Tatooine
In George Lucas's Star Wars saga, Tatooine is the home planet of the Skywalker family and the setting for much of the action in the saga's films (as well as several of the novels and other pieces of written fiction). The planet is not actually named in ; according to Lucas he named it retrospectively after the movie's desert location, Tatouine in Tunisia.Tatooine is a desert world in a binary star system, inhabited by poor locals who mostly farm moisture for a living. The planet was ruled for a long period by the Hutts, being beyond the reach of the Galactic Republic. After the fall of the Republic, the Galactic Empire established a token presence on Tatooine, but the crime lord Jabba the Hutt still retained de facto control of the planet.
Tatooine has several sizable settlements, the largest of which is the spaceport Mos Eisley, widely known for its rough-and-tumble nature and vast criminal underworld. Other settlements include Bestine (the nominal capital of the planet, where the Empire's government is located), Anchorhead, and Mos Espa, home of a sector-famous podracing track.
Notable geological features include the Dune Sea, an enormous desert, and the Jundland Wastes, a rocky region. Despite the planet's extreme aridity, some forms of life do thrive on Tatooine, including the rodent-like womp rat, elephant-like bantha, and the enormous, fearsome krayt dragon.
Tatooine is also home to two apparently native sentient bipedal species: Jawas, pygmy-like mechanical scavengers, and Tusken Raiders, also known as Sand People, who are mysterious, reclusive, and extremely hostile to outsiders. Both races wear fully-concealing robes that keep their true forms hidden from outsiders (It's stated in the Expaned Universe that Jawas are rodent-like, and it is vaguely hinted that the Jawas and Sand People share a common ancestor).
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2 Flora 3 Fauna |
Some critics have seen Lucas's use of a desert planet as excessively derivative of Frank Herbert's Arrakis in the Dune series of novels.Intelligent Life Forms
Flora
None known.Fauna