Jabba's Palace

Jabba's Palace Adventure Set

Hasbro Walmart Exclusive

So Hasbro throws a bone to those of us that didn't fall for their Sail Barge hostage gambit.  It is a great consolation prize.  A new playset that isn't made of cardboard?! (Hasbro, you're all over the map here.)  Awesome!

For $50 you get three sculpted walls of Jabba's Palace.  This is great for all the 3 3/4'' fans who have amassed a slew of palace denizens over decades of collecting.  The paint looks appropriately weathered and sandy (it gets everywhere).  The back side of the main wall leaves a bit to be desired as far as detail, but the smaller walls, though hollowed, do have some fake tech and other bits sculpted into them.

The main wall has some nice "metal" grates and two taxidermy animal heads on display.  The Tauntaun head is spot on.  Not sure if this is a completely new sculpt, or if they chopped the head off an old one and called it a day. (The newest tauntaun I have is from the "Power of the Force 2" days.)

  

The Jerba head is an all-new sculpt, because we've never had a fully rendered jerba figure before.  Wait...it's called a "jerba?"  I actually had to look that up.  Well, I'll be!  It's in a background shot of "A New Hope!"  Not very grand of Jabba to display one of Tatooine's several common equivalents of a camel.  I mean, the tauntaun being from a foreign, icy clime is pretty exotic for a desert world, and the Rancor is definitely out of it's element.  Maybe there's a story behind it, like it belonged to a rival crime lord that was one of Jabba's first hits.  Perhaps it was used in a manner like the horse head scene in Godfather Part II?

The wall is also home to Jabba's favorite display piece, Han Solo in Carbonite.  Yes, included in the price is a vintage-carded Han with arm shackles and a separate carbonite slab.  The sculpts are decent, but only one side of the slab has paint detail and freed Han has a sloppy hairline.  And like most Han and Indiana Jones figures, maybe not the best Harrison Ford likeness we've seen.  The slab has a magnet inside so you can activate the playset's only action feature.  It sticks in place and can be raised or lowered an inch by way of a switch on the back of the wall.  Far from exciting, but it is a small detail that's nice to have.  Gotta give Leia a break there...she's so short, after all.

But wait, there's more!  You get a vintage carded Ree-Yees figure.    I really didn't need a more articulated Ree-Yees (having the 5-points of articulation POTF2 Ree AND his Star Tours repack), but he is quite nice.  Thanks to a bad Toyfare magazine gag (comic-paneled shots of toys that were a precursor to Robot Chicken), I cannot hear the name Ree-Yees without it being followed by the band Heart breaking into the chorus of "These Dreams."  "Ree-Yeeeeees goes on when I close my eye-ey-ey-ey-eyes!"

So there you have it.  $50 for a nice display piece/play set with two carded figures inside.  Not too shabby.  The outer packaging is all nice and vintage too, but what a dilemma for mint-on-card collectors...how are you gonna know what condition the figures inside are in, let alone that they are actually in there without cracking it open?  How much do you trust Hasbro?  Anyway, I picked this one up via preorder on Walmart.com but it has come and gone.  Good luck in finding this at your local Walmarts!  Ugh...isn't being an aging 3 3/4" Star Wars collector fun?