Inside the Insanely Difficult Process of Making and Moving Jabba the Hutt
For a giant, slovenly space-slug, Jabba the Hutt sure took a lot of effort to build and operate.
Though the Tatooine tough-guy was mentioned repeatedly in the first two films, he didn’t appear until the third film of the original trilogy, 1983’s Return of the Jedi. But as evidenced by a new mini-documentary — which you can watch above — bringing Jabba to the big screen wasn’t easy, and creating the slimy gangster required not only an aptly oversized budget of more than $500,000, but also countless designers, engineers, and puppeteers.
The new behind-the-seams special — which was directed by Jamie Beninning, the creator of several trivia-packed “filmumentaries" — goes deep into the heart of Hutt, with new interviews with some of the Hutt-est working men in show business. Among the revelations:
- It required two people to move Jabba’s arms and head, while a third worked the tail.
- Another crew member was assigned the job of manipulating and shaking Jabba’s belly, while another smoked a cigar and blew the smoke through a long tube, so that it’d look like the Hutt was really smoking a pipe.
- Director Richard Marquand was so dedicated to maintaining the illusion of Jabba’s dominance, he spoke to the big fat puppet on set as if it was a living creature.
- George Lucas was apparently not in love with the Hutt: Toby Philpot, one of the puppeteers, surmised that Lucas would rather have used visual effects to create Jabba. In 1997, the director did just that, repurposing an old, deleted scene from A New Hope that used the actor Declan Mulholland as Jabba, and replacing him with a computer-generated Hutt.
- Here’s something very non-digital: They injected goop up Jabba’s nose and around his mouth in between each take. Talk about fearless and inventive.
Photo credit: Lucasfilm
