Jabba The Hutt’s Throne Room - TBS [P2] - Six Inch Figures (Exclusive)

Smoking his hookah pipe, Jabba the Hutt enjoys music and dancing in his palace, surrounded by criminals, bounty hunters, and his monkey-lizard, Salacious Crumb. When he receives a request to free the carbon-frozen Han Solo, Jabba quickly dismisses the idea and returns to his entertainment.

"Peecha wangee cogh pah. Tong nam nee took chan kee troi. Solo thawt du mah kee chalia." Translation: "I will not give up my favorite decoration. I like Captain Solo where he is."

The Black Series Six Inch Figure line is taking off like a rocket, and Hasbro isn’t shy about its success. Beating expectations, The Black Series line is doing quite well by collecting standards with more and more collectors conceding to the new format. Only a year in the making, Hasbro has already developed a new Deluxe line so packaging can accommodate larger characters and accessories…. like vehicles to make this line as diverse as possible. And it’s a format that is making collectors everywhere salivate over because the quality is so intensely good. To help draw more attention to this format, Hasbro decided that the 2014 San Diego Comic Con exclusive would be Jabba The Hutt’s Throne Room, a fancier take on the 2014 TBS Jabba The Hutt Deluxe Six Inch Figure that made its way to the general marketplace at about the same time. For this release, Jabba received a truly deluxe gift-box styled packaging where both the interior and exterior of the box design is meant to recreate portions of Jabba’s Palace. The front flap appropriately recreates Jabba’s palace’s opening doors and it then opens up to becomes the floor complete with rancor pit grated floor. Jabba’s sits atop a cardboard dais (sadly) and to his right is a cardboard Han Solo frozen in carbonite which can be removed so you can place the carbonite block that came with the previous year’s SDCC exclusive Boba Fett And Han Solo In Carbonite Six Inch Figure set. (This will likely enrage those that totally missed that release even more.) Jabba The Hutt is securely in place with plenty of strings and plastic-formed packaging inserts so he and Salacious Crumb won’t be going anywhere fast. If you decide to keep this unaltered and unopened, it’s quite a beautiful display piece, but for us, it’s all about the toys inside, so we won’t hold back opening things up.

We think The Black Series Jabba The Hutt Six Inch Figure is quite an accomplishment. This really, really looks like Jabba The Hutt. He looks so good it makes us feel disappointed now about the likeness of the figure from 2010’s SW [SOTDS] Jabba’s Throne which was released as a Walmart exclusive. By comparison, that figure is quite off now. Hasbro ensured that the detail in the likeness was spot on for The Black Series release and we honestly have to hand it to them because they did a rather marvelous job with Jabba. It even makes 2004's SW -S - P3] Jabba The Hutt (Jabba's Palace) look just "OK". His paint job is perfectly recreated and these paint applications help to being out what is an incredibly accurate sculpt. Jabba comes with a cool action feature and before you have a heart attack, know that it is has been added seamlessly to this figure. When you rotate either of Jabba’s arms in either direction vertically, it will open and close the lower jaw on Jabba. Soft rubbery plastic has been used to develop his mouth detail so the feature is quite realistic. The same technique was utilized for the Jabba The Hutt figure included in 2009’s TCW [F/S1] Jabba’s Palace Battle Packs set. It worked fantastically back then and it works fantastically now…. even in larger scale. Jabba The Hutt has also been given some premium articulation in the arms. Although they’ve been designed to accommodate the action feature, they include ball-jointed shoulders, ball-jointed elbows and ball-jointed wrists. Aside from the opening mouth, Jabba The Hutt also comes with a swivel torso which quite honestly interrupts the aesthetics of the character, but give it needed articulation at the same time. Clearly, Jabba The Hutt was made with collectors in mind. And if somewhere down the road Hasbro could tool an appropriately scaled plastic dais, all would be right in the world.

But if you’ve bought this set, you likely bought it for the other goodies inside. We’re of the strong opinion that all of the extra stuff should have been included in the basic release of Jabba The Hutt, but Hasbro made it exclusive to San Diego Comic Con version only. (Couldn’t they have made a plastic dais (by itself) and charged $39.99 - $49.99 for it as the SDCC exclusive and then release Jabba with all of the parts for $39.99 in the general marketplace only? And wouldn’t that have satiated all of the collectors out there.) But all that glitters is not gold for the included “exclusive” accessories haven’t been made that well. The pipe, the bowl and especially the railing have been produced in a plastic that we’re identifying as cheap. The railing is a hollow chintzy mess. It’s been produced in two separate parts and glued together, but it feels like it would shatter without much force. The hookah piper/bowl combination pieces is a little bit better. And to be fair Hasbro has added a lot of detail to these parts including real liquid and a frog swimming around the bottom of it. Still, we feel it’s better to have these parts than not to have them, so we’re going to swallow the fact that they’re not ultra high quality. Thankfully Salacious Crumb more than makes up for where the other parts fail. This very well designed figure comes with an astounding 12 points of articulation (six places of articulation to be clear) that give the figure more mobility than we had ever expected. It has a wonderful sculpt and beautiful paint job as well. What’s with Hasbro’s obsession with exclusive Salacious Crumb figures anyway? As you can see, Jabba The Hutt’s Throne Room isn’t without some faults, but it’s gorgeous from multiple perspectives. The price is a little too high for our liking, but it’s an exclusives and they always command more money. And if you don't open collectibles like this, then you will never have to worry about its negatives either, because as a display piece it's perfection.