8
Spice Wars
Star Wars borrows the voice and soul of Dune.
No, my father didn’t fight in the wars, he was a navigator on a spice freighter.
—Luke Skywalker, Star Wars (1977)
The greatest twentieth-century film version of Dune was released in 1977, and it was called Star Wars. This relationship isn’t just a casual one. There is no way the 1977 Star Wars could have ever existed without Dune coming first. If there is a populist evolutionary chain of mainstream science fiction, and we consider Star Wars to be the most “evolved” of the species because of its massive profits, then Dune would be like the prehistoric Homo heidelbergensis, and Star Wars, Homo sapiens.[*] This analogy isn’t all that clean because Dune is more intelligent than Star Wars, even if it is less popular, or perhaps simply older. But still. Dune is the Elvis to the Beatles of Star Wars. And I’m not just saying that because a guy who played Elvis (Austin Butler) is also in a Dune movie.[*]
Back in 1977, fans of Dune noticed the striking visual similarities in Star Wars right away. “I must have been seventeen or eighteen, I remember seeing a couple of the scenes in the desert with R2-D2 and C-3PO and you see that crazy skeleton creature in the sand, and I said, ‘Oh, that’s sort of like Dune.’ ” The teenage Dune superfan who spotted the visual similarity was none other than Kyle MacLachlan. Ever since he was in junior high, when his friend Jim gave him the first Ace paperback edition of the novel, MacLachlan had been a big fan of the book. In 2022, after telling me about when he spotted Dune references in Star Wars, he added, “Everyone still pays homage to Dune,” and pointed out that Star Wars has never stopped. “I still see it. I watch all those new shows—The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor—and they’re always referencing Dune. Spice is some kind of revered substance in Star Wars, and don’t forget that thing in the desert that looks exactly like the mouth of the sandworm!”
Unsurprisingly, Kyle MacLachlan is right. The skeleton of a Krayt dragon, glimpsed in the first Star Wars film, later appeared as a flesh-and-blood sand monster in 2020, in the Mandalorian season 2 episode “The Marshal,” and it really looked like a sandworm of Arrakis. The “thing in the desert” with the mouth of the sandworm is the Sarlacc on Tatooine, which first appeared in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, one year before Dune, starring Kyle MacLachlan, hit theaters. Yes, the spice has been flowing through Star Wars for quite a while. Within the first five minutes of the original Star Wars, C-3PO worries about getting sent to “the spice mines of Kessel” if he and R2-D2 get caught. Han Solo moved spice illegally for Jabba the Hutt, and in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker we learned that Poe Dameron—played by Duke Leto Atreides himself, Oscar Isaac—was also a spice smuggler. Back in the 1990s, when Star Wars novels were all the rage, future Dune continuation novelist Kevin J. Anderson corresponded with George Lucas about the nature of the Star Wars version of spice, to make sure this was, indeed, some variety of space narcotic with mind-expanding properties. Although the editors of the Star Wars novels of the time wanted to tone down the druglike aspects of spice in Star Wars, Anderson claims that George Lucas told him, “Of course it’s a drug.” In that since-abandoned Star Wars continuity, some highly addictive forms of spice, called “glitterstim,” are the byproduct of giant space spiders instead of sandworms.
Even as recently as 2022, the animated Star Wars series Tales of the Jedi revisited a planet called Raxus Secundus, which borrows its name from both the prison planet Salusa Secundus in Dune as well as “Rakis,” the name by which Arrakis is known in the distant future, starting with Herbert’s fourth Dune novel, 1981’s God Emperor of Dune. In the second episode of the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi, the titular Jedi hero (played by Ewan McGregor) is offered street drugs right away by a young woman who says: “You want some spice, old man?” From the monsters they face, to the ground they walk on, to the spice they smuggle, the heroes and villains of George Lucas’s famous faraway galaxy seemingly wouldn’t have a galaxy to live in at all if Star Wars hadn’t cribbed more than a little from Dune.
“Star Wars borrowed from Dune a lot,” Frank Herbert told Rolling Stone in 1984, just months before David Lynch’s Dune hit theaters. “I think they owe me at least a dinner.” But did he always feel like this? And, more crucially, did Star Wars rip off Dune or merely pay homage?
