The significance of Jabba the Hutt in 'Star Wars' (2024)

George Lucas gifted pop culture with countless iconic characters when Star Wars burst onto the scene in 1977, and while everybody gravitated to the heroic central trio and the formidable Darth Vader, a grotesque sedentary slug becoming a firm favourite can’t have been on the cards.

Such is the strength of the franchise’s fandom that even secondary figures who weren’t supposed to make a splash have ended up becoming folded increasingly into canon as pivotal fixtures – not to name any Boba Fett in particular – but Jabba the Hutt has so far avoided the fate that befalls so many staples of legendary properties by being killed and remaining dead ever since.

It’s hard to imagine a real-world touchstone that could inspire a blubberous, cantankerous, and ruthless slave-driving alien with more than a passing resemblance to a gene-splicing experiment between a turd and a slug going horrendously awry, but anybody who was operating under the assumption that there was at least a shade of Orson Welles in there was right on the money.

Costume designer Nilo Rodis-Jamero established that beyond any reasonable doubt by coming right out and saying, “My version of Jabba was literally Orson Welles when he was older”, although the more obvious comparisons and physical resemblances to the legendary filmmaker and Citizen Kane director were gradually smoothed out as the fearsome crime lord began to gain his more bulbous, slimy, and signature form.

Where Jabba goes, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in a gold bikini tends to follow fairly closely behind, and it was she who managed to end his life by choking him to death. The mechanics of how a human-sized person would be able to strangle the life out of a neck that’s barely perceptible, such is the way it becomes one with his body remains up for debate, but it still stands out as one of the most memorable moments of an original trilogy that’s packed to the rafters with them.

Occupying a lustful, greedy, and altogether evil rung on the ladder of the criminal underworld required plenty of screentime for Jabba in Return of the Jedi, but he was initially supposed to debut in A New Hope as a stop-motion creation before eventually being added back into the film through the medium of CGI when Lucas began tinkering with his special edition releases.

On set, though, Jabba weighed a literal tonne, which required three months of work and $500,000 dollars to realise. Veterans of Jim Henson’s The Muppets were drafted in to accomplish his movements, which required his arms, head, tail, and tongue to be operated independently, with remote radios being used to create the facial expressions and react to dialogue accordingly.

Surrounded by slave girls of various species, Jabba’s real ‘boo hiss’ moment came when he froze Han Solo in Carbonite and had him displayed for the world to see as a product of what happens when he places a bounty on the head of a wanted man. On the plus side, he did get his comeuppance and serve as the backdrop to the iconic “I love you/I know” exchange between Han and Leia, but Star Wars has gratefully resisted the temptation to play the Palpatine card and have its “somehow, Jabba returned” moment.

Fisher even suggested that Donald Trump had the potential to play the character should he ever return, which is ironic considering the unsightly creature once headlined a comic book series called Jabba the Hutt: The Art of the Deal, which derived its title from the Home Alone 2 star’s bestselling tome of the same name.

There aren’t many Star Wars characters to have exemplified pure evil quite like Jabba the Hutt, who didn’t have a redeemable bone in his bloated body. Not every antagonist needs to carry a shade of grey, and part of the reason why the ugly face of Tatooine’s seedy underbelly became such an enduring part of the saga’s iconography is that he’s someone the audience wants to see pay for their crimes without offering a glimmer of potential – and what would be hugely unearned – redemption. Leia makes him do just that, but his place in the folklore of a galaxy far, far away was secured long before he took his final breath.

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