2012 LEGO Desert Skiff (9496)
Like the new Jabba’s Palace set I posted about a couple of days ago, this set is not yet available in the US, but came out in Japan a few days ago. Since I happen to be in Japan, I decided to splurge and get them even though it would be somewhat more expensive than just waiting to get them at home in a few weeks. This is the third skiff that LEGO has put out, the other two being the Desert Skiff set that came out on its own in the year 2000, and the one that came with Jabba’s Sail Barge. Since I’m in Japan at the moment, I don’t have access to my other two skiffs, but it seems pretty obvious that this one is quite a bit bigger than either of them.
There isn’t a lot to the skiff itself. It has a folding gangplank and a control section.
The section in the middle also opens up for secret storage of weapons.
The set also includes a sarlacc, which is a bit nicer than the one that came with Jabba’s Sail Barge in that it has two tentacles and its beak is big enough to fit a minifigure inside with the jaws closed, allowing you to reenact Boba Fett’s ignominious demise. 😀
The set comes with four minifigures: Boba Fett, Luke, Lando and Kithaba, all of which are “new” versions. Of course, the only truly new figure is Kithaba, because there’s never been a figure of that character. But the others have been a bit tweaked. Boba Fett in particular seems to be a lot more detailed, with a cape and antenna and more detailed printing. Overall, it’s a pretty nice set, but not as big of a difference as with the new Jabba’s Palace set.
Jabba the Hutt Donut
I’m a big fan of the Japanese donut chain Mister Donut. (Technically the chain started out in the US, but from what I understand the US ones have been swallowed up by Dunkin Donuts, while there are some 1300 Mister Donut stores in Japan.) I suppose it’s because their donuts have been created with Japanese tastes in mind, but I find them to be a lot lighter and tastier than donuts in the US. Plus, they always have cute products that you can earn by saving up points, so I always make a point to go to Mister Donut when I’m in Japan.
Recently they’ve been selling “Oekaki Donuts” (literally “drawing donuts”). You can get a “pen” filled with chocolate icing that you use to draw on the blank canvas of your donut. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know what my first thought was when I heard about it. I was alone when I bought this, and I think the guy at the counter was a little confused as to why a middle-aged man would be buying something like this to eat in the store, but never mind. Mine was creme-filled with caramel frosting. Delicious!
I sent these pictures to my sister in the US (also a fan of Mister Donut) to try and convince her that they had come out with a line of Jabba donuts. 😉
2012 LEGO Jabba’s Palace Set (9516)
I managed to make some time last night to put this together, and it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it might, so I thought I would put up a little review of the set. I’m very impressed with it overall. It’s a nice upgrade from the original LEGO Jabba’s Palace. Although it hasn’t yet been released in the US (as far as I know), I believe it will retail for $119.99. In Japan, where I bought it, it’s retailing for Â¥21,000, which is more than double the price (roughly $270 thanks to a strong yen). However, most retailers seem to be selling it for a hefty discount, so I paid a lot less than that. It’s still quite a bit more than it would’ve been to get it in the US, but I couldn’t wait. 😉
The set consists of Jabba’s throne room and a tower. The front of the set is open, while the back of the set is mostly closed. I wasn’t sure about the tower part of the set at first, but when combined with the throne room section, it does make it look something like the exterior of Jabba’s Palace.
The back wall of the palace swings open so you can access the rear of the throne room.
The door slides up and down, and also has a simple version of the gatekeeper droid that can go in and out. (We saw a more elaborate version of the door and droid in the old Jabba’s Message LEGO set.)
For reasons that escape me, there is a firing missile in the roof of the palace. The roof itself isn’t actually attached to the building, making it easy to lift off to access the throne room below. In the throne room, you have the throne, which slides back and forth over the “rancor pit,” just like in the movie. When the throne in the rear position, it even has the steps to the left and right, which I thought was a nice touch.
There’s also a little area underneath the throne where you are apparently supposed to store things like gold, a froggy snack and a spare gun. I like how they recreated the barbecue behind Jabba (complete with frying pan :D). The designers of this set really took their time to get a lot of the little details right.
To Jabba’s right (our left) is a little alcove where the Han in Carbonite figure is displayed.
The “thawed Han” figure can snap into the rear of the carbonite block, and you can spin the whole thing around (with Han facing outward, in that case) to reenact the thawing scene).
