Jabba's Palace Pop-up Book

Jabba's Palace

Author: Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta

Illustrator: Ralph McQuarrie

Medium: Picture book

Publication Date: September 1996

Timeline Placement: 4 ABY

 

One of my favorite Star Wars picture books, Jabba's Palace Pop-up Book (or, more accurately, Jabba's Palace according to the interior title page, which indicates that the "Pop-up Book" text is more of a description than a part of the title) tells the story of Jubnuk, one of Jabba the Hutt's Gamorrean guards. You can tell which one he is in the movie because he's the one who falls into the rancor pit and gets eaten alive.

Jubnuk lives with his wife and children on Tatooine. As one of the newest guards at Jabba's palace, Jubnuk and his family are assigned to the palace's bright, above-ground living quarters. Jubnuk hopes that with hard work and loyalty, he will be able to impress Jabba enough to eventually move to the dim, dank underground quarters that his people prefer.

Today, Jabba is cross over having lost his lucky charm, a Tusken battle talisman carved from bantha horn. He assigns Jubnuk to find it for him on pain of terrible punishment should he fail. Jubnuk, already slow-witted at the best of times, is confused by this assignment, as he doesn't know what the talisman looks like or where it might be found, but he resolves to do his best and spends the day wandering around the various areas of the palace looking for it. He encounters beloved characters like Bib Fortuna and EV-9D9, who is busy instructing her two new charges, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Jubnuk tries to help her keep these two scalawags in line. He questions the B'omarr monks, the smartest people he knows. The monks haven't seen the talisman, but they offer to remove Jubnuk's brain and implant it in a nutrient jar so he can contemplate this mystery without distractions. Jubnuk says no thank you and continues on his quest.

Jubnuk returns to Jabba's throne room to make his report, but he finds the Hutt in conversation with a human called Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. Jubnuk doesn't trust this stranger, but as he makes his way forward to protect Jabba, he plummets into the rancor pit with the Jedi as Jabba triggers the trapdoor in front of his dais.

Landing in the pit, Jubnuk realizes that this is the one part of the palace he hasn't searched for the talisman. The rancor then picks him up and devours him, and the book seems to come to an abrupt, tragic end...

 

...but maybe that's not how it happened. 

 

When I first discovered this book through Wookieepedia nearly twenty years ago, what was most remarkable to me was the casual note at the end of Jubnuk's article mentioning that, according to Jabba's Palace Pop-up Book, the Gamorrean actually survived his canonical on-screen death at the claws of the rancor! This immediately became one of my favorite trivia quirks of the Expanded Universe, so imagine my disappointment when I finally bought the book and what was clearly the last page ended with Jubnuk's unequivocal death. It must have been a troll edit on Wookieepedia, a joke someone added to an article on a topic so obscure no one ever bothered to check it. Jubnuk was dead; Jubnuk was buried; Jubnuk was gone.

No resurrections this time.

Then I noticed the almost imperceptible line around the text box on that last page, no greater than a hair's breadth. After some fiddling, I was able to separate three sides of that box from the surrounding page, revealing the secret ending hidden beneath it.

Two dense paragraphs of text reveal that, after Luke Skywalker has killed the rancor and all the commotion has died down, the remaining denizens of Jabba's palace hear sounds coming from the belly of the beast. They cut it open, and out steps Jubnuk, no worse for wear, his Gamorrean guard armor having protected him from the rancor's bone-crushing jaws. In his hand, he clutches Jabba's good luck charm. He has won. No tragedy, this, but a triumph, perhaps the most triumphant hero's journey ever depicted in Star Wars media. Jubnuk is the last man standing; he has conquered death itself. The Wookieepedia article was correct.

Jubnuk looks for Jabba to return his Tusken battle talisman, but Jabba has gone out to the Dune Sea for a prisoner execution, and rumors of explosions and mayhem have reached the palace. Jubnuk hopes he hasn't missed any excitement. He decides to hang on to the talisman until Jabba returns. In the meantime, maybe it will bring him some good luck...

5/5 Death Stars. A great, great book. Perhaps the bravest thing Kevin J. Anderson has ever written. A triumph, not just of Star Wars literature, but of the human green pig-man spirit.

