Bringing Star Wars' Salacious Crumb to life - Tim Rose

Jabba the Hutt's pet "Kowakian Monkey-Lizard" named Salacious B. Crumb is a fan favourite who seldom fails to get a laugh from audiences watching Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi. Salacious was known for his amusing antics and personality, which was brought to life by puppeteer Tim Rose, who was also the man behind Sy Snootles and was inside the costume of rebel commander Admiral Ackbar.

Rose's first experience puppeteering was his attempt at creating a Punch and Judy show for a renaissance fair in his youth. After this, his love for puppeteering only grew, which eventually lead to him getting a job working on the Muppet Show, designing and performing the puppets under master puppeteer Faz Fazakas and also working closely with Jim Henson.

Later on in his career, Rose got the job as a puppeteer in Return of the Jedi, as a result of another puppeteer suffering an injury.

Tim Rose puppeteering Salacious Crumb

In an exclusive interview with Red's Reviews & Interviews, Rose describes his time playing Salacious Crumb in the movie.

He explains, "Salacious Crumb was a hand puppet just like Kermit, and he was so much like Kermit that if you took the skin off, he had Kermit's skeleton inside of him... the same way that we would build Kermit the Frog was exactly how [Salacious] was made."

Laughing, Rose mentions, "The story behind his look and construction was 'What would Kermit the Frog look like if he took too many steroids?'"

Jabba's pet was actually named by George Lucas himself. Rose reveals that when he was "playing with the puppet", he asked Lucas for any tips on how he should play Salacious. Lucas replied with, "Well, I want you to puppeteer him, that's what you do, isn't it?". Later, George decided to name the character, "Salacious. Salacious Crumb." This gave Rose an idea of who Crumb would be, as the definition of 'Salacious' in his dictionary was "Someone who gets enjoyment in the misfortunes of others." He recalls thinking, "Salacious by name, Salacious by nature"

He continues, "So that's when I made him into the cheerleader for the Rancor pit monster, and every time somebody got fed to it, he'd be leaning over the pit, laughing away, listening to their bones crunching."

Commenting on the character's trademark laugh, Rose said, "It just seemed right when the bones are crunching, that's all!"

Tim Rose with Carrie Fisher

The puppeteer spent a lot of time with co-star Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the film series. He recalls, that she "didn't like talking [to him], but she liked talking to Salacious! So she and Salacious had a really fun friendship together, they talked quite a bit."

He also describes how Mark Hamill "had always wanted to be a stop-motion animator... so he would always come around to see what the animatronics were doing. He had a real focus and an interest in that."

Tim controlling Salacious B. Crumb

When asked about his thoughts regarding CGI, the puppeteer explained that he doesn't "have a lot of time for CGI. Although it's helped visualise things, it's also killed a lot of other things in the meantime. When you act with an animatronic character, the character is there on set, so if an actor does something that stimulates the action, you can see it as the animatronic character and respond to them, and both of you go off script and ad-lib and create something better than what was being done in the first place."

Rose is of the opinion that CGI films are "rollercoaster rides, where they blind you with so much visual effects... that you get from one end of it to the other, and you feel like you've been on a rollercoaster and don't even realise you didn't get much drama or much storyline or much anything else in there at all. It's killed drama."

To hear more of Tim's stories, head to my article about his role as Admiral Ackbar, where he shares details on the character's deleted death scene.