Shortly after Star Wars hit theaters on May 25, 1977, it was Herbert’s son Brian who alerted him via telephone, saying, “You better see it. The similarities are unbelievable.” But by late August 1977, Herbert claimed he had still not seen Star Wars. When interviewed by the Associated Press[*] that month, he said he’d heard from friends and colleagues, and an editor at The Village Voice, that he might want to consider suing George Lucas. “I will try not to sue. I have no idea what book of mine it fits,” Herbert said in August 1977. “I suspect it may be Dune since in that I had a Princess Alia and the movie has a Princess Leia. And I hear there is a sandworm caucus[*] [sic] and hooded dwellers in the desert, just like in Dune.”
This is amazing. By August 1977, Star Wars had been out for three months, and Frank Herbert just could not be bothered to see it. His supposed ignorance about which book of his other people thought Star Wars ripped off also scans as a bit much. Did Frank Herbert really think Star Wars could have ripped off The Dragon in the Sea or The Santaroga Barrier? Was he legitimately unaware or was he just being a snob? Based on what he said publicly, it’s surprisingly tough to pin down what Herbert truly thought of the whole affair. Particularly throughout the back end of 1977, because he often seemed to take both sides. Either Star Wars totally ripped off Dune and Herbert wanted to sue, or Herbert didn’t care and thought that Star Wars ripped off everybody. For what it’s worth, George Lucas was also contacted by the Associated Press and basically said “no comment,” without saying it. As the article states, “Lucas, who says he drew on many sources in preparing the Star Wars script, declines to say whether the Dune trilogy was among them.”[*]
On September 11, 1977, Herbert told The Spokesman-Review that he thought the idea that Star Wars was derived from Dune was “a lot of bull” and added, “There’s probably a good number of similarities to the work of Isaac Asimov.” Spokesman-Review staff writer Tom Sowa then paraphrased Herbert, claiming, “He is certainly not, however, interested in considering legal action about unlawful use of his property.” Had Herbert still not seen Star Wars at this point, about a month after the previous interview? His quip about Asimov really makes you think he hadn’t, simply because trying to find the work of Asimov in Star Wars is a stretch. Asimov in Star Trek, yes. But claiming Asimov influences in Star Wars feels superficial at best. Yes, Asimov wrote about a galactic empire, and sure, he had a few cutesy robots, but if Herbert had seen Star Wars when he said this, the Asimov thing makes it sound like he’s sucking up to Asimov, which is just weird. Still, regardless of whether Herbert had or had not seen Star Wars yet in September of ’77, at that point, he also claimed he didn’t want to sue and seemed to try to distance himself from the conversation in general, mostly with the “a lot of bull” comment. It’s almost like in downplaying this, Herbert was saying Dune couldn’t have been ripped off, because Star Wars wasn’t important enough to have ripped off Dune.
But then, by December 1977, Frank Herbert has seen Star Wars. And his tone changes. He mocks it outright, saying, “It is very shallow in the story and character development sense. [The movie] should have had balloons in there with ‘Pow!’ and ‘Bang!’ ” And it’s at this point that it seems like he’s serious about suing.
On December 1, 1977, The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) runs a story written by Fred Crafts with the headline: “Should Sci-Fi Author Sue? Writer of ‘Dune’ Says ‘Star Wars’ Used Elements of His Novel Without Permission.” This article begins by calling Frank Herbert an “easy-going writer” with a “hearty laugh.”[*] And at first it doubles down on the notion that Herbert doesn’t want to talk about it. “I just hate getting into this damned thing. . . . I’m going to try very hard not to sue.” But then Herbert goes on the attack and admits he’s seen Star Wars, he thought it was “boring,” and his wife, Beverly, fell asleep in the theater.[*] When asked directly if Herbert believes that George Lucas “plagiarized” Dune, Herbert replies, “I think there’s reason to believe that he did.” A far cry from “a lot of bull”!