Speaking of which… Han, Oola and Leia all have heads with different expressions on them, which is a very nice feature.
There is a sliding lever that you can use to open the “rancor pit,” although there’s very little space to actually have any figures fall down into it. I’m hoping that there will be some sort of a rancor put addition later on. That would be awesome.
There are 10 minifigures that come with this set, 7 of which are new (the B’omarr Monk, Han in Carbonite and Chewbacca figures are re-used from other sets). The Jabba is probably one of the biggest draws for this set. It’s totally different from the one that came with the old Lego Jabba’s Palace. Personally, I much prefer this one.
It’s bigger, the paint is well done, and he can turn his torso 360 degrees in addition to moving his arms.
They even included his arm tattoo.
The old Jabba’s Palace set had Slave Leia instead of Oola, so it makes sense that we’ve never had a Leia as Boushh figure before.
We’ve also never had an Oola figure before, although I did make a custom Oola before.
The Gamorrean Guard is quite an improvement over the Gamorrean included with the old Jabba’s Prize set, although it seems that they are moving farther and farther away from the simple LEGO style that they used to use, and closer to Kubricks in terms of level of detail.
Salacious Crumb is also new, although he has no moving parts or anything you have to assemble, so he’s more of a uniquely-shaped brick than a minifigure per se.
I’ll have to say, I really like this set. I do think it’s expensive for what you get (especially in Japan!) but about the only thing I can think of to improve it would be an actual Rancor Pit, plus more palace aliens and the Rebo Band. Let’s hope these will come later at some point.
I don’t think these sets have hit the states yet, but apparently some people in Germany and Australia are getting them, and they just got released today in Japan (where I am). Even though it’s a fair bit more expensive for me to get them here than wait and get them at home in the US, I couldn’t resist. Here’s a shot of the new LEGO Jabba (with the tattoo on the correct arm, unlike one of the prerelease shots I saw earlier). I’m pretty busy with work this weekend, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to put them together right away, but when I do I will post about them in some depth. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied with these shots of the boxes. The Jabba’s Palace box is quite large!
Jabba’s Palace:
Desert Skiff:
Update from Japan: June 6, 2012
As I mentioned in my last post, my family and I are in Japan for most of this month. The last time I came to Japan was a couple of years ago when I went to Tokyo on business. That time I got a number of Jabba items, including the New Era Jabba the Hutt fitted cap (a favorite of mine), the Max Rebo Band Kubrick figures, a mail-away set of Jabba-themed Pepsi bottle toppers, and even the Attakus Slave Leia statue. This time, however, I haven’t had any luck. In fact, these froggies that I saw at a local gift shop are the closest thing to Jabba I’ve seen all week. 😦 They’re cute though, huh?
This time we went to Osaka instead of Tokyo, and while I did visit “Den Den Town” (an electronics district similar to Tokyo’s Akihabara) I didn’t find much of interest from a Jabba collector’s perspective. In fact, the amount of Star Wars stuff in general was less than I had remembered in previous years. I think the lack of any major motion pictures in the franchise is starting to take effect. If you look hard enough, there are still some speciality toy shops that have Star Wars toys and things, but they don’t seem to be doing much of a business. And I went to two or three Toys R Us stores and found basically nothing Star Wars-related whatsoever, with the exception of some LEGO sets. No Star Wars toys of any kind, which is a little sad. While there are still a fair number of hardcore Star Wars collectors in Japan, they are all around my age. Japanese kids just don’t seem to like Star Wars (or even the Clone Wars) — everything in the “boys’ toys” section of the stores seems to be related to Pokemon, Kaijuu (monsters like Godzilla) or Tokusatsu (special effects-driven movies and shows with heroes like Ultraman or the Power Rangers). However, I do have one surprise for readers of this site that I hope to be able to post about in a few days. Stay tuned.
My family and I are in Japan at the moment, and stopped by a place where someone was doing amezaiku — traditional Japanese candy sculptures. He had a number of different things available for sale, like animals and popular cartoon characters, but he would also make just about anything you requested. I naturally decided to have him make me a Jabba.
