Taylor Swift once sang “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending,” and that must be how disillusioned Star Wars fans have felt in recent weeks watching Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two in theaters following the realization that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Frank Herbert and essentially created a “worse version of Dune.”


Advertisement


One lifelong Star Wars fan recently took to Twitter to work through these feelings, adding that the realization had depressed him, including the realization that Dune, not Star Wars, is the “real space opera.” A person in the replies concurred, writing, “You hear all the time about how Lucas was influenced by Herbert but you don’t realize the extent that’s true until you’ve actually seen/read Dune and realize that like 80 percent of the prequels is just Dune,” to which OP responded, “Nah like it’s actually ruining my life.” That’s the feeling of your entire worldview shifting.


Plenty of fellow Star Wars fans were quick to defend Lucas’ films, with some arguing 80 percent is a reach, while others recommended fans check out other inspirations for Star Wars like The Hidden Fortress and The Searchers, writing, “It’s a tapestry and Herbert was roughly 20 percent of it.”


Others argued that Herbert himself was heavily influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation in the same way Lucas was later influenced by Herbert, with one tweeter writing, “Without Foundation there would be no Dune and without Dune there would be no Star Wars.”


It’s an ongoing debate amongst sci-fi and fantasy lovers: Is there a single Ur-Text from which all other texts flow, and if so, how do we differentiate between plagiarism and taking inspiration? Naturally, sci-fi lovers were only too happy to relitigate this question in the replies, with one person drawing a line from Dune all the way back to Gilgamesh, with stops at Asimov, Tolkien and the Bible along the way.



Perhaps the juiciest response is the reveal that Herbert essentially called out Lucas in his fifth novel in the series, Heretic of Dune. In that novel, we learn about the pejorative “three P-O” which describes a person who surrounds themselves with “cheap copies made from déclassé substances.” Oof, shots fired.


Star Wars fans have often discussed Herbert’s influence on their beloved franchise, but one person who has avoided the subject is Lucas himself. In an older Reddit thread about the question of Dune’s influence, a fan wrote, “I don't think Lucas ever explicitly acknowledged some of them, including Dune,” linking to an interview from 1977 in which Lucas declined to say whether Dune inspired Star Wars or not.


Says it all really, doesn’t it?