6) Jabba The Hutt
Jabba the Hutt cast a long shadow over the original trilogy, as all we knew about him was that he was the powerful crime boss sending bounty hunters after Han Solo. In Return of the Jedi, he finally made his debut in the (slimy) flesh and instantly wormed his way into the public consciousness.
Unlike the grand villainy of the Sith and Imperial forces, Jabba offers a different sort of evil. Greedy, gluttonous, lascivious, Jabba is one nasty customer – something perfectly embodied in his grotesque design (after initially being portrayed as humanoid, by Scottish actor Declan Mulholland, in a deleted scene from A New Hope). It’s not easy to best Leia and Han, but he had the warrior princess in chains as his slave and the famed smuggler as a living piece of art on his wall.
Thankfully, he got his comeuppance when Leia used the very chains that he used to enslave her to throttle him to death in one of the franchise’s big feminist moments – even if the effect was limited a bit by her wearing a metal bikini at the time.