The process involves taking hot blobs of melted sugar taffy and shaping them by hand and with various tools (including an air pump to pump them up like a balloon in some cases). They also add some edible dyes to color the taffy, which is naturally just a sort of translucent white color. I showed him a picture of Jabba on my phone and he got to work making what you see below. I don’t think he had ever seen Jabba before, so he turned out a bit more aquatic looking than usual, but I think it’s pretty impressive. It took less than 5 minutes to make. He also made my son an “Angry Bird” and gave us a beautiful rainbow-colored dinosaur. He said he had been making Amezaiku for 40 years. It’s a bit of a dying art even in Japan, but there are some young people getting trained how to do it.
Dan Lacey (the self-proclaimed “Painter of Pancakes”) is an artist who has made a name for himself painting portraits of famous people with pancakes on their heads. It all started a few years ago with a series of photos of a rabbit named Oolong balancing various objects on its head. The rabbit’s Japanese owner posted them online and they were eventually discovered by the English-speaking online community, who latched onto them, turning them into a sort of meme, like this:
Something about this resonated with Dan, who decided to paint pancakes on the heads of all kinds of people, from President Obama to the “Dramatic Chipmunk.” You can see a lot of them on his site (although fair warning: he also does a lot of male nudes that you can also see if you look around his site).
I asked Dan if I could commission a pancake picture of Jabba the Hutt from him, and he kindly agreed to do an 8×10 painting for me. I had originally envisioned Jabba with a pancake on his head, but I think having him eating the pancake (in the kitchen, as you can see from the background) is even better. I’m really happy with how this turned out — especially the maple syrup dribbling down his chin. 😉 Dan is fantastic at capturing likenesses, and that obviously holds true with Jabba as well. I also love the colors he chose.
Jabba the Hutt Carving in Lemon Quartz
I recently got this tiny carving from Thailand. It’s made of lemon quartz, a semi-precious stone that is sometimes used for jewelry. I like the way they sculpted Jabba — he’s smiling good-naturedly — even if his tail is facing the opposite direction of what I’m used to. It’s about an inch and a half long. It’s surprisingly difficult to take pictures of a translucent carved item like this. It’s hard to see the details, and the ambient light can make a big difference in how the item looks, but I think you get the idea.
I don’t know if they made more than one of these or not. You wouldn’t think the potential audience for something like this would be all that big, but maybe they have a huge barrel of these sitting somewhere in Bangkok. I don’t know. But in any case, I decided that I couldn’t pass up a unique item like this.
“Bacco the Hutt” Painting by Stefano Gentile
I bought this painting from Italian artist Stefano Gentile’s Etsy shop (SteGentileNerdArt), where he has a fair number of Star Wars-themed paintings in the style of various artists. Some are better than others, but overall I think they’re quite creative. I think my other favorite is Chewbacca as the Mona Lisa… This particular piece is a satire of a 16th century painting titled “Bacchus” by the artist Caravaggio, which you can see below. (It’s called “Bacco” in Italian — hence the title “Bacco the Hutt.”) It’s quite large, at about two feet wide. I like the little details, like the various creatures on his plate, or the little froggy snack in the bowl.
As a painting, I think it’s very well done. I’ve been wanting a classically painted Jabba for quite some time, and I think the combination of the subject matter with the way it’s painted is enough to make it both funny and visually interesting. I don’t think it’s very successful as a parody, though, for a couple of reasons. First, only some of the elements of the original painting are present in this version (the plate of food, the draped cloth, and maybe the hooka pipe, which was a bottle of wine in the original). Second, I don’t think the original painting is well known enough (at least in the US) for people to make the connection (unlike, say, the Mona Lisa).
It’s fairly clear that the artist used this photo of the Sideshow Jabba figure as the inspiration for his pose, but unlike cases where people have lazily used the actual photo to make a collectible, it’s just an inspiration and not a direct copy, so I’m okay with it. In fact, something about the facial expression here gives Jabba a contemplative, almost noble look that I really like. I plan to get an ornate gold frame for this. 🙂
UPDATE: Here it is framed. I thought the frame I picked out was a lighter gold color, but it turned out more of a bronze color. Still, it looks pretty good.
It doesn’t happen as often these days, but there are still vintage items out there that I’ve never seen. This one is by HC Ford, the British company that also put out the Gamorrean Guard eraser and Gamorrean Guard and Bib Fortuna pencil toppers that I posted about earlier. It’s roughly 8 x 6 inches in size (I believe it’s probably what the British would refer to as A5 size) and is entirely blank inside, as one might expect a sketch pad to be. As you can see, three of the four images on the front are Jabba-related.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 
