horizontally from the ones we usually see. The first card below is okay, but the others are all reversed. Sometimes companies will reverse images to get them to work better in a certain context, but having so many of them reversed makes me think that they just made a mistake. One other interesting note is how they call him “Jabba’l Hutt,” which is a new variation on the name for me. I’ve seen “Jabba el Hutt” in Spanish before.
 
Vintage Return of the Jedi Stickers and Album by Topps
My memories of it are a little hazy, but I’m pretty sure I had one of these albums as a kid. I recall pasting stickers in my album and opening the packs trying to find the particular ones that I was missing. I’m positive I never came close to completing the album, though. Many of the spaces in the album are multi-part images composed of 4, 6 or even 9 stickers, which I’m sure made people even more eager to buy more stickers.
The stickers were sold in boxes like this for 25 cents a pack. The album was also only 25 cents, which seems cheap, but of course it was basically a plot to rope kids into collecting the stickers. 😉 The back of the box admits as much, with this coy little note to “Mr. Dealer.” Check out the look on this kid’s face.
There were 5 stickers in each pack, and you needed 180 stickers to complete the album. I got a couple of mostly full boxes of stickers from ebay and decided to work with my 7-year-old son to finally complete an album. We must’ve opened close to 100 packs (although technically they were already open, as the glue holding the packs together had dried out long ago). Below, you can see the stack of all 180 stickers — the fruit of a couple of hours of opening and sorting. Toward the end in particular, we would only find one new sticker for every few packs, and I was getting a little worried that we might not have a complete set even with so many packs (that’s what happened when I tried to get a full set for the Jabba’s Palace Customizable Card Game set). But in the end, we were able to find them all.
The duplicates are below. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but there are quite a lot here. It’s probably half an inch thick.
Of course the idea was that you would trade with your friends to try and complete your album, but even then it would’ve been hard to get all of them. Back in the day, Topps recognized this problem. In the back of the album was a form that let kids order 10 stickers of their choice for $1 (plus a stamped envelope), so if you ended up with a few that you just couldn’t find, there was still a way to complete the album.
Here are a few sample pages. The glue on the stickers themselves had also weakened quite a bit, so we had to use glue sticks to affix the stickers to the album. Some of the multi-part images were a little difficult to complete since the stickers were sometimes not cut so they would fit together perfectly.
I’ve put together a PDF of the entire completed album, which you can download here. It’s kind of big at around 10MB, since I used full resolution images. That should allow you to zoom in and read the text if you like.
I’ll have to say, I really enjoyed putting this together.
Attakus R2-D2 Statue
This is another one of those Attakus statues that isn’t exactly part of their Jabba’s Palace line, but can certainly be pressed into service in an Attakus Jabba display. True, it’s not the drink-serving R2 from Jabba’s sail barge, but R2 also appeared like this in the palace. While Attakus statues in general have come down in price quite a bit in the last few years, the Attakus R2-D2 has done a bit better job of holding its value.
They added some weathering to his body, but I would say it’s only partially successful. In the right light it can look pretty good, but some of it looks more like R2’s been eating Cheetos. Still, the paint overall is quite good, without too much slop (although there is a little). The blue paint looks to be around the right shade, but is lacking the metallic quality that it should have. The silver parts also look more like silver paint (which they are) than metal.
R2 purists might have something to say about the shape of the dome, or some of the minor details on his body. Some people take this stuff very seriously. But it looks good enough to me (much better, in fact, than the Attakus C-3PO’s face, which has always seemed off to me). Because of the shape of their bases, you can’t really get the droids any closer to each other than this, which is a bit of a shame, but possibly unavoidable, short of using a combined base like Sideshow is using for their droids PF.
Overall, I’d say this R2 is quite well done, and is one of a surprisingly small number of R2 statues. Gentle Giant’s oft-delayed R2 statue is finally due to come out in the next few months, but it’ll be smaller. I’ll be interested to see how the paint job stacks up to this version.
“Jabba the Cat” Print by Alana McCarthy/Geeky Pet
This print of a Jabba the Hutt as a cat (or is it the other way around?) was made by Alana McCarthy — the Canadian artist behind Geeky Pet on Etsy. She specializes in prints of geeky mashups featuring pets. I like that the Slave Leia mouse is wearing a tiny little bikini…
Of course, showing Jabba as a cat is a fairly common theme, such as with the Jabbacat polymer sculpture I posted about a while ago, or this classic meme photo:
Mighty Jabba's Collection 