Mike Edmonds (“Jabba the Hutt’s Tail”) Autograph
Although he’s probably best known as Logray the Ewok among Star Wars fans, Mike Edmonds was also one of the three men inside the Jabba the Hutt puppet. Edmonds, a little person, was inside Jabba’s tail and was in charge of moving it around. While Mike is one of the signatures on the upcoming Jabba the Hutt Connoisseur Series autograph piece that Wattographs is working on, I also want to get individual autographs of the main performers. I got this one during an OfficialPix.com sale and it ended up being on the same photo that my Toby Philpott autograph is on. It’s probably my favorite shot of Jabba, but I don’t really want to display two of the same shot, so I may need to talk to Toby about getting another signed photo…
News: Jabba Joke on “The Cleveland Show”
I’m a little late posting about this, but in the recent “Cleveland Show” episode “To Live and Die in VA” there is a short cutaway joke that features Kendra as Jabba the Hutt, Rallo as Salacious Crumb, and Roberta as Slave Leia. The joke itself wasn’t really that funny (although I do like how they made the table lamp look like Jabba’s water pipe). But it is interesting to note that Kevin Michael Richardson, who plays Cleveland Jr. on the show (among others) also plays Jabba the Hutt in the animated Clone Wars movie and TV show. And of course, “The Cleveland Show” itself is a spinoff of “Family Guy” which did an extended sequence set in Jabba’s palace for their Return of the Jedi spoof entitled “It’s a Trap!“
I was excited to see this crop up on eBay a while ago, since I had never seen it before. It’s part of a collection of “art badges” (aka buttons or pin badges) put out by the Japanese company Yujin in 2002, and I don’t think they were widely available outside of Japan. There were apparently 75 different button designs altogether, and 15 in this particular series (series 4). I think it’s likely that they were actually sold in vending machines that would randomly give you an item in a plastic “egg” rather than being sold individually, but I’m not sure. It’s quite small at around 1″ in diameter. According to the insert that came with it, there was also a button of Jabba’s tattoo symbol, which I’d like to try and track down.
Star Wars Giga Pets Rancor by Tiger Electronics
I was living in Japan when the original Tamagotchi came out, and it was something of a sensation for a while, even at the high school where I taught English. I’m not ashamed to admit I had a couple myself. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a little keychain with a simple LCD screen that shows a “digital pet.” You have to take care of it by feeding it, cleaning up after it, etc., and it stays running all the time. It’s not just a game that you can pick up and play for a few minutes. You actually start to feel a bit like there’s a little creature in there depending on you.
Tamagotchis came out around 1996, and this product came a year later. With the “Special Editions” of the Star Wars trilogy coming out that year, it must have seemed like a natural to combine Star Wars with Tamagotchi. Tiger Electronics actually made three Star Wars Giga Pets: Yoda, R2-D2 and the Rancor. (They also made the laughing Jabba the Hutt keychain I wrote about last year.)
It’s pretty similar to one of the original Tamagotchis, with the exception of the Rancor at the top and the vaguely sci-fi styling. There are a number of symbols at the top and bottom of the screen that indicate when the Rancor needs something. If you feed it, you see a Gamorrean Guard falling into the pit to be devoured. Give it a treat, and Oola falls into the pit instead. You can do a few other things like “play” with it by sending an armed guard to spar with it, or even clean up its poop. [2017 Edit: I made a full video review of this, which you can see below.]
1997 isn’t really that long ago, but somehow this seems ancient compared to something like a DS or iPhone game. I’m not sure today’s kids would be interested. I do kind of like how they were able to fit the Rancor into the digital pet concept, though.
Here is a PDF of the instructions to give you a better idea of the commands that you could use. Click the image to view it.
I’ll admit it. I was a little miffed when they didn’t include Jabba in the Star Wars stamps put out by the US Postal Service back in 2007. At the time I had no idea that the small African nation of Togo (aka the Togolese Republic) had already put out a Jabba stamp a decade earlier. It’s part of a “Return of the Jedi” block of stamps released in 1997. They appear to be unlicensed, and were probably put out by the Togolese government in an attempt to cash in on renewed interest in Star Wars at the time. I’m not even sure if they actually saw a release in Togo, or if they were just printed up and sold directly to Star Wars collectors (mine has a numbered certificate of authenticity that seems to support this idea). But in any case, they’re real stamps that you could presumably use to mail something should you happen to be in Togo.
