CT Human Jabba

The human was just for Harrison Ford to have someone to interact with. Could have just as easily been George Lucas standing there with a script in his hand.

They intended to invent something different for Jabba, and superimpose it into the Harrison Ford shots, but they ran out of money and had to scrap the idea.

 

I'm not sure if the scene is more ridiculous with Ford talking to the human actor or with either SE version. I can't get the spoil of the Falcon and other things out of my head.

 

However, as I noted earlier, why go through the expense of hiring an actor and making a costume for that actor? Plus if something was going to be put in his place, having him be so close to Han, touching him etc, would that job MUCH harder.

It would be both cheaper and simpler to film Harrison with no Jabba there. Just have something for an eye line.
That they didn't suggest that this was probably going to be used. Lucas might have planned for a creature but had this as a fallback plan in case that didn't work. Or he had scrapped the creature idea and gone with this so he could have the scene. But then he figured he could alter the Greedo scene and accomplish much the same thing.

So while it is possible that Lucas did have an idea for a creature Jabba, the scene he filmed was most likely intended to be used as is. Paying for an actor and a costume plus the considerable difficulty of replacing that actor with some creature back then and given the limited budget they had.
That makes it unlikely that Jabba would be anything but what was filmed.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

It would have been hilarious if the actor was what they used in the final edit. He is not intimidating.

 

As I've said before, if the scene had been used, Declan Mulholland would probably have been dubbed over with an American actor, like so many of the British day players in the original SW film. That might have improved its quality considerably - after all, until James Earl Jones did his voice-dubbing work as Darth Vader, even George Lucas was convinced Vader wasn't properly scary on film.

 

Back in the early 80s (probably 1981 or '82), my uncle got a pirate copy of ANH and TESB. What stood out was the original Jabba scene was in it. My uncle worked around Europe as an architect, if I remember right he'd gotten the videos from a client. Literally from then until the SEs were released, every time I watched ANH I looked for the scene.

Were there workprints of ANH circling around on pirated videos? How the hell did this version of ANH get out there?

 

This clip was released in a making-of documentary. For those of us who watched the original in the theater it was interesting because we'd never seen Jabba on film, until Return of the Jedi, and only knew this scene from the comics or the novelization.

In case it helps, the novelization and the comics were both completed before post-production ended on the film. The comic version of Jabba surely reflects George Lucas' intent somewhat. There is also an early draft including a character called Jabba the Hutt who is definitely an alien, but has a different role in the story.

In all the various behind the scenes materials I have watched and read, nothing has ever indicated Lucas wanted the appearance of Jabba to be just as filmed. They always said he wanted to matte some alien appearance over it. I get that some people want to speculate, but until there is a positive source on that I think it is just speculation. So speculate away, I say. The comics and novelization tell a different story though to me--one that lines up with Lucas' own account.

EDIT: someone commented on the music, but the music is something added only after almost everything else is done--the editing, the effects and so forth. Music in the special edition was added later from John Williams' theme for Jabba the Hutt.

Also, the comic, which included art that didn't quite match the final look for many of the effects, had all of the scenes fans have sought out over the years that were cut from the film... Luke meeting up with his friends, talking to Biggs, working on the vaporator with Treadwell, talking to Red Leader and Biggs at the rebel base, and this.

When the special edition came out I noticed this scene comes in at a point where there is an odd fade in the original cut--Luke walking and talking with Ben fades to Luke walking and talking with Ben. It was fun to see the Jabba scene in the special edition when it first came out but I think the Greedo dialogue covers his situation well enough. Similar with the Biggs reunion, these things were probably best included as deleted scenes rather than restored--the biggs reunion is odd for viewers who don't know about the other missing scenes from ancillary materials such as the storybook, novelization or comic.

 

Personally, as I posted elsewhere, the restored Jabba scene wasn't all that big a deal for me. I thought restoring the scene with Biggs was the bigger attraction.

 

So basically Jabba was originally going to be a human that is why Han calls him a “wonderful human being”also before return of the Jedi there was a comic with Jabba in it and he was a human.Lucas just decided to change it and make him a Hutt.

 

Comic Jabba was alien, but humanoid.



