As I mentioned a few days ago, Mimoco has finally released a Jabba the Hutt Mimobot (USB flash drive). Of course Slave Leia is also a welcome addition, but not having a Jabba seemed wrong, especially since they called the last series the “Jabba’s Palace Series” (more on those in a later entry). Mimoco has been producing flash drives in the shape of Star Wars characters for several years now — I bought the Series 3 version of C-3Po (a nice golden chrome version) back in 2009 — but I’ve always thought that they were very expensive. Back when I got my C-3PO, I paid $35 for 2GB and as I recall that was a pretty good deal compared to the MSRP. However, the price of flash memory has come down quite a bit since then (and perhaps Mimoco has rethought its pricing strategy as well), making these much more reasonable at $19.99 for 8GB, which is the smallest available size. You can get up to 64GB for $69.99. It’s probably still more expensive than most generic looking US flash drives, but these are now cheap enough that I can see someone actually wanting to collect them rather than just getting one or two of their favorite characters.
Jabba’s design is a little unusual for a Mimobot in that his head is higher up, so you end up removing his entire head when you take the cap off. They did get some subtle design details like his arm tattoo right, and he’s even holding a froggy snack. 😀 Each Mimobot also has an LED in the back that flashes when the drive is being accessed. Jabba’s light is green, as might be expected.
Leia looks a bit more conventional (for a Mimobot). You remove the top of her head when removing the cap. Her LED is a sort of pinkish-purple color.
One thing I do really like about the Mimobots is that you get some extras on the drive itself when you buy one. One of my favorites are the icons/avatars. You get icons that can be used for either Mac or PC computers, including one of the actual flash drive itself, one of a “hard drive” that has been changed to match the character’s design (check out the Jabba one below!) and a one of a cartoony version of the character, plus a few extra. With series 8, the extras include Salacious Crumb, the Rancor and Jabba’s hooka pipe, and even a Leia strangling Jabba. These go a long way toward making any extra expense for the drives seem worth it. (You get the extras for all of the Series 8 characters no matter which one you buy, so you’ll also get the Biker Scout, Jedi Luke, and Ackbar versions, but I’m only concentrating on Jabba and Leia here.) These scale up very nicely on OS X without any loss of detail, so you can make them a lot bigger than what you see below.
However, I should mention one issue with these icons. The normal way of changing an icon in Mac OS X is to “Get Info” (command-I) on the file with the icon you want to change, copy the icon, then paste it into the “Get Info” screen for the file whose icon you want to change. This won’t work with these icons, however. When you “Get Info” on them, the icon shown is just the generic “icon” icon. Previous Mimobot series have been okay in this respect, so it looks like someone at Mimoco just messed up. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to fix if you use the free software called icns2icon. Just drag the icons into the app and it will make it so you can copy and paste them as normal.
You also get some wallpaper files in a multitude of sizes, from very small (smartphone screen) to very large (HD computer screen). The design varies a bit depending on the resolution, but this should give you an idea. They’re mostly shots from the actual Star Wars movies with the Mimobot taking the place of the actual character on screen. Kind of cute.
You’re also supposed to get access to Mimobot Soundbytes, which is a program that is supposed to play sounds from the character when you insert the drive into your computer. However, I found that the software didn’t work on my Macs (I tried a machine running OS X 10.6 and OS X 10.7 and neither worked). Doing a little poking around online leads me to believe that the software may only be compatible with even older versions of Mac OS X. There’s no mention of this that I could find on the packaging or in the readme file, so this is a bit disappointing. I would probably get sick of the sounds pretty quickly and disable them, but they should at least work.
Now that Mimobots are a bit more affordable, I’m hoping that they’ll release some more Jabba’s Palace characters, like the Gamorrean Guard or Oola, which you can see in the video in this post.
Jabba the Hutt Popsicle Stick (Frigo Spain)
This stick is one of 18 different Star Wars designs put out by the Spanish company Frigo in 1997 to coincide with the release of the “Special Editions” of the Star Wars films. (There’s a list of the characters on the Star Wars Collector’s Archive, but unfortunately no pictures. They apparently also made an R2-D2-shaped popsicle stick holder.) It’s made of plastic and is about 4.5 inches long. I tried to find an image of what the popsicle might have looked like when it was intact, but without much luck.
I’m interested to know where this art came from. It seems like they may have commissioned it especially for these sticks, which is pretty cool. I wish more companies would do that instead of relying on the same old publicity photos from Lucasfilm.
