Sorry to bump an old thread but I’ve got Lapti Nek on the mind today. I was surprised to find recently that there are two Huttese recordings of the song (Arbogast & Gruska); this much seems to be old hat for the OT community. But perhaps it’s equally surprising to discover that the theatrical cut’s track doesn’t say “Lapti Nek” (“Fancy Man”) in the lyrics at all, either in one place where Arbogast/Snootles should be singing it, or in the equivalent to the antiphonal part of the English on-set recording from “Return of the Ewok” (filled with Max Rebo instrumentals in the Arbogast recording):
https://youtu.be/Zd4Gwe6EYaU?t=68s (Fancy Man Source Gallery)
If you pay close attention to the English lyrics there, the line is “another man is comin’.” Wookieepedia tries to offer lyrics for the theatrical performance, with English equivalents, but imports “Lapti Nek”/“Fancy Man” from the Gruska recording:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lapti_Nek
Meanwhile, I don’t hear a “Lapti Nek” in the line starting here (at most there’s a “lapti zuke” but that seems a stretch, and at any rate it wouldn’t jive with my observation for Huttese in the last paragraph below):
https://youtu.be/lM7-bg-KhQg?t=25s (Despecialized Clip)
So anyway, just sinking down the Lapti Nek rabbit hole a bit which has led me here and a few other places on the Internet. Have I deepened the mystery? Obviously, the full song doesn’t appear in ROTJ, but I think the lyrics might’ve changed slightly between the time of the Arbogast and Gruska recordings, such that it might be proper to now say that “Lapti Nek” isn’t in ROTJ at all. More than that, I wonder if the Arbogast rough recording just better matched the feel of the scene, and the Gruska recording functioned more like an orchestral piece (think “Parade of the Ewoks”) for ROTJ’s soundtrack release. I’m not even one of those types who like to believe that George was some saint, blindsided by Marcia in 1983 — there are just probably better explanations for the Arbogast recording “staying in” that have to do with creative choice, rather than the implication that George was seeing Annie and wanted to throw her a bone.
- Edit: Found the following unexpected details in Rinzler’s Making Of book for ROTJ, pg. 282. “For the Jabba’s palace number, sound department assistant Annie Arbogast, who had an interest in being a reggae singer, had performed a temp track for Sy Snootles’s performance; she wrote her own lyrics in Huttese and Burtt had recorded her. Despite plans to change it, Lucas and Williams decided to keep the temp track; the former had lived with it for a year and it’d stuck. For the actual soundtrack album, however, Williams substituted his daughter-in-law for Snootles, though all concerned apparently felt at the time that the song hadn’t come out as planned.” Then it goes into how Lucas wanted something more “strange but lively” and “bizarre or unique” than “Top Forty.” I don’t know George, seems like everyone loved it but you. I am quite surprised though by the revelation that Gruska was a DIL to John Williams; perhaps there’s some sour grapes there?
I’ve also come across multiple attempts to transcribe the Huttese lyrics, and all of them seem to forget (or not have known?) that, because he had to match mouth movements for Jabba performed on set spoken with English lines, Ben Burtt insisted on a one-to-one syllabic correspondence of English to Huttese. What’s true of Jabba’s lips seems to be valid for Sy Snootles as well, so whatever transcription we use of the Huttese, it should probably start from what we know of the English lyrics, since Mark Hamill says in one of the documentaries that the song was written in English first.