(guy on the left).

 

Can you confirm the origin of this actor's accent or dialect? Bazinga'd thinks he's Scottish, but once you said Irish earlier that sounded right to me. For the record I'm from the US but also grew up in Europe a little, so I've heard many different dialects from the British Isles. I just can't place them as squarely as the different US dialects.

 

Just google the actor`s name, lol, its all very easy to do these days.
He`s Irish. Sounds nothing like a Scottish accent btw.

 

Here is the great Declan Mulholland in his finest role, as Sped the Hunchback, finest slave trader on the River Skell. From the glorious “Hawk the Slayer”...

 

The so-called hero greets Sped by calling him "Hunchback." How ableist!

And those fix-it-in-post arrow shots are amazing.

 

Hawk the Slayer is an absolute classic.

 

No one can for certain if Jabba was initially meant to be human or if he was always an alien with the human as a stand-in, but here's my perspective. One has to remember that Lucas tends to be overly ambitious with his ideas, so much that it requires concept artist Ralph McQuarrie to paint Lucas' galaxy just to sell it to the executive at 20th Century Fox. And Lucas has been known to underestimate some cost effective measures regarding stand-ins, even in 1999.

When Ahmed Best was playing Jar Jar, he wasn't in a blue skintight suit with dots on his face. He was dressed up as Jar Jar, complete with costume and rubber Gungan skin. That was to the benefit of the actors who had interact with Jar Jar as well as give the animators frames of reference of how Jar Jar is supposed to move.



Now it could a lot cheaper to just have Ahmed Best to be like Andy Serkis and only have the head of Jar Jar be the only thing needed for reference but it seems to be Lucas' approach to superimposing images prior to Gollum's revolution in 2002.

Allegedly, I heard that Lucas initially intended for Jar Jar's head to be only thing CGI'ed with the rest of his body being live-action. It's only when the team started doing the CGI process did they realize it was much easier to just animate the entire body of Jar Jar rather than just do partial CGI, leading to Lucas say "So I just spent $10,000 on a costume that I don't need."

Again, I don't know how much of that is true, but it does show that dressing the human actor for Jabba with an expensive, shaggy pirate costume doesn't indicate that Lucas wanted Jabba to be human in the first place. If anything, it reminds us that Lucas isn't the omnipotent master of knowing where to cut costs. He might have thought a human with a costume would allowed more believable interactions from Harrison Ford or didn't realize just how expensive stop-motion would be for this kind of scene.

 

I think this scene of Han with Jabba is quite unnecessary and is a waste of time for the film. Their dialogue is practically the same as that of Solo and Greedo in the canteen. It is true that Greedo says that Jabba confiscated Solo's ship, but that could only be considered a lie by him. And that ends with the surprise of seeing him only in episode 6.

 

Interesting idea. Maybe so. Though Lucas probably would have made Jabba an alien on set if he could have at the time.

John Mollo's costume sketch for Jabba in the August 1975 third draft shows a humanoid with a third eye in his forehead and a stereotypically Mexican moustache. That suggests that some sort of makeup appliance was considered. But the budget cuts with which 20th Century Fox hit SW caused lots of cost-cutting, and Jabba's makeup likely fell by the wayside in that regard.

Significantly, the January 1976 fourth-draft script temporarily removed Jabba, replacing him with an Imperial bureaucrat named Montross who tries to stop Han from leaving Mos Eisley. When Jabba was reinserted in the March 1976 revised-fourth-draft shooting script, there probably was virtually no budget left for making him an alien.

We also know that after principal photography finished, Lucas asked 20th Century Fox for more money to re-shoot the cantina aliens and the Jabba scene; the former was granted, but the latter wasn't (or perhaps the total amount Fox granted wouldn't cover both).

Lucas probably hoped that somehow an alien version of Jabba could be matted over Declan Mulholland in post-production at some point. Eventually technology came along that would allow this, but it was still hampered by the difference in conception between what Jabba had become in ROTJ and the more humanoid idea for him that had originally prevailed.

 

Interesting but I think this is unlikely,

1) Jar jar was in much of TPM, Jabba had one scene. So making a suit for a character that is in a lot of the film in order to help performances is a bit more likely than doing so for a character that is in one, pretty short scene.

