When I was a kid, we would all give Valentines to every kid in our class at school. I guess it’s better than having some kids get a lot and others get nothing, but it is kind of an empty gesture if you think about it. Still, it was kind of fun, and school Valentines do make for some cool little collectibles.
These cards are from a set of Return of the Jedi-themed Valentines from 1983 that were intended to be given out to your classmates, teachers, and principal. You’ve gotta love the Jabba one (especially compared to the Stand-Up Valentine from 1997). I do imagine that the Rebo Band card below got some strange looks from principals, who probably weren’t as up-to-date about Star Wars characters as their students were.
Here are the full sheets. Click for a larger view. I got these loose, but I think you got 6 of the sheet on the left and one of the sheet on the right, for a total of 28 cards in a box. I’d kind of like to frame the Jabba one, but I’m reluctant to tear it from the full sheet. And you can’t really frame the full sheets very well because the cards have different orientations. Hmm…
I posted about the Hawthorne Village Jabba’s Palace a while ago. I suggest you read that post for the full story, but in short, these statues are part of the Galactic Village Collection, which only sells its statues on a subscription basis. This is a pain if you want just one or two items. While you can send back ones that you don’t want, I’m sure you have to pay shipping and it’s a hassle. Plus you never know which item you’ll be getting at a particular time, so it could be months before you get the one you want. I decided to forgo all of that and just wait for them to come up on eBay, since I only wanted one or two of them. It took a while to get the Palace and even longer to get the Sail Barge (since it’s a newer item and few people have received it), but I think I’m done with Hawthorne Village now.
The barge is fairly large. At around 10″ long, it’s one of the largest sail barge collectibles out there, smaller only than the LEGO barge and the papercraft one. But of course there are relatively few barge collectibles in existence. They never made a barge playset for the action figures (although I have my fingers crossed that Hasbro may finally do so in the near future), so all that’s left are relatively small ones like Hasbro’s Titanium Sail Barge model or the Deagostini Sail Barge model.
All of the Galactic Village models light up in some way, but they’re kind of disappointing. The palace’s lighting was underwhelming, and this one is just pathetic. It’s just one light on the deck of the barge. They should have had the light come out from the shuttered windows along the side of the ship. As it is, it seems like an afterthought.
The palace model came with Jabba, and the barge comes with Slave Leia. She looks pretty terrible in the picture here, but keep in mind that she’s only about an inch long, so in person she looks okay. They seem to have taken the pose directly from the Gentle Giant Slave Leia statue (which I don’t have yet). She’s more or less in scale with the Jabba that came with the palace, as you can see below. Click for a larger view.
The barge isn’t bad, but considering how difficult it is to get, I don’t think I would recommend it except to a big Jabba fan. It’s really more of a statue than a model. It looks okay from a distance, but doesn’t have quite the level of detail I’d like.
The original concept art by Christopher Lauria (found here on Deviantart) is below.
212th Crumb Bomber Embroidered Patch
There is a surprising number of Star Wars patches out there, and like this one, many if not most of them are actually fan-made (or fan-commissioned at least). Indeed, patch collecting is a full-fledged sub-category of Star Wars collecting. Aside from this one, I only have a couple: the Jabba the Hutt Boy Scout Jamboree patch, and the “69th Imperial Dewback Cavalry” patch, which features Oola. In a way, they’re kind of a strange collectible since I’m positive that the great majority of them are never actually used as patches. But the embroidery makes them little pieces of artwork, so I guess it’s kind of like how collector plates are no longer actually used as plates. If you’re interested, I found the panel about patch collecting at Celebration V to be pretty informative. You can watch it on Youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
Anyway, this one appears to have been made by some fans in Sweden (or at least that’s where I got mine from). It features the art from the “Crumb Bomber” which is a gunship from the prequels with a picture of a kowakian monkey-lizard on the side, similar to the art that was on WWII bombers. At the top is the message “laugh this off” in Aurebesh.
