I saw Return of the Jedi at the theater in Breckenridge Village here in Little Rock. That building has been torn down twice since then, and the spot is a Film Alley now, which tells you about how long ago 1983 was.
After the movie we probably jumped over to Kmart, because that's where the latest action figures were, and I think that's the trip where I finally got Boba Fett. I can't swear to it after forty-some years, but I know I wanted him bad. Gotta love the Fett.
What I didn't find on that trip, or any trip after it, was the Sail Barge. Kenner gave us Jabba and his throne, and eventually the little skiff, but the big tan barge with the cloth sails, where the whole back half of the movie happens, never made it to a shelf. At figure scale it would have been about four feet long, and I don't think anybody in 1983 was going to put a four-foot boat in the toy aisle at Kmart, no matter how many of us were standing there looking for it.
So it sat on collectors' wish lists for something like thirty-five years. In February 2018 Hasbro tried an experiment they called HasLab, where fans paid up front, and if 5,000 people signed on by early April, Hasbro would actually build the thing. It got there in the last couple of weeks and closed out at 8,810 backers. The barges started showing up on porches in March 2019, in vintage-style Kenner packaging, with a Jabba figure and a carded Yak Face that only the backers got.
It never went to retail in the US, so every one you'll run across over here came from somebody who signed up in 2018 and then, for whatever reason, decided not to open it.
That's where mine comes in. It's still in the brown shipper carton Hasbro mailed it in, shrink-wrap and all. I haven't cut the tape and I'm not going to, so the only pictures of the barge itself are Hasbro's. What I can show you is the carton, with the item number, UPC and date code printed right on the side, which is about as close to a birth certificate as a toy gets.
Hasbro's photo of the assembled barge. The one I've got stays in the box until you decide otherwise.
If you were one of the kids staring at that aisle in '83, I figure you've waited long enough. The barge is right here.
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