2) When making TPM, Lucas had a lot more money to use than when making ANH.
The budget was a big issue with ANH and keeping it under control involved lots of work.
So burning money on hiring an actor and making a costume for just one short scene when a regular stand in would work just as well, that is rather frivolous use of money.
And with TPM, it was Lucas own money, not so with ANH.

3) When having character that will be replaced with effects, the common way to film that is to film the scene twice. One called a reference pass with a stand in interacting with the actors. And a second pass, called an animation pass, where the stand in is gone and the actor interacts with nothing.
As far as I know there was no second pass with this scene. They filmed it once, with the actor there.
And I think Lucas knew enough of stop motions effects to know that it would be a lot easier to add a creature if there was nothing there originally.

4) If there was an intent to put an effect over human Jabba, the way the scene is filmed makes little sense.
Look how close Han and Jabba are, they are touching each other and Han walks around Jabba.
Putting some sort of creature over that is very hard, as they found out when they tried to put slug Jabba there in the 90's.
Doing so with tech twenty years older would likely be impossible or it would look rather bad.

So no, while it is possible that Lucas had Jabba as some sort of alien at first, I think it most likely that what he filmed was what he intended to use.
The scene was not used in the end and the Greedo scene was altered a bit.
Very maybe Lucas felt that what he filmed was not good enough and wanted more with Jabba but he didn't have the budget or time to make such a creature or go back and film the scene again.
So another reason why the scene was dropped.

Lastly, if having Jabba as a creature, they did have aliens with masks in the film. So that was an option.
If that was insufficient and a more elaborate creature was planned but could not be done.
Have the guy in the scene be Jabba's right hand man, a person that speaks for Jabba.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

It's also worth asking: If Lucas had re-shot the Jabba scene in post-production as he'd hoped, would he have set it in the Millennium Falcon docking bay, as he had previously? Maybe re-creating that set made it too expensive. (Though in hindsight he could have set it in another location, which would also have the virtue of not spoiling the Falcon's reveal when Luke and Ben arrive.)

 

You're wrong about this, if I'm not mistaken. He requested more money to shoot the extra desert sequences he needed (all the technical stuff shot in Death Valley) and the cantina scene (shot without the actors). As far as we know, he never requested money to reshoot Jabba; in fact, the scene had already been cut from the edit at that point!

 

As you say, Lucas did inted to use Ahmed Best's physical body as often as he could, just replacing his head. That's why he made the suite.

As far as I know, scenes with Jar Jar were shot twice: once with the actor as reference, and one without the actor (which was the one they intended to use!). The whole thing of a skintight suit with dots came a few years later, if I'm not mistaken.

What you say about Jabba is interesting, but I don't think you can really compre to this. Animating a creature, fully or just the head, was virtually impossible back in 1977 (the only stop-motion sequence of the movie, which was basically an experiment, was the chess-board game). If Jabba needed to be a humanoid alien, the way to go was to put a mask over the actor's head (as every other creature). If Jabba was intended to be a different kind of monster, they would've shot it differently, allowing the actor to be somehow replaced, and not closely interacting with Harrison Ford.

 

Considering that George has been pushing the limits of special effects even back in the 1970s, virtually impossible doesn't stop the ambitious from trying. Or making mistakes with the technique. After all, stop-motion interactions with humans tends to be reserved for fighting back in the day, so doing a regular conversation between a human and a stop-motion creature would be innovative. And of course, you may be already far ahead into production of a scene before you realize that the technology you have could not achieve what you want.

Interesting, on a somewhat unrelated note, according to this blog, Lucas never actually personally shot the Jabba scene and that the original notes were lost in the shuffle over the years.

 

According to the Making of book, the scene was shot in two days, Friday April 9 and Monday April 12, 1976, at EMI Studios by the first unit (obviously, directed by Lucas).

Of course, it's believable that Lucas could've tried and failed to make something "impossible". The thing is, there is no evidence he ever tried. Absolutely nothing that suggests he wrote, budgeted, storyboarded, shot or animated anything for a monster-Jabba.