Max Rebo Band “Live at Winterland Ballroom” Concert Poster
Like the Gentle Giant poster I wrote about a few weeks ago, this is a faux concert poster for the Max Rebo band. The Gentle Giant poster included a number of Earth cities in the band’s tour schedule, and this one actually has them playing at the Winterland Ballroom, which hosted many famous bands. The Star Wars Collector’s Archive (which erroneously gives the subtitle as “Live at Wonderland”) lists the manufacturer as “Western Graphics.” Aside from that, and the fact that it came out in the mid 1990s, I don’t know much about this poster, but it’s not a hard one to get. Many of the common poster sites have it in their inventory, and there are always some available on eBay for a few dollars. I actually won mine second hand for $0.25.
As you can see above, it’s done in what appear to be pastels or maybe colored chalk, which is kind of an unusual look for a Star Wars poster. The vibrant blues and pinks remind me of the 80s.
Custom LEGO Oola Minifigure
LEGO has never made an Oola minifigure, so a number of people have made customs of her, and you can even buy custom-made LEGO parts for making your own. That’s what I did with this one. The head, torso, and headpiece are custom parts made by Arealight Custom Work in Hong Kong. They have a variety of different colors, so you can do other Twi’lek characters as well. Oola’s actual headpiece was black and silver, but I thought the brown looked good and matched the crotch on the legs that I had, which are from a Gamorrean Guard. I had to get the arms, hands, and chain from a seller on Bricklink.com, which is a site that allows people to sell individual LEGO pieces to others. I slightly modified the chain so that I could attach the hand with the chain around the arm. I think it came out pretty well, although it would have been nice to have legs that also had the mesh design used on the torso.
Here she is with my custom LEGO Jabba’s throne that I made with the LEGO Design By Me service.
Star Wars Pull-Out Poster Book by Scholastic
This is a book of mini-posters put out by Scholastic in 1997. I think calling these “posters” is stretching things a little, as they’re all 8.5″ x 11″ in size. They’re perforated for easy removal, which is nice, but the quality of the photographs isn’t that great. Most of them are too contrasty and not all that attractive.
I was surprised when I first got this in hand to find that all of the posters are from “A New Hope.” I would have expected them to use shots from all three films, but instead they’ve arranged them in chronological order with captions to sort of tell the story of the first film.
If I had to pick one poster to use on the cover, it certainly wouldn’t have been the one with Han and Jabba, but it seems like the added scene with the CGI Jabba was used a lot around the release of the “Special Edition” of the films in the 90s. Of course today this Jabba is kind of an embarrassment.
The posters aren’t too bad for decorating a child’s room, which is after all what they were intended for. One side note: I hadn’t seen this item before it cropped up in an eBay search. I think the seller wanted around $8 for it, which seemed a little high, so I did some looking around and found a used copy on Amazon for a little over $2 including free two-day shipping (as I have Amazon Prime). It just goes to show you that it’s worth doing a little research before buying an unfamiliar item.
I decided recently that I should try to get one of each version of the vintage Kenner Jabba the Hutt playset. This is actually not that difficult, as from what I can tell there were only a handful of different versions. I’ve already got the two American versions (the full-color box and the line art box), and now I’m adding the Canadian version. It’s very similar to the full-color American version with one important difference — three of its sides are in French. I’m only going to show photos of the French sides here, as the English sides appear to be identical to the American version.
As far as I can tell, the contents are identical to the American version as well, although it’s possible that there were some variants. Since it’s a bit rarer, the Canadian version of the playset is a bit more valuable than the normal American version (at least with the box — I imagine the loose playset contents would be worth the same as the American version). Still, both were produced in sufficient numbers to make them among the least valuable of the Star Wars playsets.
I still need to get the Lili Ledy (Mexican) version, which is rather rare and expensive. And there may have been a European “tri-logo” version (with logos in three different languages), but I don’t think I’ve even seen a picture of that one yet. Both of these will be considerably harder to track down.
The instructions for the Canadian playset came on one large folded sheet of paper, with English on one side and French on the other. I’ve reproduced each side here in PDF format. Just click one to view it.