Java the Hutt Sticker
If you’ve seen the movie Fanboys, you may remember that a coffee shop called “Java the Hutt” made an appearance. I don’t know if they came up with that on their own, or if it was an intentional homage, but it’s very similar to “Javva the Hutt” (see t-shirt here), which is Lucasfilm’s in-house coffee shop. This sticker from Redbubble is of the shop’s logo, and you can also get it on a t-shirt. I’ll have to say, I prefer the “Javva the Hutt” logo to this one, but it’s not bad.
Profiles in History “Hollywood Auction 43” Catalog (with Original Jabba Maquette and Rancor Head)
Profiles in History is an auction house that often deals in very high-end items like screen-used props and costumes, some valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a catalog for one of their auctions that was held on December 17th and 18th of 2010. It’s fascinating to leaf through something like this. It’s nearly 400 pages long, and chock-full of stuff from popular (and some not-so-popular) films, including the Star Wars, Alien, and Terminator franchises.
It might be a bit of a stretch to call this a Jabba the Hutt collectible, but I’m including here because it contains a couple of very interesting items from the collection of Phil Tippet. The first is the original maquette that Tippet created to show George Lucas to get his approval on the Jabba design. (This is apparently a casting of the original sculpture, but the original and the mold have both been destroyed, making this the only surviving version of the piece.)
It kind of reminds me of the kind of sculpture you might find in an ancient tomb. It’s pretty close to the final Jabba design, if not quite as fat. They estimated the sale price at between $30,000 to $50,000, although according to the online page for the item, it didn’t sell. I can’t say that I’m too surprised, since that’s a lot of money and I think a lot of collectors would prefer screen-used items to concept pieces like this. Still, it’s a great piece and I would love to have a collectible version of it if it were affordable.
Here’s a short video I found showing the maquette in more detail (skip to about 50 seconds in):
Another item from Tippet’s collection is the head of the Rancor monster. It seems to have deteriorated a bit over the years, which can be a problem with latex and foam rubber. This one apparently sold for $15,000. A fair chunk of change.
They also have a “rancor puppet animation handle” which was apparently used in the stop-motion animation of the rancor, but I never would have known if they hadn’t said so. I’m not too surprised that it didn’t sell, even at a somewhat lower price than the other two. After all, it just appears to be a piece of machined metal. The little chain that hung from the rancor’s manacle is actually more interesting to me.
While I can’t really afford much in this catalog, it is fun to think about what I’d buy if I had unlimited funds.
Carded “Revenge of the Jedi” Salacious Crumb from Hasbro’s SDCC-Exclusive Death Star Set
One of Hasbro’s exclusives for San Diego Comic Con 2011 was a giant set of 14 action figures in a large round package shaped like the Death Star (see below). All of the cards in the set use “Revenge of the Jedi,” which was the original title of Return of the Jedi before it was changed at the last minute. (The idea was that Jedi wouldn’t stoop to getting revenge, and I think that was probably a good change to make.)
Salacious Crumb has never been released on a card. He’s always been part of a larger product, such as a Jabba playset (like the vintage Jabba Playset or the recent Vintage Collection set), or been paired with another figure, like Oola, C-3PO or Amanaman. (This particular version of Crumb is essentially the same as the one that came with C-3PO and the Vintage Collection set.) It’s hard to tell from pictures, but this is a teeny tiny little card. It’s about 5 x 4 in size.
While 12 of the 14 figures will be released later on the “Revenge of the Jedi” cardbacks, there are two figures that can only be found in carded form in this set. One is Salacious Crumb and the other is a Mouse Droid. But even though you can only get them in this set, Hasbro decided to give them a number, making them an official part of the Vintage Collection lineup (Salacious Crumb is VC66). This move has upset some hardcore collectors because they feel that their carded figure collections won’t be complete without getting these two hard-to-find figures.
