Sculptor Tony McVey talks Salacious Crumb: “If I’d known it was going to be put on Jabba’s tail, I would have spent more time on it”

Sculptor Tony McVey talks to the official site about his work on the original Salacious Crumb, a character that was sculpted to be a background creature not an up-front main character, and discusses his return to Mr Crumb almost 40 years later to work on Regal Robot’s Salacious B. Crumb 1:1 Prop Replica Statue Dual-Signature Edition.

After a stint with Jim Henson’s studio working on The Dark Crystal, Phil Tippett brought McVey on for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. McVey sculpted the bodies for the Gamorrean guards, helped Tippett with the first incarnation of the rancor suit that was intended to be worn by a human, and worked on the armature for the massive rancor hand that gripped Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill in close-up shots. Occasionally, he even stepped into the hand, he says, a favorite place to pose for photos among the crew.

But while McVey helped with the look of Sy Snootles and many background aliens for Jabba’s Palace, his work is synonymous with the cackling court jester that perched on Jabba the Hutt’s tail: Salacious B. Crumb. The Kowakian monkey-lizard was cooked up in a single night — in about 10 minutes, McVey recalled in The Art of The Mandalorian Season 1 — and was intended to perch on the shoulder of Ephant Mon, a blink-and-you-miss-it part of the crowd. However, the crew, including George Lucas himself, became so enamored with the creature that the puppet quickly got promoted to Jabba’s minion, coming to life at the hands of puppeteer Tim Rose and Mark Dodson who provided the voice. “One day I came in and here was Salacious and I fell in love with Salacious,” Lucas said in The Making of Return of the Jedi.

Be sure to check out the full and fascinating interview with Tony and Regal Robot supremo Tom Spina, where they go into details about the new and faithful sculpt.