The art on these stamps is kind of uneven. The image of Leia on this stamp is excellent (even if it’s taken directly from a film still) and Jabba isn’t terrible, although he does look strange being so small in comparison to Leia. Almost like a little lapdog or something. But some of the other ones look like quick sketches in comparison. Luke looks nothing like Mark Hamill, the Rancor looks weird, etc. In any case, it’s an interesting piece.
In 1997 a company called Authentic Images put out a series of 24K gold cards featuring images from the three original Star Wars movies. This one is from A New Hope and features the infamous scene between the computer-generated Jabba and Han Solo. The card itself is quite thin as you might expect (I imagine the actual amount of gold in it is very small), so it’s encased in a thick slab of acrylic to protect it. It comes in a leather (?) case that does lend it a bit of class, especially since the card in the case weighs about a pound and a half.
It’s not easy to take pictures of a polished gold surface under a layer of acrylic, so I’m not sure I can convey what it really looks like, but in person it looks fairly nice.
And I guess it’s impressive that they were able to replicate a photo in gold the way they did. I don’t really understand how they went about it.
That said, I don’t get what they were going for with this product line. Why make photo cards out of gold? Who was buying these things, anyway? And to use the terrible CGI version of Jabba is the very definition of polishing a turd. I believe these originally sold for around $100, but I got this one for less than $20, so like many of the high-end items from the late 90s, it hasn’t held its value very well. I do still want to get the one depicting Jabba from Return of the Jedi, but I’m a little mystified by this whole idea.
There was a time in my life when I read both Cracked and Mad Magazine (who also had a Jabba cover in the late 90s), but Cracked always did seem a like a poor man’s Mad. This issue, which came out about the same time as Return of the Jedi, features Jabba on the cover with a painful looking case of indigestion after over-indulging in some junk food.
There’s also a full parody of Return of the Jedi called “Returns of the Jed Eye.” It’s the usual stuff with silly jokes and characters with altered names (Blubba the Hut, Fluke Skystalker, and Hands Solow, for example) but it’s a reasonably enjoyable read. I’ve scanned in that part of the magazine, so click the image to the left to view the PDF.
News: Jabba the Hutt Bluetooth Headset?
Starwars.com recently posted about a series of Star Wars Bluetooth headsets to be released by a company named Earloomz (get it?). Apparently there will be a number of different designs, including one of Jabba. There’s no picture of the Jabba one yet, but they do have several pictured, including the Darth Vader design to the left. I can’t say the designs are all that inspiring — basically just Star Wars themed pictures on a generic headset. Frankly, I think they’d look kind of dumb in use. And at $69.99, they’re not really cheap. Still, I’ll have to get the Jabba one, even though I don’t intend to use it. I just hope I can find one on sale…
This software from 1994 is for Windows 3.1 and lets you assign a number of Star Wars audio clips to various computer tasks like deleting a file. I have a feeling it would’ve gotten old pretty quickly, but there was a time in my life when I might have liked this kind of thing. It comes on one 3.5″ floppy disk (remember those?) and I actually dug out an old USB floppy drive that I hadn’t used in years just to see what was on the disk. I was able to access the files, but the sound files are in a format that none of my software seems to be able to recognize. From what I can tell from the charming 8-character file names, there were at least a couple of sound clips of Jabba, as well as various other lines and sound effects.
I used to have an installation of Windows 3.1 on Virtual PC on my Mac, and I thought about trying to install the software there, but after spending twenty minutes or so trying to get it to run again, I realized that my time would be better spent elsewhere. Still, I really like the box the software came in.
This sketch card by Randy Martinez is from the “Star Wars Heritage” series from Topps in 2004. It’s a very simple pencil sketch, but I like it because I think this is what Jabba would look like if he were in a Don Bluth or Disney film from 80s or 90s. Randy also did an excellent Jabba for me in color a while back that’s still one of my favorite pieces.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 
