In the image below, we've gathered a handful of items that were available within the first six months of Star Wars' release in May, 1977. If you've ever owned one of these early items -- the novel, program book, soundtrack records, calendar, trading cards, etc. -- you may have noticed a famous Star Wars scene suspiciously absent from the photographs included with these publications -- yep, the Star Wars cantina.
For a sequence from the film that was immediately lauded as an audience favorite, it's a bit strange that not a single photograph of the cantina, or any of its colorful customers, were highlighted in the US media kits or published products available in 1977. In fact, the cantina didn't make an appearance in Topps' classic trading card set until the fifth series -- card # 277 -- released well into 1978.
Further evidence of a cantina cover-up arrived in the form of Ballantine's 1978 Star Wars Album book, a revised reprint of an earlier 1977 international collector's magazine. While the overall imagery and text remained the same, there were a few noteworthy omissions: a photo of the human actor portraying Jabba the Hutt in a deleted scene was removed; passages describing locales scripted for the sequel were stripped out; and most tellingly, a full-page color illustration of cantina aliens by the Hildebrandt Brothers had gone missing along with the artists' bio.
So why the six-month media black-out on one of Star Wars' most beloved scenes? We decided to do a little digging and call in some sources to find the answer.
Internally, some suggested the possibility that Lucasfilm didn't anticipate the popularity of the cantina sequence and so may have overlooked it in its early publicity and publishing materials. That sounded logical -- Lucas himself has said he originally envisioned a much busier cantina scene, an atmosphere most would agree he effectively achieved with a series of last-minute creature pick-up shots filmed after principle shooting had wrapped. Lucas still may have underestimated the scene's warm reception by audiences, though.
We followed up with a phone call to original Star Wars vice-president of marketing and merchandising Charley Lippincott, who would have been in charge of imagery used for publicity and publishing back in the days directly following A New Hope. He suggested there may have been questions surrounding the merchandising of the cantina aliens, namely those created by A New Hope's second unit make-up artist, Rick Baker, who'd loaned a bunch of his personal masks to the production to populate the cantina interiors during pick-up shots.
(UPDATE: We did manage to locate a July 1979 internal Lucasfilm memo suggesting which masks had been copyrighted by 20th Century Fox in 1977 and which were owned by Baker: Louie, Veiny, Bat, Wolfman, Brainee, and "Don Rickles". For mugshots of these and the other cantina aliens, please see our Cantina Roll-Call feature. We are still hoping to hear from Rick Baker himself regarding the circumstances surrounding the commercial use of these masks back in the 70s)
By mid-1978, the cantina embargo was apparently lifted, opening the taps to a torrent of cantina-related merchandise which included posters, action figures, puzzles, trading cards, and more. The cantina black-out was soon forgotten by the few fans who had noticed (we literally only found two old fanzine references where fans had raised the question) with attention trained on rumors and speculation surrounding the saga's next chapter -- which would introduce a memorable new alien of its own.
This investigation is underway. Keep an eye out for updates should we uncover any new information.