I've never heard of anything like the secret ending in any other book before. Usually these lift-the-flap type of books will give some kind of indication that there's a flap to lift, like a semicircular cut-out you can work your fingernail underneath to pry it up. In Jabba's Palace, the flap just lies flush with the rest of the page. In a brand-new copy where the pages haven't been bent by small hands and the bottom of the secret flap has yet to be creased, it would be very easy to read the book and never know that the True Ending even exists. It's like they were deliberately trying to keep it hidden, which is crazy because this was a mass-produced, widely available, officially licensed Star Wars book with pages that had to be cut and printed by a real publishing company. It's not like KJA was tucking hand-written notes into the back of each copy as they went out the door.

Leland Chee, Lucasfilm's official Keeper of the Holocron continuity database, tweeted in 2013, "That part about Jubnuk the Gamorrean surviving after being swallowed by Jabba's rancor?  I'm gonna pretend that never happened." I'd postulate that maybe KJA was trying to sneak Jubnuk's survival past the buzzkill LFL continuity cops, but that's a lot of effort considering their dismal arrest record.

I'll also point out that despite being ignorant of the secret ending almost seventeen years after the book came out, Leland Chee never actually said that it was non-canon or not official. He only said that he, personally, was going to pretend it didn't happen. Did he mean this in his capacity as the chronicler of official Star Wars history, or was he talking about his own private headcanon? Who cares, the guy manages spreadsheets, why did anyone ever think he has iron-clad Word-of-God control over what aspects of officially licensed canon products are or aren't "true"?

This is an important distinction because, prior to receding from public view in the aftermath of Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm and the discarding of EU continuity ("We don't reboot. We don't start from scratch." – Leland Chee, 2008), Chee was known to make "official" declarations on social media in which he'd arbitrarily decree, seemingly on a whim, that certain individual elements of long-established EU lore were no longer canon. He did this with Palpatine's use of clone bodies before Return of the Jedi, Yoda's knowledge of Dagobah before Revenge of the Sith, and Greedo's father's appearance as a child in The Phantom Menace. But to the best of my knowledge, he never did it to Jubnuk's survival in Jabba's Palace Pop-up Book, aside from his off-the-cuff snark about pretending it never happened. 

Nevertheless, the editors of Wookieepedia, who I would trust with arbitrating Star Wars canon significantly less than I would Leland Chee ("...as long as there's the Holocron, Star Wars will not reboot." – Leland Chee, 2012), have taken it upon themselves to mark the section of Jubnuk's article describing his survival with their {{Unlicensed}} tag, denoting it as "contain[ing] information from a Star Wars Legends source that was released outside of the Lucas Licensing process," even though as far as I can tell this is completely made up.

 

NO FUN ALLOWED

This is the source of my gripe not just with Wookieepedia, but with Star Wars fans in general who dismiss out of hand any aspects of it that are too un-serious for them to handle in their inherently ridiculous children's space fantasy. It's not an issue of poor writing or incoherent continuity or a complete lack of the themes and tones of Star Wars, no, they can deal with all that. But they can't abide some fringe detail minding its own business on the outskirts of canon, having no effect on the major storylines, doing nothing but adding some small dash of flavor to an increasingly colorless universe. Details like Mount Sorrow or The Glove of Darth Vader or Yoda's Jedi Master or Boba Fett being eaten by and escaping from the Sarlacc three different times (yes, that's canon) or, yes, the survival and triumph of Jubnuk. Nerds hyperfixate on these irrelevant curiosities like they're so embarrassing they somehow ruin this perfect, sacrosanct thing that is Star Wars, failing to realize that caring about Star Wars to such an extreme is itself the embarrassment.

But we know that Jubnuk struggled, and Jubnuk strove, and Jubnuk survived, and, ultimately, Jubnuk succeeded. It's printed right there on the page, black and white, clear as crystal. And nothing Wookieepedia or Leland Chee or Pablo Hidalgo or Dave Filoni or anyone else can ever say can undo our knowledge that the seemingly lifeless arm dangling from the rancor's mouth in this image belongs to a very much alive Gamorrean named Jubnuk, a Gamorrean small of brain but big of heart, a winner.