Fascinatingly, within this same article, Herbert explains that while he’s holding off on sending his loyal Fremen to destroy Lucas, he is suing Creed Taylor and CTI Records because of the release of the 1977 jazz album titled Dune. The article states that Herbert filed suit against the record company because the album was in “competition with Herbert’s own reading of his own work on Caedmon records.” This suit failed. Today, you can easily get this album, which was recorded and performed by a prominent pianist, David Matthews, who is not related at all to Dave Matthews of the Dave Matthews Band, because the world isn’t ready for that musical take on Dune. This funky, fun jazz record is, as of this writing, readily available on Spotify and iTunes, and a copy on vinyl is easily the least expensive Dune collectible in the universe. Why Herbert believed this album was a threat to him is understandable at first, but upon closer inspection, it seems like he may not have done his homework before filing the lawsuit.
The first four tracks of David Matthews’s Dune are very Dune-y. You’ve got “Arrakis,” “Sandworms,” “Song of the Bene Gesserit,” and “Muad’dib.” Then track five switches gears into . . . a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” After that song (which includes the album’s only vocal), you’ve got a jazzy version of the theme to Silent Running, followed by a funk version of “Princess Leia’s Theme,” capped off by, yes, a bizarrely underwhelming jazz version of “Main Theme from Star Wars.” In terms of musical authorship, the only songs that David Matthews wrote for this album were the Dune tracks. The other half of the album is an easy-listening jazz sci-fi cover album that you can totally imagine playing in the background of deleted scenes in Boogie Nights. To top it all off, the cover of the album has the word Dune styled in what is clearly the yellow Star Wars font, set against a sea of stars, not a desert landscape.
Why was Herbert so mad about a jazz record? Here’s one theory: Herbert loved jazz. In fact, he sometimes referred to conversations with fellow authors or readers as “jam sessions.” The art of improvisation was deeply important to Herbert’s thinking and writing, and he even considered certain conversations verbal “jazz performances.” In the final Frank Herbert–penned Dune novel, Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), Darwi Odrade, Herbert’s last great Bene Gesserit protagonist, is into jazz, and incorporates it into her philosophy, and thinks that conflicts can be resolved through the reactive qualities of jazz music, which is why Darwi Odrade says, “Feed us with jazz.” Not the most famous Dune line! And yet, suddenly, when you realize how much Herbert liked jazz, you can see why a mostly corny jazz record with the word Dune on it might piss him off.
Herbert failed to shut down the funk of David Matthews’s Dune, even though he tried. At the same time, he didn’t even really try to take on George Lucas and instead joked about forming a club with other sci-fi writers called We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas. This joke and Herbert’s posturing in interviews about whether Star Wars ripped him off reveals two things: First, that science fiction was changing rapidly in the 1970s, and second, that Herbert correctly intuited the real problem with Star Wars, at least relative to Dune. It wasn’t a rip-off, but it was going to change the way the public perceived Dune, at least cinematically, forever.
“I mean, George Lucas took all the Bene Gesserit and turned them into men!” Kara Kennedy tells me in 2023. “The Jedi could not exist without the Bene Gesserit, and what Lucas did there is almost unforgivable.”
Still, Herbert couldn’t legally sue because Lucas didn’t really rip him off. Homage and inspiration are not the same as plagiarism, as Herbert had once implied. Structurally and tonally, George Lucas was just as influenced by Flash Gordon and the films of Akira Kurosawa, not to mention the huge influence of Joseph Campbell’s Jungian theories about “the hero’s journey,” which also influenced Herbert’s writing of Dune.[*] If Joseph Campbell is right, and various monomyths tap into some kind of shared collective unconscious, then Lucas and Herbert were mining the same psychological places for story structures.
In 1984, David Lynch called it the way most people see it. “George did a fantastic thing, and he may have been influenced by these different things, but he took them in a super creative way, he made it go very far from the feeling of Dune.” In other words, it’s nuts to think George Lucas wasn’t inspired by the aesthetics of Dune. But the basic aim of the story of Star Wars is, at least at first, the opposite of the story of Dune. Luke Skywalker is a poor moisture farmer who leaves the desert planet for a greater adventure. Paul Atreides is a cosmopolitan character, a guy who is literally royalty, who comes to live on a desert planet, and in a sense becomes a poor moisture farmer before becoming the king of the universe. Yes, there are some strange similarities to the familiar revelations—Darth Vader is the father of Luke and Leia, the same way the evil Baron Harkonnen is Jessica’s father, and thus Paul and Alia’s grandfather. Many have compared the Jedi to the Bene Gesserit, specifically the famous Jedi mind trick, in which you can get somebody to do something just by speaking, exactly like using the Voice in Dune. As Herbert knew, it was tough to take legal action with homage, especially when the work had been transformed into something else entirely. What Herbert feared was that the success of Star Wars was going to make it hard for a film version of Dune to become viable. Because after Star Wars, every movie version of Dune would be compared to Star Wars, which was, of course, backward.
