Jabba the Hutt
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Template:SW Character Jabba Desilijic Tiure, or simply Jabba the Hutt, (596 BBY–4 ABY) (son of Zorba The Hutt) is a character in the Star Wars movies. Jabba is of the Hutt race and, like most of his species, a gangster. Hutts are a large slug-like race with thick, leathery skin, human-like arms, large amber eyes, and wide mouths. A Hutt may weigh in excess of several tons. They speak Huttese, a language reminiscent of Quechua.
A mobster, Jabba the Hutt was the unsurpassed top dog of crime in the Outer Rim Territories. Overseeing his business out of Tatooine, Jabba had interest in a number of profitable and illegal schemes -- slavery, gunrunning, spice-smuggling, extortion and more.
A robust Hutt, Jabba bore a resemblance to a large slug, being that he was legless. A broad, slobbering smile divided his dreary countenance, and two yellow-red reptilian eyes gazed with detached amusement from his mammoth cranium. Jabba encircled himself with the criminal sect of the social order, guaranteeing his security with a shield of henchmen. He dwelt in a luxurious but entropic stronghold out on the edge of the Tatooine Dune Sea.
Jabba's dark hedonism was well-known. He entertained himself by tormenting, humiliating, and killing his followers. He kept slave girls shackled to him for his entertainment. When bored, Jabba would lethally dismiss his cherished chattels via a trap door.
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Episode I
In The Phantom Menace, Jabba makes a cameo appearance at the Boonta Eve Classic podracing event where he declares the beginning of the race. He is then seen asleep at the end of the race, until Bib Fortuna wakes him. Jabba was computer generated and credited as playing "himself."
Episode IV
Prior to A New Hope, Jabba sent Han Solo on a Kessel run to smuggle spice. However Han was forced to dump the spice when he was boarded by an Imperial starship. Jabba demanded that Han pay him the value of the cargo. When the smuggler failed to pay him back, he put a price on Han's head. Greedo attempted to collect the bounty, but was killed for his efforts.
Re-released version
George Lucas filmed a scene for Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in which Jabba confronted Solo in the Millennium Falcon's launch bay, but this scene did not appear in the original 1977 theatrical release. In this scene, following the death of Greedo, Jabba met Han in the Millennium Falcon's hangar bay, where he agreed to let Han go, in exchange for a premium of 15%, with a warning that if Han delayed payment again, he would have a price on his head so high that Han would not be able to go near a civilized star system.
In the unaltered film footage, Jabba was portrayed by a stocky male actor in a shaggy coat. The actor was intended only a temporary stand-in that would be replaced by a stop-motion creature in post-production, but this process was unsuccessful due to the limitations in visual effects at the time. Eventually the 1997 re-release of the film restored the sequence but with a CGI version of Jabba (more mobile than suggested by his sedentary Return of the Jedi appearances) that obscured the original actor, and newly recorded dialogue in the Huttese language (also introduced in the later film).
A challenge was that the scene had been staged for two ordinary-sized humanoid characters, and Harrison Ford, playing Solo, had walked around the other actor without allowance for the bulk and large tail that the later version of Jabba would have. Lucas and his effects team dealt with this by manipulating the image so that Solo appears to walk over Jabba's tail and Jabba yelps in pained surprise. This somewhat humorous effect was not entirely popular with fans of the series, since it was inconsistent with the plot. In another odd twist, as Solo leaves Jabba for his ship, he says that Jabba is a "wonderful human being", which can make the scene puzzling as the current Jabba is not human and sarcastic in that Jabba is not wonderful either.
Further improvements in CGI techniques led to yet another version of the scene for the 2004 re-release.
Episode VI
The bounty on Solo's head was eventually collected, between Episodes 5 and 6, by Boba Fett.
In Return of the Jedi, after a failed attempt by Princess Leia and Chewbacca to rescue Han Solo, Luke Skywalker's attempt succeeds and leaves Jabba the Hutt dead after being strangled by Leia (given Jabba's immense size, and Leia's lack thereof, it is likely that Leia was - perhaps unwittingly - using a form of Force choke on Jabba). This death scene has been acknowledged by George Lucas as being a nod to the garroting death of Luca Brasi in The Godfather, directed by his mentor Francis Ford Coppola. In this movie, Jabba is "played" by a large puppet requiring several operators.
Expanded Universe
Jabba's rise to the chief of the Desilijic crime family was protracted and treacherous, but Hutts have long life spans and persistence to go with it. Jabba inherited much from his father Zorba, whose unremitting imprisonments were a clear sign that he was an incompetent leader. Despite the fact that Jabba profited from Zorba's losses, the largest part of his riches came from triumphs in the competition between the Desilijic and Besadii crime families.
By the time he was 600, Jabba had become the Hutt, cutting out an extensive crime syndicate covering most of the Outer Rim Territories. Although the well-known Black Sun syndicate controlled the Core and adjacent regions, it allowed Jabba and the other Hutts extensive autonomy in the Outer Rim.
Jabba relocated the Desilijic business from Nal Hutta to Tatooine, a remote desert world he started to consider home. He erected his stronghold in the environs of a very old monastery of the B'omarr monks.
Outside of Star Wars films
There are rumours that the name of Jabba the Hutt is based on Czech words - žába and had (English: toad and snake). Authors looked for the most ugly spelled words. Or, like "Alderaan", it may have come from a disused real-world star name of Arabic origin: see Alderaan (real).
In the radio version of the series, a version of the scene with Han Solo added to Episode IV was included, with a new character called Heater replacing Jabba.
In the Expanded Universe, the death of Jabba cancelled the debts of many individuals and as such, Luke was held with considerable favour for removing that dangerous complication in their lives.
Years after Jabba's death, many Hutts preferred that Jabba lived. If he did live, there would have been no Darksaber project. The disastrous deal that the Hutts made with the Yuuzhan Vong would never have happened.
In the movie Spaceballs, Jabba the Hutt was parodied as "Pizza the Hutt", a cheesy blob whose name is also a reference to Pizza Hut. Pizza the Hutt, like Jabba, dies in the movie. However, his cause of death is eating himself.
Jabba the Hutt also got his own comic book. It was called The Art of the Deal and features Jabba, Bib Fortuna and the rest of Jabba's crew, where he - through the adventures he gets in - lectures in dirty tricks and exchanging of favors.fr:Jabba le Hutt nl:Jabba the Hutt