Jabba's Dancing Girls (Star Wars: The Power of the Force): A review

(C) 1998 Hasbro, Inc. and Lucasfilm Ltd. 

You have to hand it to Jabba the Hutt. He might be the slimiest, most vile gangster in the galaxy, and he does surround himself with scum and villainy, but man, he does have some redeeming qualities. 

Er, two redeeming qualities: he likes good music, and he likes dancing girls. He has been known to hire such renowned groups as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes -- the jazz-like band that was present at Chalmun's Cantina in A New Hope -- and Max Rebo's Band, currently playing at Jabba's fortress-like palace on Tatooine. 

Although the core of the group is the trio of Max Rebo, Sy Snootles, and Droopy McCool, the Band has been known to hire additional musicians, including Joh Yowza, a Yuzzum from Endor; Barquin D'an, a Bith musician (and relative of Figrin's), and three shapely backup singer-dancers, Greeata, Lyn Me, and Rystall. 

Hasbro's Jabba's Dancing Girls is one of the 10 three-figure Power of the Force Cinema Scene Packs. Most of them feature a combination of major and bit players featured in George Lucas' 1977-83 Star Wars Trilogy, but Jabba's Dancing Girls is one of the few that showcases characters -- however minor -- featured in the 1997 Special Edition reissues. 

One of the reasons -- or lame rationalizations, as skeptical Star Wars fans might put it -- that Lucas altered the Original Trilogy was the chance for the director/producer to make his original vision for each film come to fruition. Lucas, it seems, was constrained by technology and production schedules and was forced to delete or abandon certain scenes he was particularly keen to see on film. One, of course, was the encounter between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt; a bigger, more elaborate musical number for Return of the Jedi was another. So when Lucasfilm began the process of creating CGI and digital cinematography hardware and software to make the current prequel trilogy, Lucas decided to test some of the new tools by revisiting the sequences he had always been unhappy with and made still-controversial changes to the "classic" trilogy. 


Jabba's Dancing Girls, first released in 1998, features Rystall, an exotic red-spotted dancer with flame-red hair and pale skin, Greeata, a member of the Rodian species to which Greedo from A New Hope and Wald from The Phantom Menace belong, and Lyn Me, a Twi'lek (like the ill-fated green-skinned Oola and Jabba's nasty majordomo, Bib Fortuna). They are wonderfully posed, caught in mid-dance in the dark cavernous main audience chamber in Jabba's Palace. As usual, the quality of the 3.75-inch figures is excellent; every costume and physical detail is carefully replicated, and the base and backdrop add both support and detailing to this mini-diorama based on the "Jedi Rocks" musical interlude from Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. 

For collectors, Hasbro's packaging design makes it easy to both store and display the figures. The clear plastic "window" lets one see the figures, plastic base, and cardboard backdrop without having to take Jabba's Dancing Girls out of the box. This obviously makes displaying multiple Cinema Scenes in limited shelf space possible; I simply stack them in chronological order -- with the exception of the newer Scene Packs, which have smaller boxes -- in two groups of 6 (with a thirteenth, Death Star Escape, strategically placed on the CD tower between them). I only have to dust the box tops and fronts, without having to worry about figures coming off their bases or losing tiny blasters and lightsabers. 

For small children, however, Jabba's Dancing Girls may not be the best gift. First, they can only be found at such online stores as Entertainment Earth or Brian's Toys; their limited availability means they can be pretty expensive, so a mom or dad might want to consider getting their young Jedi trainees something a bit more fun to play with (such as a Hasbro Electronic Lightsaber). Second, from a small child's point of view -- particularly a boy's -- Jabba's babes have no fun-to-play-with extras like the aforementioned tiny blasters and lightsabers. Rystall, Greeata, and Lyn Me just dance and look pretty (or as pretty as their species perceive them to be), unlike, say, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in "Final Jedi Duel. (Now, that one is really nifty! All of the figures in that set are major, and there is an exciting lightsaber duel!) 

(c) 2012 by Alex Diaz-Granados.  All rights reserved.