Even though Tusken Raiders show up in Star Wars from the very beginning and reappear throughout,
they remain mysterious and poorly understood. Who are they? Where do they come from? What do
they want? And what do fans and casual viewers alike need to know about them?
The Tusken Raiders appear first and most memorably in A New Hope.
The Sand People are initially presented as fearsome savages, dangers to "civilized" people
like Luke Skywalker and his family. They roam the desert, attacking and pillaging the unsuspecting.
When Luke leaves the safety of his homestead to search the Jundland Wastes for his escaped droid,
R2-D2, the Raiders quickly overpower the naive and unprepared young man,
knocking him unconscious so they can ransack his land speeder. Luke is only saved when the
mad hermit Ben Kenobi appears and scares away the Raiders by mimicking the call of the Krayt Dragon,
a beast they fear. Despite his ability to scare them away, Ben also warns Luke:
"The Jundland Wastes are not to be traveled lightly."
Of course if Luke had died in this scene, he never would have blown up the Death Star,
fought Darth Vader, become a Jedi Knight, and helped defeat the Empire.
Perhaps the trilogy would have centered on Leia Organa, Luke's Force-sensitive sister, instead.
Star Wars mastermind George Lucas created the Tusken Raiders and
their desert world to resemble the Bedouins, tribes of Arab nomads.
However, it's likely Lucas' conception of the Raiders was also influenced by the so-called
"savage Indians" of John Ford Westerns, especially from The Searchers, which Star Wars famously
pays homage to. In The Searchers, Comanche warriors attack the white settlers' homestead,
killing the family and burning the house down. While it's the Imperial stormtroopers,
and not the Tusken Raiders, that exterminate Luke's family, Lucas designed the scene in
direct homage to the scene from The Searchers. In general, Lucas depicts
the Sand People the way that Ford depicts the Comanche: brutal, bloodthirsty and uncivilized.
In terms of the name, "Tusken" sounds quite a bit like "Tuskegee," as in the Tuskegee Airmen,
the first Black U.S. Army airmen who trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama
before flying in combat during World War II. Lucas has long been interested in their story,
even making a movie about them with 2012's Red Tails. Finally, Lucas was influenced by Frank
Herbert's sci-fi novel Dune, which features nomad dwellers on the desert planet Arrakis.
Banthas are large, trundling creatures that resemble elephants with huge, droopy faces.
They have curving tusks on the sides of their heads shaped like cornucopias, or perhaps Princess
Leia's hair buns in A New Hope. The Raiders use them as beasts of burden. Lucas clearly liked the
Banthas, as he digitally inserted a lot more of them in the special edition of Return of the Jedi,
which features a herd of "wild" Banthas roaming the Tatooine desert. They are seen as Jabba the
Hutt transports Luke, Han Solo, and company across the Dune Sea to the Pit of Carkoon to
be slowly digested over a thousand years by the mighty Sarlacc. This is an appropriate fate, since
Jabba had previously told Han, "You may have been a good smuggler, but now you're bantha fodder."
Digital banthas also appear briefly in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
Chapter 9 of The Mandalorian also heavily features Banthas. Early in the episode,
the Krayt Dragon - a huge worm-like creature - swallows one whole. Later,
a Tusken Raider brushes a Bantha's teeth, and in the climactic scene,
a Bantha is rigged with explosives and used to bait the Krayt. The dragon swallows the
Bantha bomb and the Mandalorian detonates it, causing both animals to explode in a shower
of flame and flesh. In other news, the ASPCA does not appear to have a Tatooine chapter.
While it's true that Banthas provide the Tusken Raiders with a means of transportation across
Tatooine's unforgiving terrain, they aren't merely beasts of burden. In fact,
every Tusken has a deep lifelong connection with their Bantha - the culture's initiation rite,
which typically takes place during youth, includes gifting the initiate a Bantha that
matches their gender. When Tuskens marry, their Banthas mate as well - and in the unfortunate
circumstance that a Bantha should die before its rider, tradition calls for
its remains to be interred in a graveyard with sacred meaning to the Tusken people.
One of the Star Wars saga's strongest points is the way in which
even incidental elements can be fully fleshed out into stories of their own,
and the bond between the Banthas and the Sand People is a perfect example.
They may have served as little more than a brief, terrifying plot point in A New Hope,
but the hidden depths to their story offer some of the franchise's most compelling allegories.
The Tuskens have a cameo during the Episode I podracing sequence and their
brief appearance in the movie echoes their aggressive characterization from A New Hope.
In the scene, young Anakin Skywalker is racing the villainous Sebulba to gain his freedom from
slavery when the Tuskens attempt to disrupt the race. From their perch in the rocky hills above
the desert race track, the Raiders take pot shots at the racers with their long-barreled rifles,
and celebrate when they hit Anakin's pod. Whether the Tuskens are doing this for vicious sport
or whether they feel they are protecting their territory from interlopers is never specified.
Either way, the brief scene sets the stage for the Tuskens' longer appearance in Episode II,
a movie that seems to use their established villainy to justify their wholesale slaughter.
Tusken Raiders feature prominently in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, in which they kidnap
and brutalize Anakin's mother, Shmi Skywalker. Anakin sneaks into their camp to retrieve her,
but he is too late and she dies in his arms. In a fit of vengeful rage,
he exterminates every Raider in the camp, including women and children.
