Mighty Jabba's Collection

I believe I saw one of these in assembled and painted form at a hobby shop in Tokyo a couple of years ago, but I don’t have a clear memory of it. All I recall is that it was made of soft vinyl (known as “sofubi” in Japan) and that it was more expensive than I wanted to spend. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind, though, and have occasionally tried to find more information about it, but with little success. However, recently I was able to find a listing for it at on online model store in the US, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they actually had one in stock.

I don’t know exactly when this was made, but it was certainly a number of years ago — possibly even around the time the original films came out. The label reads “ランカーモンスター” (Rancor Monster) on the front, and “made in KOREA” on the back (along with the characters for “outer space”). However, I have my doubts that it was actually made in Korea. I was able to find something written by a Japanese hobbyist about this kit, and he said that he thought the maker of the kit (Ozu Shop, which is a Japanese model shop) was probably trying to make the kit seem more like kits available at the time from Billiken Shokai, and just put the “made in KOREA” disclaimer on it to make it seem more authentic. It does seem odd that a small Japanese model shop would go to the trouble of contracting with a foreign factory to make something like this, but I don’t know for sure.

As I said earlier, the kit is made of soft vinyl. And when I say soft, I mean soft. All of the parts are quite rubbery and easy to bend or squish. The AMT/ERTL rancor model kit that I posted about a while back is also made of vinyl, but a much harder type that holds details much better — as good or better as any resin kit. This one feels like a cheap vinyl toy, and the level of detail is really quite low. As you can see above, it comes in 8 pieces that need to be trimmed and adjusted a bit in order to assemble the kit.

There’s no mention of a manufacturer on the package, but when you open it up you can see the instruction page, which mentions that it’s from Ozu Shop. Since it’s an unlicensed kit, there are no copyright dates, which are often helpful in dating things, but there are also no web or email addresses in the contact info, which leads me to believe that it’s rather old. The illustrations are rather crude and rushed looking, but I did like the little manga comic they included, which I have translated below. (“Kun” is the suffix traditionally added to boys’ names in Japan, so you might translate the title as something like “Star Wars Guy.”)

Here is the kit assembled. It measures about 6″ from his feet to the top of his back, but the large arms make the model seem quite a bit bigger than you might expect. I plan to just leave him unpainted, for a couple of reasons. I already have several painted rancor monsters, and the detail on this is low enough that I’m not sure it would look that great when painted. Plus, you apparently need special paint for soft vinyl, and I don’t plan to get any. And in the end, I think leaving it unpainted is more interesting. As I already have most, if not all, of the commercially available toys, statues and figures, I’m enjoying finding obscure things like this.

No, this isn’t an April Fool’s post. It’s true that strictly speaking this isn’t a Jabba-related item, but anyone who wants to put together a full display of Attakus Jabba’s palace statues will want to include C-3PO to act as Jabba’s interpreter. My first impression on opening this up was that it looked better than I expected. From pictures, I knew that it didn’t have a metallic finish (which C-3PO really should have). But it’s not the matte gold finish that I thought it was — he’s got a shiny coating over the gold. It is hard to see in pictures, but it does make it look somewhat better than I expected. It still looks more like shiny polished fiberglass than metal, but it’s not bad. He’s also slightly weathered, although it’s not really very effective or realistic.

The face looks a bit off — a bit stylized or cartoony — but that’s something you can say about Attakus’s human figures as well.

The sculpt is mainly pretty accurate, but I did notice that he’s missing the three pointy rods that he should have on the back of each of his hands. Maybe they thought they would be too small or delicate.

The biggest flaw with this statue (aside from the lack of a true metallic finish) is his pose. He’s kind of bending backwards in an awkward way, in what appears to be surprise. It’s true that there are only so many poses you can use for C-3PO, so I guess I have to give them some credit for trying something less traditional, but it doesn’t quite work for me.

As I have mentioned before, I don’t have room to display all of my Attakus statues together (the main problem being that the Jabba statue is much too big to fit on most shelves — particularly when you add his throne railing and hooka). So for the moment I have added him to my mantle in front of my life-size Jabba bust. (From left to right, you can also see the Gamorrean Guard, Han in Carbonite, Bib Fortuna and Oola statues.) I’d still like to get the Attakus R2-D2 and Boba Fett.

I posted about my Knight Models Jabba the Hutt kit a while back. I like it pretty well even though it’s much more expensive than it really seems like it should be. The same can be said of the Knight Models Gamorrean Guard kit, which has a suggested retail price of €42.33 — or close to $60. I found a reasonably good deal on this, however, so I decided to get one. Like the Jabba kit, it comes in a nice metal case which does make it seem a bit more like a premium product.

When you open it up, though, you’ll see that the Gamorrean is only partially made of metal. His body and stand are made of gray resin, while his head, two arms, and axe are made of metal. I said this about Jabba as well, but when you’re paying this much for a kit, it just seems chintzy to only do part of it in metal. I don’t know if cost reduction was the only reason for this or if there’s some technical advantage to using resin, but I can’t say that I like it.

Here it is assembled. Needless to say, it was MUCH easier to assemble than Jabba. I’m a little unsure about the pose they chose, with him looking down, but it’s well sculpted. Like the Jabba kit, this is a 70mm scale model, so it’s slightly more than 3″ tall. Since both kits are the same scale, they should fit in well together, but the Gamorrean does seem a bit too big next to Jabba and Leia. I think the problem is that Leia is actually a bit smaller than she should be. Still, it’s not a fatal flaw and I’ll be displaying them together.

This is how Knight Models has painted the kit. I’ll post again when I’ve painted mine.