(It’s true that “Popsicle” is actually a trademarked term, but here in the US we often use it to refer to any kind of frozen confection on a stick.)
UPDATE: Reader Chris pointed me toward a site that has picture of various things to do with these items, including what the wrapper and ice cream looked like.
http://www.starwarsspanishstuff.info/frigo-expositores-y-envoltorios.html
My son just got the latest edition of LEGO Club Magazine (essentially a glorified LEGO ad, but it has some comics and activities as well). I was interested to see that they are running a contest in which kids can design a room to add on to the new LEGO Jabba’s Palace using Star Wars LEGOs. Five winners will get $100 LEGO gift cards. I’m trying to convince my son to enter. 🙂 I tried accessing the LEGO Club website for more info (you’re supposed to enter the club code “palace”) but it didn’t seem to work. Maybe it’s not active yet. Click the image for a bigger version.
This custom figure was made by UK artist Stuart Witter. It’s based on a Kidrobot Munny Rooz figure. The Munny figure (in the shape of a rabbit) has been the basis for all kinds of amazing customs, and Kidrobot has come out with a variety of other blank figures in the shapes of different animals. The Rooz is in the basic shape of a kangaroo, but Stuart removed the head and added some sculpted elements to turn it into Jabba. I’ve made some custom Mighty Muggs (like this Jabba the Hutt), so I know how hard it can be to create and execute a design like this, even though it may seem relatively simple. I think he did a great job of utilizing the existing shape of the Rooz figure. It’s about 2.5 inches tall.
Stuart originally had Jabba paired with “Wooqee” (a Chewbacca-themed custom of a Qee figure), but I asked him if I could just buy the Jabba. Check out his Flickr feed for more of his customs (mostly non-Star Wars related, but still very cool).
Vintage Polish Unlicensed Photo of Jabba the Hutt
This photo is around 3×5 in size and is printed on card stock. It might not look like much, but it represents a rather fascinating corner of Star Wars collecting (see this website for the full story about Star Wars products available in Poland — it’s pretty interesting). Back when the original Star Wars films came out, Poland was still under Soviet influence, making it difficult to get much in the way of Star Wars toys or other products. Still, there were quite a number of bootleg toys available, and these are coveted by collectors today. Photos were apparently quite popular as inexpensive ways to have a representation of the characters from the film. Most of the photographs were reproductions from magazines, so the quality leaves something to be desired. It’s kind of mind-blowing to think that some of the photos were actually shots of Kenner toys from catalogs. While I was playing with Star Wars figures, some poor kid in Poland had to be satisfied with grainy black & white photos of them.
This particular photo has the message “Pozdrowienia z Poznania ! Hey!” (“Greetings from Poznan. Hey!”) written on the back. Not sure why they wrote that there, but it does at least tie this item definitively to Poland. I just love unearthing this kind of item.
Mimoco has just announced Series 8 of their Star Wars Mimobot flash drives, including Jabba the Hutt and Slave Leia. I talked about Series 7 a while back, and pointed out how odd it was to have a “Jabba’s Palace” series without Jabba. But that problem seems to have been solved with this release. In some ways Jabba isn’t the best fit for the stock Mimobot body, but it doesn’t look bad at all. The new ones range from $19.99 for 8GB to $69.99 for 64GB. As usual, this is more expensive than generic USB flash drives, but you’re paying for the characters and design.
Here’s a video about the new series. They’re all available for order now at Mimoco.com, so it looks like I’ve got some ordering to do…
Japanese Power of the Force 2 Figures (Jabba the Hutt, Slave Leia, Rancor Keeper, 8D8)
I mentioned earlier that I’ve had some trouble finding Jabba-related products during my stay in Japan, but I did find this figure going cheaply on Yahoo! Auctions (the default auction site in Japan, much as eBay is in the US). You’d be forgiven if you were a little confused by the picture above, since it looks exactly like the US version of the POFT2 Jabba and Han Solo set. In fact, that’s exactly what it is, with one difference. If you look on the back, you’ll notice that there’s a sticker on the bottom right with some Japanese on it. That’s the only thing that distinguishes this from the normal American release.
