Mighty Jabba's Collection

This is a game that you play with a “slinger” (a mechanized yoyo with a magnet on the bottom) and a number of metal medallions with various Star Wars characters on them. The object is to use the slinger to defeat the other players’ medallions before losing all of your lives. I don’t really have the patience to learn all of the rules, since it’s not as if I’m really going to be playing this, but the basic idea is that two or more players duel it out, with the medallions that you pick up determining how well you do.

I got these from a friend in Australia, and at the moment they appear to be only sold in Australia and New Zealand, although they will apparently be coming out in the UK as well. So far, I haven’t heard anything about them being sold in the US, despite the American accents you can hear in this commercial:

There are six kinds of slingers (each corresponding to the prequel versions of Darth Vader, Obi-wan Kenobi, Anakin, Clone Trooper, General Grievous, and Yoda). Each one has a couple of dials that are used to keep track of the player’s life and score, and supposedly they have different “Power” and “Stamina” ratings as well, although I don’t really understand what that means.

A PDF of the instructions is below if you want to know more about the rules. Apparently there is a “battle mat” as well, although I guess it can be played without it.

The “Starter Pack” comes with one slinger and three medallions. The “Medallion Power Pack” comes with 10 medallions (3 of which you can see in the package). Apparently there is also a “Booster Pack” of 5 medallions as well. The medallions seem to be randomly packed, and like POGS and collectible card games, a big part of the game is assembling your “deck” by buying medallions and trading friends for the particular ones you want. Since each player apparently needs a minimum of 20 medallions to play, you can see how this could get a little expensive. Here’s a list of all 65 medallions from the back of the Power Pack’s packaging.

My friend who got these for me was able to select packs with some Jabba-related characters showing, and I got a Gamorrean Guard in the Power Pack as well, so all I’m missing from Jabba’s palace is the Rancor. I think the game itself looks kind of silly, but the medallions are actually pretty nice. I imagine they’re made out of steel, since they obviously have to be magnetic. While they’re fairly thin, they have a bit of weight to them and don’t feel flimsy at all. They’re 2 inches in diameter. It looks like the character photos are actually painted on the metal — it’s not just a sticker or anything.

This is a pipe made out of clay in the shape of Jabba the Hutt. Someone on the Rebelscum forums found it at a swap meet and agreed to sell it to me, but beyond that I know very little about it. It’s obviously a handmade piece that is partially based on the “Jabba Glob” figure put out in the late 1990s. The name “Wyatt” has been carved on the bottom, so that’s presumably who made it. If anyone has any information about it, I’d love to know more. In particular, I wonder if this was a one-off piece or if a number of them were made.

The details of the face sculpt follow the Jabba Glob figure so closely that I think it must have been cast from the figure, rather than just inspired by it. If you look at the rest of the figure, the tail and arms are really quite basic in comparison, so it seems unlikely that the person who made this could have pulled off such a perfect copy by themselves.

Jabba has a metal bowl in his head where the tobacco (or whatever) would go, and there’s a hole at the end of his tail where you would actually smoke. I have no idea if it works and have no intention of trying it, but there does seem to be a passage through the tail to the bowl, so it should work in theory.

Longtime readers of the site will know that this is actually my second Jabba-shaped pipe (no Jabba collection worth its salt would stop at just one…) The first was my Jabba the Hutt water pipe. As you can see, it’s much bigger and heavier than this one, and not nearly as practical. I wonder how many other Jabba pipes of various types there are out there. Has anyone seen other ones?

This is another strange one. I got this from a Chinese eBay seller that apparently specializes in making collectible “gold coins” with pictures of Hollywood and sports stars on them. They have a number of Star Wars ones, although their character selection is a little strange, with some very obscure characters (e.g. the IT-O Interrogator droid, aka “Dr. Ball“) making an appearance, but no Jabba or other related characters. The closest they have is the sail barge, but maybe they just haven’t gotten around to making a coin for him.

The auction lists the materials as “alloy with a little silver, 24 karat gold-plated on the surface. Other color planes, Paint and color pigment.” So maybe there’s a microscopic amount of precious metal in there, but not much. It looks pretty nice, though. Shiny and gold, and with a nice heft to it. It looks like they basically just printed off the image on a glossy sticker of some kind and stuck it to the coin, but for $0.99 it’s not that bad.

The reverse reads “Hollywood Superstar.” I’m glad to see that I’m not the only who thinks that Jabba’s sail barge was the true star of the Return of the Jedi. 😀

This is a bit of an unusual item. It’s just a huge button (reminiscent of the Staples “Easy button”) that you press to hear various Star Wars creatures laughing. The laughs seem to play in more or less random order, one for each button press. But Chewbacca is always the first one that plays if you press the button after it’s been idle for a while. I’m not entirely sure of all of the characters used, but I know it includes Chewbacca (and of course this is where the name of the product comes from), Salacious Crumb, Jabba, and R2-D2. I’ve included a video below showing what I believe to be all of the laughs. Can you identify the others? It sounds like there could be two Salacious Crumbs, or maybe it’s just a very similar laugh. The sound quality is actually quite good.