CT When did Jabba REALLY become a slug?

This is a particular item that deserves questioning, IMHO, since a lot of "official" information appears to have been designed to create the impression, that Lucas had wanted Jabba to be a slug from the very beginning.

The revised "fourth draft from January 15, 1976" at IMDB states:

"Jabba the Hut and a half-dozen grisly alien pirates and purple
creatures stand in the middle of the docking bay. Jabba is
the grossest of the slavering hulks and his scarred face is
a grim testimonial to his prowess as a vicious killer. He is
a fat, slug-like creature with eyes on extended feelers and
a huge ugly mouth."

Essentially that's the same text in my copy of aforementioned draft from March 15, 1976, page # 53, except that the bold sentence didn't exist there, yet. That text addition / alteration first showed up in the 1979 Art of Star Wars, so it's safe to say that by 1979 Lucas had made up his mind that he wanted a "fat, slug-like creature".

The original John Mollo pre-production sketches (currently traveling with the Star Wars Identities exhibit) merely revealed Jabba as a human character, played by Declan Mulholland in the (deleted) scenes shot in 1976. The 1981 Star Wars radio drama recycled the actual scenes by giving Declan Mulholland the new identity of "Heater", one of Jabba's henchman (before Lucas decided with the Special Edition to replace Declan Mulholland once and for all).

While Lucas probably trimmed the original "human Jabba" scene for pace (Greedo had already delivered the essential information the audience neeeded), he definitely opted for an alien character by 1977 because Marvel's Comic Six Against the Galaxy featured the (one of two!) alien character "Walrus Man" (in an Imperial uniform!) as a placeholder for the galactic crimelord until 1979 when Lucas had finally settled for a "slug-like creature".

This didn't stop anybody from creating a myth surrounding Jabba, i.e. that Declan Mulholland supposedly was to be overimposed by a fake Jabba slug (as "evidence" the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi presented a storyboard that's probably fake).

Admittedly this may be old news here, but if anybody can shed some light on the question, why - of all the Cantina Aliens - one of the two in Imperial (!) uniforms got to be chosen to become the Jabba placeholder, I'd be very grateful.

 

Well, it isn't until work on ROTJ began in 1980-81, that Lucas had ILM come up with a design that he liked. The alien design in the comic was actually taken from the comic adaptation of the film.



The novelization for ANH mentions that Jabba is an alien and is a bit portly. But no other details are given. As far as I know, the text of the novelization has not changed since the first printing. Just the covers have changed and the inclusion and absence of the photo gallery.

 

I know Jabba was in the re-mastered version of Star Wars but was he original to be in ANH or was that a later idea by Lucas?

 

I believe they shot a scene with a man playing Jabba and the intention was to replace him with a stop motion Jabba (I think). For whatever reason, the scene was cut in the original (maybe budgetary or pacing reasons?).

 

Was that in the original novelisation though?

 

Lucas said in some doc or featurette (don't recall which-sorry) that he originally pictured Jabba as a large hairy humanoid.

 

Lucas: originally I thought Jabba would be a furry Character like Chewbacca...

source: Special Edition featurette A New Hope VHS,

 

I'm pretty confident, that the original intention was a human actor, according to the screenplay description ("scarred face") maybe even the punk in the Cantina that the EU elevated to ""Dr. Evazan"".

Then this myth popped up of using Mulholland as "plate" for a Jabba the slug. I don't buy it.

There was no chance giving the budget restrictions and please take notice that the Jabba in this allegedly original storyboard (that's not the 1976 style, IIRC!) lacks "eyes on extended feelers"! http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YL9clp0zVZU/UXIbrGWXuLI/AAAAAAAAPZU/TEyA6tx5r6c/s1600/jabba-storyboard.jpg

To me that looks like a "retroactive continuity" storyboard made post-1983 to "sell" the illusion that Lucas had always wanted Jabba to be the slug as featured in ROJ.

Frankly, I had not yet heard about the "furred Jabba" variant. Declan Mulholland wore a furry jacket, but now that was supposed to be used as body hair for another Jabba variant?

Seriously?

 

You are right: all evidence points to the idea of Jabba not being an alien when the original scene was shot. (The scene was cut because of the pacing and because Lucas felt the "casting was not strong enough" according to the Making off book). It is indeed possible that Lucas originally wanted someone more impressive for Jabba, but he ended up with a normal-looking human as an actor. It is also possible that, as soon as the scene was cut from the movi(it was one of the earliest scenes to be cut out), Lucas wished to have an alien-looking version of Jabba. And of course, the comic version of the movie already has an alien looking Jabba, and the 1979 version of the script includes that concept as well (it was not a slug-creature though, it was shown as a regular alien, that could've been shot with a guy in a mask, as every other monster of the movie). And when Jedi came, Lucas decided on a design for Jabba tha was more extravagant and repulsive of course.