This scene appears to further equate the Sand People with cinematic Native American violence in
Lucas' vision. The kidnapping and slaughter in Attack of the Clones again echoes The Searchers,
when the title characters discover kidnapped white women in Comanche tents
similar to the ones in Episode II. Later, John Wayne's character Ethan gleefully participates
in a bloody slaughter of the Comanche, which includes scalping them. Anakin also appears
to relish his butchery, and tells Padme that he simply slaughtered them like "animals."
Although Lucas means to portray Anakin's killing as heartless - a significant step
toward his embrace of the Dark Side - the director's sympathies
seem to lie at least partially with Anakin. Anakin may be in the wrong,
but the Raiders are nevertheless depicted as sub-creatures, undeserving of pity.
Like most pop culture properties that have been around for decades, Star Wars has tried
to keep up with the times by reflecting social and cultural changes. In particular,
the franchise has attempted to be more diverse in its race and gender representation, an effort
that has resulted in backlash from some fans who don't care for change. The Mandalorian has been
part of this effort, both with its casting and behind the camera. It even attempts a makeover
of the Tusken Raiders by representing them as a less overtly aggressive and more complex culture.
The more complex portrait of the Sand People of The Mandalorian
debuts in Chapter 5 of Season 1. When another character implies that the Tuskens are "filth"
who bother "the locals," the Mandalorian responds,
"Tuskens think they're the locals. Everyone else is just trespassing."
He then peacefully attains passage through their land by negotiating with them in their
sign language. This is the first notion anywhere in filmed Star Wars that Raiders have a language,
let alone one that allows them to communicate with other peoples. Language is one of the
most important markers of civilization and this episode presents it as a feature of the Tuskens,
who are no longer depicted as the backwards savages of previous eras.
After their cameo in Chapter 5 of The Mandalorian, the Tuskens return in the action-packed Season 2
opener in an even more vital role. In this episode, the Mandalorian enlists their help
to kill a Krayt Dragon. This quest returns full circle to the saga's introduction of the
Sand People in A New Hope, when Ben Kenobi's Krayt noises frighten them away from Luke.
But this time we see the actual beast, and quickly understand why the Sand People,
as well as the human settlers of the frontier town Mos Pelgo, fear it.
Consistent with the mistrust dramatized between settlers and natives in so many Westerns,
the human settlers in Mos Pelgo are reluctant to trust the Sand People
until the Mandalorian brokers a tentative peace. Naturally, the Mandalorian is fluent
in two separate dialects of Tusken - one silent, one spoken - and so is able to explain that the
nomads are not only capable and rational, but also honorable people who keep their word.
Working together, the humans and Tuskens defeat their common enemy. Of course many of the Sand
People die in the cause, while virtually all the humans walk away unscathed. Tusken
Raiders may have come a long way in the Star Wars universe, but evidently they are still expendable.
Not much about Tusken culture is seen or discussed in the Star Wars movies, but as
with just about any other species that's even so much as glimpsed in the background of a scene,
there's a deep well of information about the Raiders that Star Wars fans can glean from a
variety of sources. Indigenous to Tatooine, the Tusken Raiders not only view outsiders with deep
and often violent mistrust, but they regard natural resources - particularly water - with
a spiritual level of respect. It's this component of the Tusken belief system that led them to raid
moisture farms and attack travelers who wandered too close to the planet's scarce natural wells.
Of course, all any longtime Star Wars fan wants to know about the Tusken Raiders is
what they look like under their masks - a question that seems unlikely to ever be
answered in canonical media. The Tuskens have an almost religious aversion to removing them,
only showing their faces during life milestones such as their wedding night.
The Tusken Raiders speak using a combination of vocal speech
and sign language — and as we see in The Mandalorian, our hero is well-versed in both
forms. What casual viewers may not realize, however, is that Tusken sign language is
real — and it was developed by actor Troy Kotsur, a Mandalorian actor who is deaf
and developed the language to look as little like American Sign Language as possible.
Mandalorian viewers caught a good glimpse of Kotsur's work during the
season 2 episode "The Marshal," in which Mando and Cobb Vanth team up with a Tusken
tribe to kill a Krayt Dragon that's been plaguing the Tatooine outpost of Mos Pelgo.
In late 1977 and early 1978, the first year after the original film's release,
Star Wars sold $100 million worth of toys.
"Industry-wide sales are up by almost eight percent, most of the increase
attributable to the space toys craze." "22 million figures. Per year."
Since then, Star Wars toy merchandising has become a billion-dollar industry,
still thriving today with new action figures, Funko Pops, and Lego sets introduced regularly.
There are even books and documentaries devoted to the creation and selling of the toys,
as well as many volumes and sites cataloging them. George Lucas famously negotiated the
rights to the Star Wars sequels from 20th Century Fox partially so he could have the
merchandising rights as well. One cynical way of explaining the sheer number of new
characters and ships for each new movie is by considering how many new toys Lucas could peddle.
Along with their more diminutive fellow Tatooine dwellers the Jawas,
the "Sand People" as they were then known, were among the first dozen figures to kick
off the global merchandising phenomenon. There have been many iterations of the figure since,
some now going by their proper Tusken Raider designation. The original vintage action figure,
now a collector's item, can be had for hundreds of dollars on Ebay.
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