Jabba the Hutt sails back on to shelves in the latest LEGO Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series set, but demands a bounty greater than many of us will be able to stomach.
It turns out we should have been paying attention when the LEGO Group debuted
Release: October 3 (Insiders), October 6 (wide), 2024 Price: £429.99 / $499.99 / €499.99 Pieces: 3,942 Minifigures: 9 (plus Jabba and Salacious Crumb figures) LEGO:
A barge for the ages
Before we get bogged down in talking about price, because like nearly all LEGO Star Wars sets this is one that will hopefully be discounted eventually, let’s talk about
Selecting this Return of the Jedi icon for a coveted UCS slot was a shrewd move, though. It’s like nothing you’ll have built before from LEGO Star Wars. Yes, you’ve built capital ships, you’ve built cantinas and you’ve even built characters… but you’ve never built a giant space boat. The sense of something fresh and different on such a supersonic scale hits you by the end of the first few bags, when the Technic base on which everything else sits is firmly in place, revealing the true scope of 75397 Jabba’s Sail Barge. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn it's massive.
It's 77cm long, in fact, and commands a huge presence in the same way the barge did on screen, and in a way the playset versions have not really translated to bricks so far. You’re still mostly working within a singular palette – browns – but hey, at least it’s not greys. (There are some greys too.) And while it sticks with the tried-and-tested approach of a removable deck (in two separate sections here for better accessibility and stability) and folding panels, there are some clever touches along the way to account for the bump in size and weight.
The heaviest panels at the back of the barge use a loose bar and hole connection to stay in place, for example, ensuring everything stays together without compromising access to the interior. The deck itself manages to find ways to keep things interesting too, with hatches that reach down inside and turrets that can be picked up and moved around the extensive tubing, which forms the rails that run the full length of the top level. And the giant paper sails, packaged separately to avoid creasing (although ours still turned up folded over by dint of everything else in the box), are far more pleasant on the eyes than the shiny vinyl versions used in the 2013 set.
Where the panels that form the shell of the boat could have been a blinding mass of brown that swallowed up any potential details, the designers have employed a smart combination of dark brown pieces, grille tiles, hinges and other greebles to keep things visually interesting. Piecing it all together is inevitably repetitive in stages, but it might just remind you of running alongside this thing in LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga – especially all those hinged window panels you could snap off for studs. (Although there’s only space for them on the back panel here, unfortunately – the rest are fixed tiles.)
UCS or MBS? (Why not both?)
While it’s just too dark to see through those windows, pulling open the panels reveals a fully fleshed out and incredibly detailed interior.
The full interior includes the cockpit (with two seats and multiple control panels); a prison (with removable rear wall for a quick escape to… the barge’s outer shell?) and armoury; a kitchen (complete with a tiny olive green frog that you could generously call a newborn Hutt); and what the LEGO Group is calling the ‘entertainment room’. It’s here where you’ll place Jabba on a removable bed, with Max Rebo standing just next door playing his Red Ball Jett keyboard. That the sandy bed can be removed to stand alone is a nice touch, and calls back to sets such as
In short, we’ve come a long way since 75192 Millennium Falcon’s limited interior: this set makes more than ample use of every square inch of the Sail Barge’s internal space, and even has a couple of removable ladders that reach up to those top-deck hatches, filling gaps inside without getting in the way when you want to interact with the interior. It’s very much up there with 75331 The Razor Crest and 75313 AT-AT from an internal perspective.
There’s a lot to love here inside and out, which is pretty much what you’d hope for from an Ultimate Collector Series set. Where
That’s a shame for the price tag, but what we do have here is a generally excellent selection of minifigures. There are sore spots – Bib Fortuna reusing his Book of Boba Fett headpiece, rather than the more accurate Return of the Jedi element from older sets; Salacious Crumb’s missing pupils; Princess Leia’s dual-moulded legs that inadvertently (or not) give her shorts – but on the other hand there’s Jabba with improved printing over his 2013 version (which was already a mould ahead of its time), Max Rebo looking as great as ever, a couple of brand new and obscure alien characters in Vizam and Wooof, and the best Gamorrean Guard and Kithaba to date.
The great Jabba hopes that you will pay honourably
But then… that price tag.
There are some LEGO sets that come in at incredibly high price tags but are obviously worth saving up for –
Do you see where £430 is going here compared to, say,
It's even more frustrating given a fairer solution is staring us in the face: including the contents of
It’s a shame to have to focus the discussion here so heavily on price, because
If it’s enough to get the nod on day one, you can at least soften the blow with
This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.
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Our honest opinion: An all-time LEGO Star Wars set punctuated by a price tag few will be able to justify. But if you see it discounted, snap it up: it really is the ultimate Sail Barge.
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