“Fine Art Movie Playset” Aims to Recreate an Obscure Italian Vintage Jabba the Hutt Store Display
I was recently contacted by the people behind “Fine Art Movie Playset.” They are a group of people trying to produce playsets inspired by vintage products, or in this case, store displays. One of their first products is to be a recreation of a very cool cardboard store display that was used in very limited numbers in Italian stores.
I first wrote about this display back in 2012 (here is the relevant page on the SWCA). The best photo I have of the display is below, from an auction where one was sold for some obscene amount like $20,000. So clearly this is out of the reach of the vast majority of collectors, and of course they are very limited in quantity as well.
The original display at auction
So I suppose that makes it a good choice for a recreation like this. To be clear, this is not a “reproduction” in the generally accepted sense. Rather than just trying to replicate a vintage item as closely as possible using scans and photos, they have hired an artist to paint something that is inspired by the original display, but it will not be a copy in any way. Hopefully they will also clearly mark it as a modern item just to avoid any possible confusion, but the prototype photos seem different enough to make it unlikely for someone to be able to pass this off as an original, even in online photos.
The main issue with this whole endeavor is the price. They are asking nearly $500 (including shipping from Europe) for their version of the display, and say that they have to get 150 orders for it to even go into production. I could be wrong, but I have real doubts that there are 150 people wanting to buy a product like this at any price, much less at nearly $500. I mean, I’m probably the craziest Jabba fan in the world, but I’m afraid it’s just too much for me. I would probably be interested at a significantly lower price, but it sounds like production and shipping costs make that difficult.
That said, I thought this might be of interest to some of my readers, so if you want to know more, feel free to check out their Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as their Etsy account where you can currently place a preorder for the product.
Now available: Han Solo in Carbonite Wall Plaques by Regal Robot
The folks over at Regal Robot contacted me to let me know about some new products that are going to be available starting today. Of most interest to me are probably the Han in Carbonite wall plaques. They have two different sizes: a large one (pictured above) that is 17.5″ tall, and a mini version that is 6.5″ tall. Judging from the photos, they seem quite well painted and sculpted.
My only real reservation is that these are not full reproductions of the carbonite slab, or even just the front of the slab. You’re just getting a square with Han’s upper body. On the one hand, it allows the most important details to be lot bigger than they otherwise would for these prices ($199 for the large version or $44.99 for the mini). I think this might work best for someone who wants a little Star Wars-inspired decor and doesn’t necessarily care about having a replica of the entire thing.
To go along with these, they also have a carbon freezing chamber-inspired cafe table ($299).
If you’re interested in any these, they’re going to be offering free shipping on them for the time being, so now would be a good time to order. I understand that they may also be adding some items with even more of a connection to Jabba at some point in the future, so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for that.
This set is an Entertainment Earth exclusive for SDCC2018, but they took preorders for it for mail order customers (which is how I got mine), and it’s currently in stock on the Entertainment Earth site for $45.
The backpack and the pouch both feature some colorful artwork of Jabba’s palace, in a style that reminds me of certain children’s books where lots of things are going on at once, and you can spend a lot of time looking at the little details. I don’t know who the artist is, but I like the artwork quite a bit. I think it’s actually quite attractive on the backpack, but I can’t say that I would use something like this as my day-to-day backpack. The pouch could see some use, though.
Both the pouch and the backpack have a gray and white striped lining, although I sort of expected it to be a Star Wars design. Either way, it’s very nice to see a company coming out with a Jabba-centric design like this. Loungefly has been coming out with some killer products recently, including the Jabba coin purse that I posted about a while back.
Star Wars Xcavations Creature Crates Hutt Skull by Uncle Milton
As some of you may know, I became very interested in 3D printing a while ago, and doing some printer reviews on my YouTube channel has allowed me to build up a fairly large stable of printers for my projects (such as a life-size Jabba statue!) One of these projects was printing some Star Wars-themed skulls from 3DKitbash, who started a Kickstarter to sell the printable STL files. I made a few videos about those, but after a while I started getting messages from people who said you could no longer buy the files. After a little investigating, it turned out that 3DKitbash had partnered with Uncle Milton to create a series of blind box toys based on their 3D designs, so they had to stop selling the original files. That’s a shame, since they were a lot of fun to print (I even printed a gigantic version of their rancor skull as part of my review of the Creality CR-10S5 large-format printer. But I have been very interested to see how these toys turned out, so when I heard that they were showing up at Walmart stores, I went on the hunt.
