Star Wars: 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Jabba The Hutt
1. George Lucas Didn't Like The Puppet
George Lucas, co-directing and co-writing Return of the Jedi, was not impressed with the gargantuan puppet built to represent Jabba the Hutt. He was particularly unimpressed with how cumbersome it was, requiring hours of arduous heavy lifting for the crew to get it into position for different shots.
If the early 1980s had given Lucas access to CGI, he would have undoubtedly used it for Jabba. As it is there are three fully CGI versions of the Huttese crime boss in the Star Wars movies. One is the original Jabba added to the formerly deleted scene in 1997, a weirdly-proportioned creature that bears only a superficial resemblance to the creature in Return of the Jedi.
In 2004 this was replaced with a much more accurate and technically proficient version for the home media releases of the Special Edition. Sandwiched between these two is the version of a younger Jabba who presides over the podrace in The Phantom Menace, from 1999.
Few Star Wars purists would prefer a CGI Jabba to the return of the Jedi's majestic puppet. At half a million bucks, though, you can understand why George wasn't so keen to make a new one.