They have claimed a stop motion creature would replace the actor in 1977, but Phil Tippet didn’t get instruction on designing Jabba as a ‘Sidney Greenstreet’ type character until later…
Yeah , and there’s something suspect about the whole narrative . In the 1983 Documentary , From Star Wars to Jedi The Making A Saga , they go over it and show a part of the scene as originally shot with Decan Mullholland and then show a storyboard of what the intended creature effect of Jabba was supposedly going to look like , superimposed over the human figure on the storyboard . Giving the impression that it was an archival piece of artwork from the time of the shooting of the original film , except if you look closely , you can see what appears to be Salacious Crumb on the ground next to Jabba ! The little guy was never talked about , seen ,or mentioned until 1983.
Yeah, the whole thing stinks of another George retcon and him trying to alter history yet again.
The “Category No. 9 • Jabba originally was a human; from planning to filming…” of the George Lucas: Star Wars Creator, Unreliable Narrator & Time Travelling Revisionist thread really lays it all out quite well. With quotes from the people involved at the time, the guy who thought up and designed Salacious Crumb in 1981/82, the drawings, George’s changing to the scripts after the fact to insert a description of Jabba later being a “slug like creature”, and about that 1983 Documentary.