It turned out that they were searchable via the Walmart website, and the closest store in my town listed them as being in stock, so I went there. It took a LONG time to find them, since they weren’t in the places I thought most likely (anywhere near the Star Wars section or the collectible/card section near the front of the store). At my store, they were at the outskirts of the toy aisle next to other random blind boxes. They come in plastic crates that are actually pretty sturdy and well designed. Inside is a sheet talking about fossils and comparing the Star Wars skulls to actual skulls from Earth (remember that these are ostensibly educational toys). There are also some assembly instructions, since each of these skulls seems to come in 3 pieces. The skull parts themselves are packed in a kind of kinetic sand, and while it is a bit of a pain to get the sand out of the nooks and crannies in the sculpt, it is much better than fossil toys that make you chip away at a block of plaster.
I found out that there are codes on the bottom of the plastic cases that allow you to know which skull is in which crate, so I picked up the Hutt skull. By the way, all of these designs are based directly on the 3D printable files I mentioned earlier, with the exception of the Hutt — there was no Hutt included in those files, but as one of the Kickstarter backers, I did request one, and they seemed interested. Maybe it wouldn’t even exist if I hadn’t done that — who knows?
As you can see in the first photo at the top of this post, they chose the Hutt skull as the sample one that you can see in the display box, which is kind of cool. But the box only holds 12 crates (including the space for the sample). This means that there is only room for one Hutt that you can actually buy, while there are two of every other character. That will likely mean that the Hutt will be a lot harder to find than the others.
The skulls seem to be around 2 inches wide, and don’t appear to have been painted or weathered at all, but they look pretty good just with bare plastic. Overall, I think these are pretty cool little toys, and the box is marked “Series 1” so presumably there will be more if these sell well. The $5 price tag seems kind of high, although you do get a fair amount of kinetic sand in addition to the skull. I’m hoping that I may get a full box of these to review on my YouTube channel, and am also very interested to see what the full skeletons (Rancor and Tauntaun) will look like!
Now on YouTube: Jabba’s Sail Barge Bonanza
In honor of May the Fourth, I thought I would make a video introducing all of the Sail Barge-related items in my collection. (I focused on things that were just related to the barge, and not products that just happened to have the barge on them.)
Upcoming: Jumbo Kenner Bib Fortuna Figure and Amanaman Mini-Bust Appearing as Gentle Giant’s 2018 PGM Gifts
I’ve talked about Gentle Giant’s PGM program a number of times in the past, but in a nutshell you pay a certain amount for a year’s membership, which then entitles you to a certain number of “free” rewards (depending on the tier you select), as well as access to some exclusives, and some discounts on other products you might purchase during the year. If you’re interested in Gentle Giant’s stuff, it’s usually not a bad deal, since even if you’re not interested in any of the things that they have as rewards, you can pretty usually easily get your money back by selling them on the secondary market, while still enjoying the discounts, coupons and other exclusives available to members. They’ve changed the way the program works a couple of times, but basically you choose Platinum, Gold or Silver membership, and get the rewards mentioned below.
Last year, I wasn’t super into the available choices, but I did end up joining largely to get access to the Bib Fortuna mini-bust. It’s a different story this year, though, since they have not one but two Jabba’s palace characters available as rewards. (There is also a Spacetrooper mini-bust, Cloud City Leia mini-bust, and Darth Maul statue available as choices.) The first is the Jumbo version of the vintage Kenner Bib Fortuna figure, which should go well with the other jumbos they have released up until now. However, it just makes me wonder what happened with the Jumbo Jabba the Hutt figure even more. I checked back through some of my previous posts, and they first mentioned it in 2014, and I said that it was slated for 2015! Obviously that didn’t happen, and Gentle Giant has largely kept silent about it since then. If it’s not canceled, releasing this Bib Fortuna figure seems like a bit of an odd choice, since it would be a perfect companion to a Jumbo Jabba.
The Amanaman bust is an interesting one because Gentle Giant recently did a survey of PGM members to see which character they would like made into a mini-bust. The choices were Amanaman, Ahsoka Tano, Count Dooku, Doctor Aphra and Ponda Baba. It ended up that Ahsoka took the lion’s share of the votes, at 53.95%, with Amanaman coming in a distant second at 17.57%. I was pretty disappointed in that result, since I have no interest in an Ahsoka bust, but would really like an Amanaman to help fill out my display of Jabba’s Palace mini-busts. I don’t know if they had always planned to make the second-place bust, or maybe they thought Amanaman would do better in the survey than he did (it’s interesting that they already have an in-progress digital sculpt of him, but haven’t shown anything of the Ahsoka bust as far as I know). But either way, I’m just happy that we are getting him in bust form after all.
