Ahhhh Jabba the Hutt. A character that goes back to my childhood, the excitement of seeing previews of Return of the Jedi and then finally seeing it in the cinema. So when I started to expand my Imperial Assault collection, how could I skip the most notorious crimelord of Tattooine?

One thing that was never apparent for many, many years was the fact that a lot of Jabba is actually green. Why? Well, when seen in the film, he’s always in dim surroundings and the main angles that he’s lit and filmed from highlight his sandy-yellow coloured face and underside. The “green” areas always looked to me like they were prdominantly a shadowed effect.

This was further reinforced by the oringinal Kenner toy. I never had it myself as a kid, but a friend did, and the thing was basically desert yellow in its entirety.

So then the remastered, butchered “Special Edition” Original Trilogy films came out, and what the actual fuck was going on here? Unconvinging, cartoony-faced CGI, a vastly smaller Jabba, a silly “comedy” spot where Han steps on Jabba tail, and much more green, to boot! Messed up on a variety of levels to the point where it looked (to me) like they’d just changed Jabba’s colour. In the same way that they changed his face, his size… you get the idea.

So it wasn’t until years later – sometime after the Internet became a thing I spent time on – when I finally saw and understood that Jabba was in fact, actually mostly green the entire time. So.. okay. So then that was how I finally painted the model, despite my instincts wanting to make him entirely made up of shades of yellow, tan and ochre. Finally complete (he’s a Neglected one, too!) It’s a pretty nice model, though it does have a few flaws.

So wild tangent aside, the main flaw with the model is basically the size. As you can see from this triad of “Scum and Villany” types, the scale used by FFG for Imeprial Assault is one that gives a lot of priority for the models being boardgame pieces first, and miniatures a (distant) second. People familiar with Star Wars will know that the droid, IG-88 is super tall, the Jawa is tiny, and Jabba is a huge, bulky slug. For scale, Jabba should be so big that the Jawa is about the size of Salcious Crumb (the bird-faced fellow sitting under his bong in the above film still).

Ah well, boardgame miniatures, eh? Whaddayagonnado?