Jabba's Dungeon Playset Cromalin
The picture above shows a Cromalin for the Jabbas Dungeon playset. It exhibits various marked changes and notes on it, most notably the wording located underneath some of the "action" shots on the sides of the box.

The text that was originally conceived was : The Branding Iron Will Torture Any Droid In Jabbas Dungeon

It seems that the word torture was a bit too much for this particular kids toy, even if it did feature a torture droid!

This change was marked on the Cromalin by one of the departments that worked on this design and you can read the new suggested text here :

It reads : Use the branding iron on any droids in Jabbas dungeon

I believe the wording located on the bottom left indicates the text/size to be used (10pt Avant Gard Medium)

Joe became interested to see if that change actually was made or was left out due to time constraints and to his surprise the new text IS on the finished article :

The cool thing is that the change was NOT added to the box design that went ahead for printing, it is actually a sticker!

You can see it clearer in the above picture, a small black sticker with the new text neatly stuck over the old text!

Joe has never seen playsets without the sticker and sure enough if you check your playsets and take the sticker up the old "torture" text is still underneath :)

There are a few more cool things on this piece, the next picture shows the box design a bit closer and you will notice that the bottom right blank areas are marked for changes

These boxes are the barcode box (called a UPC) and the top is noted as a PIS, interestingly they were printed out on the final design and here is the wording that went into the PIS box.

Timeline:

This particular Cromalin started its journey on the 7th June 1983, first sign off is the 8th June, in Marketing.

Here is the sign off sheet which shows the dates ,signatures and departments it went through.

If you check the last date on the sheet you can see it was signed off by an Engineer on June 22nd and seemingly signed off again on the same day by the Packaging Art Director, he didn't date it but he used the same pen so I think its safe to say it was the same day.

June 22nd has a special meaning to Joe because it is his birthday. Joe was very lucky to have this piece come up and with the birthday link couldn't pass it up, so he says a big thanks to his Wife who bought this for his 26th.

A big thanks go out to Joe for not only submitting this piece to the SWCA, but also for writing a very comprehensive and decriptive entry to go along with the photos.

Description by: Michael G. Mensinger, J. O'Brien
Photo: J. O'Brien
From the collection of: J. O'Brien
Country:United States
Film:Return of the Jedi
Licensee:Kenner
Year:1983
Category:Prototypes / Prototype Packaging and Proofs


  


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