If you’re interested in signing up, you should be able to do so starting today on the Gentle Giant site, although as of this writing I don’t think it is available yet.
I’m 3D Printing a Life-Size Jabba the Hutt
The model I am printing
I realized recently that I’ve never posted about this project in my website, even though it’s been taking up a lot of my time and energy on my YouTube channel for the last few months. Not everyone who reads the site is a subscriber to my channel, and having a blog post can sometimes help attract attention to something in ways that just a YouTube video can’t, so I thought I would talk about it a bit here.
I started incorporating 3D printing into my YouTube channel a little over two years ago, starting with a print of the Jabba from the Disney Infinity video game, and working my way through a number of projects, including recreating vintage unlicensed ceramic figures, making life size versions of vintage Kenner action figure weapons like Han’s blaster, a stormtrooper blaster, or Luke saber, and trying to make my own version of the Jabba cookie originally released by Pepperidge Farm in 1983. There’s now quite a playlist of 3D printing-related videos if you’re interested.
Creality CR-10 S4 3D printer
I have also been reviewing 3D printers on my channel for a while, and that has allowed me to build up an arsenal of large printers, such as the Creality CR-10 S4 and S5 that I am using for this project. This got me thinking about what I could use them for, and eventually I hit upon the idea of making a series of videos about printing a life-size Jabba the Hutt. The first step was to find a decent 3D model of Jabba, since the ones commonly available for download weren’t very good, and were definitely not suitable for printing at life size. So I ended up reaching out to Josh Smith at Beast Toys. Josh does 3D modeling on commission and was able to create a very respectable Jabba model, with some input from me. I did a test print at roughly 1/6 scale, which you can see below, and I think it turned out quite well.
My new banana. 3D printed Jabba for scale
However, printing this at life size would be a different matter. I would of course need to split up the model into many pieces, and it seemed to me that the best idea would be to hollow it out and just print a shell that I would glue together. I figured this would dramatically decrease the time and filament required, although it would still be a huge undertaking. I ended up with around 70 sections, most of which were fairly large and would each take 15-24 hours to print.
The model cut up into printable sections.
Here’s one section getting printed on the Creality CR-10 S4.
Printing part of Jabba’s face
After printing the first few sections and gluing them together I was left with the front half of Jabba’s head, which looked surprisingly good and made me pretty optimistic that the approach I was using was going to work. I had scaled the model based on my life size bust of Jabba the Hutt, which was taken from an unused latex face mold from Return of the Jedi. (The Gamorrean Guard head I’m wearing is a life-size bust that I printed. It’s not really a mask since there are no eye holes.)
Just chillin’ with my homie Jabba
However, I did notice after making some more progress that the proportions of the 3D model were off — the head and arms were a bit too big relative to the rest of the body. So that means that while the head/arms/torso of my version will be life size, the tail is going to be shorter than it should be. I should have noticed this during the design phase, but I was too focused on getting the details of the face right. But even with a stubby tail, he’s going to be roughly 6′ tall by 10′ long, and even as a hollow shell, it would take hundreds of dollars worth of filament. It occurred to me that a filament maker might be interested in sponsoring this project, so I got in touch with MakerGeeks, which is a US-based filament company whose filament I use pretty frequently. They were quite interested and agreed to send along some filament for me to start printing the rest of Jabba. They even gave my viewers/readers a coupon code “JABBA” that can be used to get 15% off.
With the second layer done.
As you can see below, I now I have much of the statue finished, although the bottom layer will undoubtedly take the longest to print. For the most part, things have gone well. I encourage you to check out the Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 videos if you’re interested in the details. I do plan on painting and finishing this later, but that will probably take a while. I will be releasing the 3D model for free once I have finished the printing part of the project, so if you want a good Jabba model to print at any size from action figure to life size, this will be a good option.
My 3D-printed Jabba the Hutt statue in progress. He’s roughly 3/4 finished.
