Creating 'Jabba the Hutt' by John Coppinger

 Jabba the Hutt's creators

This is the story of how I sculpted Jabba the Hutt, as part of his construction team and one of the operators on set.  I was working for Stuart Freeborn on ‘Return of the Jedi’, when the film was still called ‘Revenge of the Jedi’.  That was in 1981.


Stuart had granted me an interview, during my last weeks on ‘The Dark Crystal’, promised me a job and the first thing he asked me to do when I started was to sculpt the enigmatic Jabba character.


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