Jabba the Hutt is 35 years young and he’s never looked better than he did as a one-ton puppet in Return of the Jedi.
Weight like that is precisely what so many other CG characters since 1983 have lacked. As Solo: A Star Wars Story rules the box office, it’s worth remembering that the original Star Wars trilogy wrapped up this same time three and a half decades ago.
Return of the Jedi has a lot going for it, but it often suffers by comparison to A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Even David Fincher, who got his start working at Industrial Light & Magic on Return of the Jedi, seems to find the movie less interesting. He referred to it as the “one with all the creatures,” and the movie still is the zenith of creature effects work in the Star Wars franchise. On that front, it remains unassailable even as advances in motion capture technology have given us more and more highly expressive characters in Hollywood films.
Let’s take a look back at what made Return of the Jedi so special and what future Star Wars movies can possibly learn from its unforgettable alien line-up.
Before we dip our heads into Jabba’s palace, let’s touch briefly on a couple of the things Return of the Jedi has going for it besides creatures. One is the redemption of Darth Vader and the culmination of Luke Skywalker’s story arc. Luke’s three-movie maturation from a whiny teenager to the galaxy’s ultimate bad-ass Jedi warrior is something I wrote about last December while making the argument that he’s the greatest Star Wars character.
Apart from that, Return of the Jedi also had the benefit of coming at a time when fewer real-life environments had been explored on-screen in the Star Wars universe. In addition to providing the setting for a thrilling speeder bike chase, the forest moon of Endor, filmed in the redwood forests of Northern California, gave the movie a uniqueness of location that is really only rivaled by The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a toss-up: along with the forest moon, Jedi sailed us back over the sand planet of Tatooine and flew us into a half-constructed Death Star II, while Empire gave us the ice planet of Hoth, the swamp planet of Dagobah, and Cloud City on Bespin.
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Rogue One’s beach planet of Scarif and The Last Jedi’s oceanic planet of Ahch-To (where the island of the first Jedi Temple is located) have made strides toward restoring some of that lost locational uniqueness. But as cool as the idea of a scavenger planet is, and as neat as the streaks of red soil on that salty mineral planet look, locations like Jakku and Crait do feel like something of a Tatooine or Hoth remix.
As the Star Wars franchise has found new life under Disney, it feels like it has shifted more toward human characters and there have been fewer aliens with speaking parts. Penguinish porg cuteness notwithstanding, where have all the cool aliens gone? The only real vocal stand-outs that we’ve seen thus far are the mo-capped Maz Kanata and maybe Admiral Raddus, the Mon Calamari whose design was based on Winston Churchill. (Supreme Leader Snoke was more humanoid-looking, like an overgrown Imperial Advisor with lightsaber scars.)
For all we know, Solo: A Star Wars Story might rectify this shortage of new species (or even returning species), but other than a pre-existing Wookie named Chewbacca, there haven’t been any aliens featured prominently in the advertising. Most of the ones we see now are relegated to background status—if they even appear on-screen at all, as opposed to just having a toy released. Anyone remember the strange saga of Constable Zuvio?
Contrast this with Return of the Jedi and all its weird and wonderful aliens. It begins in Jabba’s palace, where characters like Bib Fortuna, the Gamorean Guards, and Salacious Crumb build upon the Mos Eisley Cantina’s promise of a galaxy populated with colorful creatures. Unfortunately, George Lucas went back and tampered with the Max Rebo Band for the Special Edition of Return of the Jedi, but the original trio lives on in memory, even if Sy Snootles is now an in-your-face CG singer.
There are also the skiff guards and a whole host of other peculiar faces lurking in the background of Jabba’s throne room and sail barge. You’d probably only know their names if you collected their action figures, but the various squid heads, yak faces, and three-eyed monsters with goat snouts all sport eye-catching designs that enable fans to pick them out of the crowd. Even casual viewers might zero in on them if only to wonder, “Who’s that guy?”
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