In any case, there is absolutely no logic to the idea that stop-motion animation (which was not used at all for ANH, except -as a very late decission- for the chess game scene) could be used to replace a human interacting so closely to another actor, with a moving camera, no empty plates shot... It is a sequence that was totally impossible to concieve in 1977 -and more importantly: there were many easier ways to shoot Jabba as an alien (such as... using a guy in a mask!)

 

Another nitpicky detail I'd like to add:

Docking Bay 94 had very small doorframes. Had Lucas seriously considered to use a massive Jabba slug, I'm confident that would have reflected in the original studio set's design (as a matter of fact I still wonder how the SE Jabba got to the bottom of Docking Bay 94).

 

Yes, it was shot and included in all adaptations of ANH and in the shooting scripts.

 

Love seeing that sequence as it was first shot. The lines actually make sense ('you're a great human being'), and it just works better with two real actors rather than CGI pasted over the top.

 

I should add that the picture in my post # 8 was also published in the very early and official Star Wars Album. Original audiences that also read the novelization had a very good idea what Jabba looked like before the ANH comic obfuscated this impression.

Actually, I think this particular line "'you're a great human being" works much better with Jabba the Slug, because in this context it reveals Solo's Humor, rich in irony and sarcasm.

 

Agree. In an ideal world, for me, I'd have the OOT on Blu-ray, with this original deleted scene as a deleted scene on the special features.

 

Jabba looks best in the 97 special edition. Best the colors. The 2004 edition I felt, while more detailed wasn't as good in the color choices for me. Then again he looked more disgusting and that might have been the point. He might have been a human at first, or a actor was placeholder for the CGI they didn't have time for. ANH was VERY rushed because fox was angry it was taking so long. Very stressful development.

 

There was two versions of what Han says as a parting shot. The other one is the one used in the comic adaptation.



I'm assuming that the alternate line wasn't salvageable. As noted, it winds up being an insult.

Nope. As noted, Lucas did want an alien for Jabba, but he didn't have the time or money to put it together. The budget was not what Lucas wanted and he was still struggling to get another million to finish the film. He opted to film Jabba sans mask, but had cut it out early on. He may have intended to figure out how to splice in new footage later on, but it wasn't feasible at the time. Once "Jurassic Park" and "Forrest Gump" came along, it was now possible to pull that off.

 

That's what I said, I said the actor might have been a placeholder for CGI jabba latter,which in a way he definitely is.

 

But when the actor was shot, it was definitely as a real character, not as a placeholder. (you don't stage the scene like that if you want to add a special effect on top of that).

 

He did have the time and money to make Jabba an alien... (use a spare mask from the Cantina scene) just not to make him iconic.

 

I think he was never sure at first other than big, despicable, and kinda scary even when he shot the scene.

Lucas just knew what he had wasn't what he wanted so it got dropped.

My guess is that by the time he wrote himself into a confrontation with Jabba come episode VI in Empire something like we know had begun to coalesce

 

i think he became a slug during pre-production on ROTJ

 

I had the same thought some time ago.
One work around that could have pulled it off is to have Jabba as a hologram. One of his goons could just have some portable projector.
It would avoid the problem of Han walking around him. He would just walk through the hologram.
And Jabba is big and heavy and going all that way just to talk with Han seems like lot of work.

I think that originally Lucas did film it with the intention of going with the human actor. But later he either felt the scene was lacking or it was not needed and slowed the pace down.

Bye for now.
Old Stoneface

 

Can you back this up with some professional's statement in agreement with yours? Having just watched the two 1970s Sinbad movies back-to-back last night, in which all manner of stop-motion characters interact with live actors both behind and in front, I'm having trouble accepting this as accurate.

 

Generally, it goes like this. If you intend to put some creature in the movie, you film the scene with nothing there. Having a guy present only creates problems as you must remove or hide him in some way.
You might do a reference pass with some stand in there in order to get eyelines and timing and things like that. But that reference pass doesn't feature an actor in full costume.
In this case, Hans walks very close to Jabba and even walks around him.
That would make the job of adding a creature way more difficult.

In the LotR films, with Gollum they did pretty much this, a reference pass with Andy Serkis there and then a pass with him gone. But they found that the acting was on the whole better on the reference pass so they opted to paint out Andy and animate Gollum over him. Doable but very time consuming.
Back in the 70's this would have been even harder to do.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Sure, I understand how it works. But consider this: If Lucas was planning to replace the fur-clad actor with a larger stop-motion creature, then the creature model would simply obscure the actor underneath, so no "painting out" of the actor would be required.

The animator (Phil Tippet, presumably) would have had to be careful to avoid letting any of the original actor show through from beneath the creature. Apart from that requirement, the animation would not have been any more or less challenging that the typical shot from Harryhausen's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) or Clash of the Titans (1981). Given Tippet's work on the chess game and on his later animation of the Taun-Tauns and AT-ATs, I'd guess that his skills would have been up to the task.

As for Han walking around Jabba, the scene as we have it presents that action in a single take, medium close-up. But there might have been other angles the editor(s) could cut-away to, which would make Han's walk-around more do-able. The version of the scene as it now exists does not preclude the existence of other angles that would have been easier for a stop-motion animator to work with.