The Star Wars Micro Machines blog (a great resource for anything to do with Star Wars Micro Machines) recently posted pictures of a Jabba’s Palace Micro Machines playset that unfortunately never got beyond the early prototype stage. They did put out the R2-D2 Transforming Playset, which changes into Jabba’s palace, but it’s quite small and unimpressive compared to what we see here. Of course you can’t see everything in the picture, but you can make out the towers of his palace itself on the right, the door that R2-D2 and C-3PO enter through on the left, and what is probably the throne room in the middle. Be sure to click through to their site to see the excellent Ralph McQuarrie artwork that was going to be used for the packaging!
There haven’t really been many Jabba’s palace items made. Aside from the Transforming Playset mentioned above, the only other toys that comes to mind are the Micro Machines Planet Tatooine Playset and the LEGO Jabba’s Palace set. Some other non-toy items include the Hawthorne Village Jabba’s Palace statue, and the AMT/ERTL Jabba’s Palace model kit, but the number of items that try to recreate his palace as a whole is surprisingly small given the relatively large number of Jabba collectibles.
This is an unlicensed coaster that I got on eBay UK. They have a number of similar parodies, such as “Spocky” (Spock and Rocky mashup) or “Stevie Wonder Woman.” I didn’t have very high expectations for it, but it’s actually a pretty high-quality coaster. It appears to be made out of wood that’s about 2mm thick, with some soft foam on the underside. The art on the front looks nice and clear. They also make T-shirts with the same design, but they’re rather expensive (around ￡15 compared to ￡1.50 for the coaster) so I went with the less expensive option. Thanks again to Rodders for procuring this for me! 😀
This is part of a large line of statues and figurines manufactured by OddCo called Bad Taste Bears. They take cute cartoony bears and put them in costumes and situations of questionable taste. Take a look at their website if you like, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. 🙂 I don’t think this one is that offensive, but just to be safe I have censored some of the pictures. If you want to see the uncensored version, just click on the image. In any case, Jabba has one particular feature that’s rather… distinctive.
These are made in England, and as far as I know they aren’t officially distributed in the US. So I had my friend Rodders from the UK pick one of these up for me. Thanks Rod! According to the official product page, it retailed at £60 (or £54 for members of their club) and was limited to 400 pieces. I paid somewhat less than that on eBay, however. Either way, it’s not cheap, but I was impressed with how large it was when I got it in hand. It’s about 6″ tall and 8″ wide, although it’s relatively lightweight.
Apparently the sculptor intentionally made Jabba look like John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister who apparently has a reputation as a bit of a playboy.
Slave Leia looks pretty relaxed, but that might change once the “Viagro” he’s smoking kicks in. There’s also a little Salacious Crumb-looking creature to the right of the throne.
As a statue, I can’t really say that this matches my tastes, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to add such a unique Jabba collectible to my collection.
In addition to the magnets I wrote about yesterday, I also got a couple of “mix-up magnet buddies” from Joel Wintersteller’s Etsy shop. This is a series of magnets that come in multiple pieces, allowing you to pose them a bit and also swap pieces between characters.
The Jabba magnet above is quite different in style from the other one — this one is more of a Jabba-bot, which I love. He comes in five parts: head, body, left and right arms, and tail. He’s about 6.5 inches tall and 10.5 inches wide, making him even bigger than the other style of Jabba.
Bib Fortuna also comes in five parts: head, torso, left and right arms, and left and right legs. He’s about 5.5 inches tall, so he wouldn’t fit in with the other humanoid magnets I’ve written about.
Joel has a number of other characters in the series available as well. I suggest you give them a look.
More Jabba’s Palace Magnets by Joel Wintersteller (Amanaman, Gamorrean Guard, Slave Leia, Rancor)
Last December, I posted about the excellent Jabba the Hutt and Han in Carbonite magnets above. I got them from Joel Wintersteller’s Etsy shop, and he just added a number of other characters from Jabba’s palace, including a Gamorrean Guard, Amanaman, Slave Leia, and the Rancor. They’re printed on flexible vehicle-grade magnet sheets, and are really quite attractive. The humanoid ones range from 3 to 5 inches tall or so, while the Rancor is a huge 9.5 inches tall.
The Rancor is actually even bigger than he appears below — check the shot of all of the magnets together at the bottom to see the relative scale of all of the characters. These are a lot of fun, and I love the art style. The rancor is a tad expensive at $20, but the others are pretty reasonable ($3-5 for the humanoids, $8 for Jabba). There’s only one copy of each magnet available on the store at a time, so if someone has bought one recently, it may take a little time for it to pop back up on the store.
Mighty Jabba's Collection 