I can understand their frustration, since I had trouble getting one myself. They sold out easily at SDCC, and while they were briefly available from hasbrotoyshop.com, those also sold out very quickly. Since Slave Leia was the only other Jabba-related figure in the set, and she will be seeing a release later on, I decided to just buy Salacious by himself on ebay. He wasn’t cheap, and I got mine before the prices really took off. Still, I’m glad to have him my collection. I have a soft spot for Crumb and I can’t help but smile when I look at this tiny card.
This puzzle is from the UK and features a photo of Jedi Luke just after he steals a blaster from one of Jabba’s guards. I’m pretty sure this is just a reenactment of the scene rather than a shot taken directly from the film. The puzzle came with a “super print” — an 11 x 17 poster of the same photo that is on the puzzle. I think it’s the same size as the puzzle would be if you put it together, which is actually kind of a nice extra. Most of these that you find today are missing the print.
I mentioned in my recent post on the “There Will Be No Bargain” diorama from Sideshow Collectibles that the Gamorrean Guard’s hands look strange, and you can get a good look at that here. They were huge oversize mitts that the actors had to wear, and I guess it was difficult to get them into natural looking positions.
Interestingly, this shot was used as the inspiration for the painting used on the front of the vintage Return of the Jedi lunchbox, and they even copied the position of the fingers on the hand. Check it out.
I posted about the American version of this set a couple of years ago. This is the European multi-language version, featuring no less than six languages (UK English, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, and German). I’ve decided to try and track down different language versions of all of the Jabba figures. There’s actually not as many as you might think, since in many cases they just used the English version (perhaps with a sticker in the local language pasted on it).
“Jabba el Hutt” and “Jabba le Hutt” have something of a different ring to them, don’t they? Apparently “Jabba el Hutt” is used in Spanish and “Jabba le Hutt” is used in French, while “Jabba the Hutt” is used in all of the other languages shown. I wonder why they don’t translate the “the” part in those languages as well.
It might be interesting to come up with a list showing Jabba’s name in as many languages as possible. Of course most of them will just use “Jabba” and “Hutt” as they are, since they aren’t real words. The only other one I know of off-hand is Japanese: Jaba za Hatto (ジャバ・ザ・ハット). That’s just a phonetic conversion of the English words into Japanese sounds. Does anyone else know of others? I’d be interested if anyone knows of some others. What about Chinese? As a translator I’m always interested to see how they translate things into different languages.
If you’ll look at the American version of this set, you can see that this one is dominated by text by comparison. The front isn’t too bad, but the back has line after line of text. Not too surprising when you have to fit six languages on there, but still. The “spitting” feature kind of ruins this figure, so it’s not my favorite, but I’ve got a bit of a connection with this set since I own some of the original design documents for it.
I already have a coaster with this design on it, so I passed on the T-shirts that I’ve seen from the same company. But when I saw these socks, I couldn’t resist. Jabba-themed footwear is not all that common, although I do have some vintage tube socks with Jabba on them, and of course one mustn’t forget the Adidas Jabba shoes.
There have been rumbles about this for a long time, but Sideshow finally previewed its life-sized Han in Carbonite figure at SDCC a few days ago. Below are some shots taken from Rebelscum’s coverage of SDCC. Click for a larger view.
I was holding off posting about this because I wanted to get some concrete price info, but it looks like the price hasn’t been entirely decided yet. However, a Sideshow employee did mention the figure $7,500 to someone on the Rebelscum forums. That price seems incredibly high, but I’m afraid it’s probably more or less accurate. You can get fan-made versions of Han in Carbonite for a fraction of this price, and even the Illusive Concepts version can be had for less than this on the secondary market.
Before you ask, no I do not intend to buy this one. It’s much too expensive and I have no place to display it. And while it could fit into my Jabba focus, it’s not a perfect fit. I generally collect Han in Carbonite stuff when it is part of a larger line of figures or statues, not as standalone pieces (although I do sometimes make exceptions, like for the Han in Carbonite throw blanket, which is awesome). I have also sworn off big expensive pieces like this since a disappointing experience with Sideshow’s life size C-3PO figure (which I subsequently sold). But still, it’s interesting to hear about things like this.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 