Upcoming: Sarlacc Themed Table by Regal Robot
The name Tom Spina should be familiar to many collectors of Star Wars statues and props, as his studio Tom Spina Designs not only did things like creating the prototype for Sideshow Collectibles’ Figrin D’an life size bust, but also made the Han in Carbonite coffee table that got quite a bit of attention online a few years ago. They also made a stand for the purpose of displaying the latex Jabba the Hutt face casting that my life size Jabba the Hutt plaque was based on. And they’ve done a lot more than that, as a stroll through their portfolio will show you.
Tom recently got in touch with me to tell me that his second studio, Regal Robot, is working on a new project — a Sarlacc-themed table. Right now it’s just a concept and they are waiting on someone to commission one before they build it. I don’t know how much that would cost, but since the Han in Carbonite table apparently goes for $7,499, I doubt it will be cheap. But if you’re looking for something to fill that Sarlacc-table-shaped hole in your life, this is your lucky day! The interesting thing to me about all of this is that they are officially licensed by Lucasfilm to make these things, so someone who commissions one of these will have one of a VERY small number of officially licensed products. And if you have an idea for something else, they even make completely custom creations for people.
You can contact Tom through his website, or on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
I was surprised when this popped up on eBay the other day. I have a number of inflatable Jabba figures at this point. The first was the Morbid Industries Jabba, which is the largest and was widely billed as being “life size,” although that is debatable. All of the other ones are from Gemmy and are variations on the same design you see above. There’s the larger Canadian-exclusive Jabba figure holding a Jack o’lantern, and also a much smaller version not holding anything, which was sold at Walmart stores in the US.
This prototype is sort of a combination of those two figures. It’s the smaller size of the Walmart version (maybe 3″ tall by 5″ wide), but has him holding something like the Canadian version. But of course in this case he’s holding a Christmas present instead of a Jack o’lantern. I don’t have any information about how this was used or how it ended up for sale. The seller had quite a number of prototype Gemmy figures for sale (although this was the only Jabba), and said they just bought them as a lot on pallets. Either way, I was really happy to get this for a very reasonable price.
If you look closely, you’ll see that all of the details on the face, arm (tattoo) and Christmas present are hand-painted, although with the exception of the tattoo they match up very closely with the details on the retail versions.
As far as I know, this version never went into production. In fact, all of the other inflatable figures I have were marketed as Halloween decorations, rather than for Christmas, which I find interesting. They have made a number of Christmas decorations of other Star Wars characters, but maybe they thought Jabba wasn’t quite festive enough. Personally, I think adding a Santa hat to Jabba would have been a good idea.
A little Googling shows that there are actually some people who collect Gemmy prototypes, so I guess it’s not too unusual for them to sold in this way. If anyone knows anything about how these were used in the production process, I’d be interested to know.
I posted about the New Zealand Mint back in 2015. Back then, I was talking about their gold- and silver-plated coins with Jabba on them. Since they incorporate some kind of color printing or decal into the coin, they don’t quite look like proper coins, but they weren’t super expensive either, although I did have to wait a while to find an acceptable deal on the gold version.
It seems they are stepping up their game a bit, since they have now released 3 high-end coins in silver and gold, all implausibly featuring Jabba the Hutt. The first is the 1oz silver coin pictured below. They all come in a nice looking presentation box, and are proper engraved coins, unlike the previous releases.
This retails for $85 on the company’s website and is limited to 10,000 pieces. (As of this writing, silver costs about $17.50 per oz).
Next we have a 1/4 oz gold coin. It also comes with a nice wood (?) display case. It retails for $600 on the website and is limited to 1,000 pieces.
Gold is currently at roughly $1,300 per oz, so that’s $325 worth of gold and $275 worth of Jabba, I guess.
Finally, there is a 1oz gold coin that retails for $2,500 (!) on the website and is limited to 500 pieces. So you’re paying a $1,200 premium over and above the cost of the gold.
This one uses the same design as the silver coin, showing more of Jabba’s body. It’s not clear just looking at the pictures what the difference between the 1/4 and 1 oz coins is. In fact, the 1 oz version below looks like it might be smaller than the 1/4 oz version above. But looking at the technical specs shows that the 1/4 oz one is 22mm in diameter, while the 1 oz one is 32mm. Maybe the 1 oz is also thicker?
In any case, it’s not often that I introduce items here that I have no intention of buying, but barring a donation from a generous and wealthy fan, there is no way I’m getting the gold versions of these coins. I might consider the silver version, but even then I would have to find a good deal.
I really do wonder if there are 500 people in the world willing to pay $2,500 for a coin like this, but basically I guess it all depends on how much overlap there is between coin collectors and Star Wars fans.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 