Jabba The Hutt Origin Reveals He Wasn’t Always A Slug

How did George Lucas go from—in Chris Farley’s words—a “Fat guy in a little coat,” to the gooey gastropod we see in Return of the Jedi? A little bad luck and a whole lot of trial and error.

Hardcore Star Wars fans are already familiar with Jabba the Hutt’s origins as a human, but for everyone else, here’s a quick rundown. George Lucas’s original plan was to have Jabba show up in A New Hope to confront Han over Greedo’s death. The scene was filmed with Irish actor Declan Mulholland with the hope that Industrial Light & magic (ILM) could animate some sort of alien creature over him in post-production. George Lucas scrapped the scene after it became clear that ILM couldn’t make his vision come true.

At least, that’s Lucas’s version of the story. There’s a good chance that Jabba the Hutt’s origin happened slightly differently. For one thing, the scene wasn’t filmed as though it would be altered in post. Lucas didn’t shoot any background plates, he didn’t use a blue screen, and he didn’t block the scene correctly.

Meanwhile, there is documentation that Lucas filmed the Jabba scene three times and cut it because none of the takes looked good. In other words, it’s very likely that George originally intended for Jabba the Hutt to be a human but later changed his mind. Who knows what Jabba we would have gotten if the scene hadn’t been plagued with technical difficulties?

At some point after Jabba the Hutt’s human origin in A New Hope, George Lucas decided that Jabba should be an alien. The director rejected several designs before settling on the big slug we all know and love. He would eventually add the alien Jabba scene into A New Hope for the 1997 Special Edition theatrical release.

The director used what was then state-of-the-art CGI to superimpose Return of the Jedi Jabba over the original human actor. While that finally solved the problem of human Jabba in the movies, the character made a few rare appearances elsewhere in the franchise. One Legends story retconned Declan Mulholland’s human Jabba as a decoy that Jabba employed for meetings to keep his real identity a secret.

Even the Return of the Jedi novelization makes a possible reference to Jabba the Hutt’s unlikely origin. In the book, writer James Kahn describes Jabba as having “no hair—it had fallen out from a combination of diseases.” One could infer from that description that Jabba’s monstrous look is the result of sickness rather than genetics, meaning that he could have started life as a more human-like figure.

For over forty years the Hutts have been accepted as large hairless, slugs with big tongues and even bigger appetites. And while that version of the species isn’t going anywhere any time soon it’s still fun to look back at Jabba the Hutt’s humble origins—that one fleeting moment, when Jabba was just some guy, and not a frog-slurping monster.