They made completely new boxes for the European version of this set, for example, but apparently all they could be bothered to do was slap some stickers on the existing American toys when they sold them in Japan. And in fact that’s how Star Wars figures have been sold in Japan for quite some time. There were some companies like Popy that did make their own original packaging back in the days of the vintage toy line, but even in the 1980s Takara was selling Kenner figures with just a sticker stuck on the back of the package. As someone who enjoys collecting foreign versions of toy packaging, I find this disappointing. I’m sure it probably saved money, and perhaps the market in Japan wasn’t big enough to warrant making new packaging. I’m guessing that it’s also due to the fact that Star Wars collecting in Japan is mostly driven by adults rather than kids. They probably figured they didn’t need to bother coming up with packaging that might appeal more to Japanese kids, since they weren’t going to buy them anyway. Japanese Star Wars enthusiasts might even think having the same packaging as the US was cool.
The sticker describes the product as a “Star Wars Creature Figure.” I find it interesting that they decided to use the English word “with” in the title (“Jabba with Han Solo”), especially since they’re not just copying the English title (which, after all, is “Jabba the Hutt and Han Solo”). The word “with” is used in Japanese in some cases, so it’s not totally strange, but it’s also not standard usage. I wonder if they weren’t sort of playing up the foreign nature of the toys by using an English word in the title like this.
Under the name is a message that reads, “Move Jabba’s head and his tail will move” (I can’t help but think of this German ad when I read that…) The rest of it is just safety warnings and the like. Pretty boring stuff. I can’t help but think that Hasbro Japan could have added a bit more explanation in Japanese about the characters, etc. Wait, Hasbro Japan? Before buying this, I didn’t even realize that there was such a thing. Turns out there’s a good reason for that — Hasbro pulled out of Japan in 1998 (shortly after this came out), leaving Tomy in charge of distributing some of their products.
I was surprised to find these figures for sale at store in (somewhat) rural Japan. It was a place that sells DVDs, comics, and toys of various kinds, and they had a bin of Star Wars figures on sale for 200 yen apiece (about $2.50 given the current exchange rate). These are very similar to the Jabba figure above in that they’re just the US releases with stickers on the back.
I haven’t heard much about people going out of their way to collect these Japanese versions, and it’s not surprising since they’re really not that interesting compared to the foreign variations that have completely different packaging. But since I’m here and they were cheap I figured I get a few just to have them. And I’ve just realized that I’ve never posted entries for the American versions of these figures, which I will have to fix when I get the chance.
I was amused to see that Leia is called “Leia in Slave Girl” in Japanese, which is either an incomplete sentence or some sort of Engrish. Again, it’s not just a translation of the English, though, which is “Princess Leia Organa as Jabba’s Prisoner.”
Jabba the Sock
When I lived in Japan, I used to like the store UNIQLO because they always had inexpensive, good quality socks available in 20 or more colors. They have them all displayed on shelves making a veritable rainbow of socks. (I made the mistake of getting a bunch of different colors a few years ago, but decided after ending up with a bunch of odd socks that I’d keep it down on just a small selection of colors at once.)
I live in the US now, but I still like UNIQLO’s socks, so I stock up when I’m back in Japan. This time, I thought it might be fun to get some in Jabba’s colors. It didn’t occur to me until later that I could actually use the socks to make an actual Jabba. It turned out better than I thought it might, since I was able to make use of the socks’ natural shapes such as the heels, etc. to help create Jabba’s shape.
BG-J38 “Build a Droid” Figure by Hasbro (Jabba the Hutt’s Dejarik and Hologames Droid)
The “build a figure” (or in this case “build a droid”) concept has been around for a while. The idea is that each figure in a particular wave contains an extra part and if you collect them all, you can use them to build a complete standalone figure. It makes sense from the point of view of the manufacturer, since it encourages people to buy figures that they might have passed on otherwise, but it can be a little annoying, too. This is particularly true when you only want the “build a figure” figure and not any of the normal figures that its parts come with. You’re pretty much stuck looking on eBay in that case, which is where I got this guy.
Wookieepedia tells us that BG-J38 was Jabba’s personal Dejarik and Hologames droid, who never lost a match except when playing against Jabba himself. As you can see, he comes in six pieces that fit together (somewhat loosely) to make the complete figure. His main characteristic is probably his insect-like head, along with his purplish metallic parts. I wouldn’t exactly call him a must-have (and in that sense he’s a good choice for a “build a figure”), but he does add a little something to a Jabba’s palace display.
This isn’t new (the pictures are dated 2009) but I just found out about it. How awesome is this butter sculpture of Jabba the Hutt eating a piece of cake? I’d love to have a version of it in a more permanent medium. Click through to her site for more pictures.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 