“Dune was going to be Star Wars for grown-ups,” Virginia Madsen said of her experience as part of the cast of the 1984 film. During the initial production design of that Dune film, David Lynch admitted that the existence of Star Wars proved to be a difficult problem in trying to craft something out of the pages of Herbert’s books and translating that feeling to the screen, mostly because that aesthetic metamorphosis had already happened. The visual motifs of Dune had, as Rolling Stone pointed out in 1984, “already been co-opted” by Star Wars. “It was strange to go through [the novel Dune] and find this was done in Star Wars,” Lynch admitted. “I wanted to do new things, so I had to do them differently.”
Aesthetically, 1977 is the turning point for how the mainstream public perceives Dune. Even though Star Wars hitched a ride on the cloak of the sandriders of Arrakis, for the rest of the world, Dune was playing catch-up. In 2018, just after he had been announced as the director of the new Dune film, Denis Villeneuve expressed nearly exactly the same sentiments David Lynch and Virginia Madsen had about their Dune thirty-four years earlier.
“Most of the main ideas of Star Wars are coming from Dune,” Villeneuve said before he began pre-production. “In a way, it’s Star Wars for adults.”
Interestingly, even when the Star Wars franchise later went into more adult territory, you could argue, it again borrowed from Dune. In the climax of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith, we learn that Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side of the Force is all because he was trapped by a vision of the future, which is very similar to how Paul Atreides’s prescience forces him into a terrible and inevitable future in Dune Messiah. In Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker has walked away from his entire life and then seems to preach against the teachings of the Jedi, much like Paul transforming into the Preacher in Children of Dune, after walking away from his empire. Even in J. J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker, Rey learns that Emperor Palpatine is her grandfather, and she’s tempted to join the dark side. This is pretty similar to Alia’s realizing Baron Harkonnen is her grandfather in Children of Dune and actually choosing to give in to that evil spirit that lives inside her. The darker elements of Star Wars almost always move toward being more like Dune, especially in The Empire Strikes Back, when it seems like Luke Skywalker can’t ever win, even if he does learn the ways of the Bene Gesserit . . . or Jedi.
When I spoke to Denis Villeneuve before the release of Dune: Part One, the first thing he said to me was “You have a lot of Star Wars shit behind you.” We were speaking over Zoom, and at that time, I hadn’t mastered how to change my background to obscure the clutter of my writing desk area. Like many science fiction critics and historians, no matter how much shit I talk about Star Wars, the truth is, we all love Star Wars, and so, as Villeneuve pointed out, even the biggest Dune fans probably have a lot of Star Wars shit.
Villeneuve was mostly referring to a prominent Princess Leia action figure (Cloud City gear!), a relatively new lightsaber toy, and my 1980 vintage snowspeeder model from The Empire Strikes Back. This made him smile. “Oh, let me see that,” he said. “I love that.”
Frank Herbert probably wouldn’t like this outcome. Dune will always be compared to Star Wars, even if Dune is the original Star Wars. But Villeneuve’s childlike delight with a vintage snowspeeder model tells you everything you need to know about the legacy of Star Wars smuggling some spice away from Dune. In the backstory of Dune, we learn that the Bene Gesserit intentionally planted myths and legends on several planets, just in case, in the future, people like Jessica and Paul needed a handy religious story to embody. Which is exactly like the contemporary relationship between Star Wars and Dune. Today, if someone erroneously believes Dune is derived from Star Wars, that’s okay. Star Wars has, paradoxically, prepared those new fans for the gospel of Dune.
This is a fact that Denis Villeneuve doesn’t fear but, rather, embraces. “The Empire Strikes Back is always good for the soul,” he tells me. “Dune is more like that, you know?”