Jabba the Hutt

• Appeared in:
  
  I
  II
  III
  IV
  V
  VI
  CW

• Homeworld:
  Nal Hutta, Tatooine

• Species:
  Hutt

• Gender:
  Neither

• Size:
  3.9 meters long

• Weapon:
  Assassins and bounty hunters

• Vehicle:
  Ubrikkian luxury sail barge, repulsor sled

• Affiliation:
  Criminal

• 

From the Movies

A loathsome slug of a gangster, Jabba the Hutt was the preeminent kingpin of crime in the Outer Rim Territories. Basing his operations out of Tatooine, the Hutt had his pudgy fingers in a number of lucrative and unsavory rackets -- slavery, gunrunning, spice-smuggling, extortion and more.

Jabba's physical appearance was as repulsive as his decadence. A hefty Hutt, Jabba resembled a worm-like slug, with a legless, tapered body coated in slime. A wide, drooling toothless grin split his flat face, and two yellow-red reptilian eyes stared covetously from his immense head. Jabba surrounded himself with the shiftless dregs of society, ensuring his protection with a screen of henchmen and hired guns. He lived in an opulent if sand-scarred palace out in the Tatooine deserts.

Jabba's depravity was legendary. He kept himself entertained by torturing and humiliating his subjects. He kept scantily-clad slave girls chained to his throne for his amusement. When fickle, Jabba would send his prize possessions to a ghastly end. For example, the beautiful Twi'lek slave Oola was fed to the terrible rancor monster living beneath Jabba's throne room when she failed to amuse him.

To spread his influence and business across the Outer Rim, Jabba employed a number of smugglers to traffic his illicit goods. One of the best starpilots on his payroll was a young Corellian named Han Solo. Solo's luck ran out while running a shipment of Kessel spice, and his freighter, the Millennium Falcon was boarded by an Imperial patrol. With no options, Han jettisoned Jabba's cargo into space.

The Hutt was livid. He demanded compensation for his lost cargo. When Solo failed to provide the credits, Jabba sicced his bounty hunters after him. One of the first, a bumbling Rodian named Greedo, failed miserably and ended up fried in a seedy Mos Eisley cantina. Jabba then tried to smooth things with Solo by trying to play the fatherly patron. It was all a ruse, and Solo knew it. That Jabba showed up with the deadly bounty hunter Boba Fett in his party indicated to Solo that time was running out.

Weeks passed, then months. Still, Solo had not paid off the crime lord, as he was drawn deeper into the Galactic Civil War and assisting the Rebel Alliance. Jabba, never one to be interested in political ideals or civil wars, saw this as no excuse. More bounty hunters came. One nearly bagged the price on Han's head in a run-in on Ord Mantell.

Ultimately, it was Boba Fett who tracked down the Corellian. Fett delivered Solo, frozen in carbonite, to Jabba's palace in return for a large bounty. Solo, once an extraordinary pilot, smuggler, and soldier in the Rebel Alliance, was now little more than wall decoration for a grotesque crime lord.

It wasn't long before Solo's friends attempted a rescue. Spearheaded by Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi, this mission brought C-3PO, Princess Leia Organa, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian and R2-D2 into Jabba's dark palace. After a seeming failure in which the Rebels were held as Jabba's prisoners, Skywalker turned his would-be execution in the Dune Sea into a surprise attack.

Jabba's enforcers were no match for a group of determined Rebels led by a Jedi Knight. Princess Leia Organa, who had been subjected to the humiliation of being one of Jabba's slave girls, instead used the chain that bound her to strangle the Hutt. Using all her strength, Leia drove the chain deeper into Jabba's gullet, cutting off his air. Aboard his luxurious sail barge out in the desert sands, Jabba breathed his last fetid breath. His body was consumed by the flames that exploded from the sail barge as the Rebels raced for freedom.

From the Expanded Universe

Jabba's ascent to the head of the Desilijic crime family was a long and duplicitous one, but Hutts are long lived with patience to match their bulk. Jabba, whose full name is Jabba Desilijic Tiure, inherited much from his shiftless father Zorba, whose constant prison sentences did not mark him as a competent leader. Though Jabba did gain much from Zorba's losses, most of his wealth came from successes earned in the long-standing rivalry between the Desilijic and Besadii crime families.

By the age of 600, Jabba was the Hutt to be reckoned with, carving out a sizable criminal empire in the Outer Rim Territories. Though the legendary Black Sun syndicate operated throughout the Core and surrounding regions, it permitted Jabba and his fellow Hutts considerable freedom in the Outer Rim.

Jabba transplanted Desilijic operations from Nal Hutta to Tatooine, a backwater desert planet he began to think of as home. He built his palace around an ancient monastery of the B'omarr monks.

Jabba's deceptiveness was legendary among his throng. For instance, when he chose to hire Gamorreans as his enforcers, he had to follow Gamorrean tradition and best the pig-like warriors in combat. While the Hutt may be able to defeat a single Gamorrean in hand-to-hand combat, a dozen Gamorreans was more than he cared to handle. Instead, Jabba challenged the dim-witted pig-guards to blindfolded combat, claiming that he could defeat all of them. The guards accepted, and once they were blindfolded, 20 of Jabba's armed henchmen brutally attacked the Gamorreans. When the dust cleared, the blindfolds were revealed, and Jabba, bearing cosmetic scars, claimed victory. The Gamorreans, including Ortugg the axeman, served him loyally ever since.

Behind the Scenes

Before he became the fat loathsome slug that we recognize Jabba as in Return of the Jedi, Jabba was referred to as a "Hut," and looked quite different. In the 1977 version of A New Hope, there was to be a confrontation between Han Solo and Jabba that was filmed, but it was never completed to make the final release.

The script establishes Jabba to be a large, repulsive creature, an effect that George Lucas could not realize at the time. He is described as a "fat, slug-like creature with eyes on extended feelers and a huge ugly mouth." The scene was filmed with a stand-in actor, Declan Mulholland. It would be over 20 years later that this scene was finally completed. The Special Edition of A New Hope featured a computer-generated Jabba replacement for Mulholland.

In the Marvel Comics adaptation of Star Wars, the confrontation remains intact, but Jabba is a tall humanoid with a walrus-like face, a scraggly topknot, and a bright uniform. The Marvel artists used a variation of Mosep, one of Jabba's underlings, glimpsed as an extra in the Mos Eisley scenes.

With the release of The Empire Strikes Back, Jabba gained an extra 't' to become a "Hutt." When he was finally revealed to be a large sluglike creature in Return of the Jedi, Marvel's Jabba was proven apocryphal.

Marvel's Jabba attempted to collect the debt Han owed him, and confronted the smuggler on the planet Orleon. The two fled the world when they discovered it was infested with stone mites. Jabba's ship, the Voidraker, was also infested, and in exchange for dropping the debt, Han rescued Jabba, and let him on the Millennium Falcon. Jabba later discovered the wreck of Crimson Jack's cruiser, a starship that he financed. Since the ship was destroyed by Han Solo (albeit indirectly), Jabba reinstated the Solo's debt. While this particular version of these events didn't happen, it is still possible that the Orleon incident did occur.

In the film Return of the Jedi, Jabba was performed by three puppeteers, David Barclay, Toby Philpott, and Mike Edmonds in his tail. Edmonds also played Logray, the Ewok medicine man.