What Is Spice In Star Wars & How Is It Different From The Dune Version?

There’s quite a bit of similarity between Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series and the “Star Wars” franchise created by George Lucas. Both draw from writer and literature professor Joseph Campbell’s idea of “The Hero’s Journey” from his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” both feature “chosen one” narratives, both have giant toothy worm monsters that live in the desert, and both have lots and lots of sand. Desert planets play a big role in both “Star Wars” and “Dune,” and they also contain something the franchises seem to share: spice. 

In both “Star Wars” and “Dune,” there is a substance called spice (not to be confused with highly dangerous synthetic cannabis, called “spice” in our own world), but are they the same thing? Let’s take a deeper look at the spice melange of “Dune” and the illicit substances collectively called spice in “Star Wars” to determine the differences once and for all. 

Of the two franchises, spice plays a much larger role in “Dune,” which began with Herbert’s eponymous 1965 novel. In “Dune,” spice melange is the most important substance in the universe, and whoever controls spice controls the universe. It’s a less-than-subtle allegory for our dependence on oil and the conflicts that arise because of it in our reality, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Not only is spice, well, an actual spice used for flavoring food that apparently tastes like cinnamon, but it’s also a drug that extends lifespans, can grant prophetic visions, and powers everyone’s spaceships. It’s petroleum and then some, a nearly magical creation that influences every aspect of life for not only the Fremen, who live on the desert planet Arrakis where spice is mined, but for most people in the vast Galactic Padisha Empire. In fact, in the novel “Children of Dune,” Lia Atreides, the younger sister of the chosen one, Paul Atreides, explains that even the empire’s middle class ate a little bit of diluted spice at least once a day to promote health and extend their lives. 

Spice is only able to be mined from Arrakis because it’s the excrement of the sandworms that live there. Yup, spice in “Dune” is sandworm poop. Extremely expensive, powerful sandworm poop. It’s also what gives frequent spice users like the Fremen and the powerful religious order the Bene-Gesserit their “blue-within-blue” eyes (called the “Eyes of Ibad”), memorably depicted in both David Lynch’s 1984 “Dune” film and in Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” films as shocks of cool color in otherwise warm environments. It also gave “Dune” one of its most potent pop culture elements: “The spice must flow.” 

Due in part to its incredible self-seriousness, “Dune” is incredibly meme-able. The “Mystery Science 3000” guys have made a million jokes out of just Sting’s line deliveries as Feyd-Rautha in the much-maligned 1984 Lynch adaptation, and the movie led to another easy-to-joke-about moment through its introduction via Virginia Madsen’s Princess Irulan. In the introduction, she says “The spice must flow,” referring to its importance within the universe. “The spice must flow” became a big internet meme in the early 2000s and has never really gone away, surging in popularity again with the release of Villeneuve’s movies. But that’s far from the only reference in popular culture. 

Spice, as it’s used in “Dune,” is mentioned in everything from an episode of “King of the Hill” to an episode of “The Simpsons” where Lisa eats food so spicy that it allows her to see through time. Many a comedy has made some kind of reference to “he who controls (insert whatever here) controls the universe,” even the 2016 “Trolls” movie, which might mean the joke is officially dead. “South Park” also riffed heavily on the spice melange and the blue-within-blue eyes in the 2019 episode “Turd Burglars,” in which football star Tom Brady’s poop becomes as wanted as the melange of “Dune.” Tom Brady poop, sandworm poop … same difference, I guess? 

Meanwhile, over in the slightly more family-friendly “Star Wars” franchise, spice is actually just an illicit substance used to get users inebriated, but there are multiple different forms and strains of it. Though many of these are only mentioned in supplemental materials like the book “The Smuggler’s Guide,” there are strains called Ryll, Booster Blue, Muon Gold, Sansanna Spice, and more. (There’s also Glitterstim, though that’s mentioned in the books that are part of the formerly extended universe, now called “Star Wars Legends,” i.e. no longer canon.) 

While spice can be a very hot commodity in “Star Wars,” it doesn’t have the same uses as its counterpart in “Dune.” There are some medicinal applications for various forms of the drug, including pain relief, but it’s not giving entire populations psychic abilities or keeping people young. It’s much closer to something like opium than the telepath-creating delicious petroleum of “Dune,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not still pretty darn important. 

Because “Star Wars” is mostly kid-friendly, we don’t see a ton of spice users in “Star Wars” outside of a handful of pipe smokers in the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” though one of its biggest heroes once tried to smuggle it across the galaxy. In “Star Wars: Episode VI – A New Hope,” Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is in trouble with Jabba the Hutt because he dumped a shipment of spice when his ship was boarded by the Empire, which eventually ends with his imprisonment in carbonite in “Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi.” (Notably, Jabba’s hookah pipe looks very similar to the ones smoked on the “Obi-Wan” series.) 

Spice has ended up playing a role in several “Star Wars” films and shows beyond the original trilogy, including plot threads on the animated shows “Star Wars: Clone Wars” and “Star Wars: Rebels,” a part of the crime syndicate vs. Mandalorians and lawmen story on the live-action series “The Book of Boba Fett,” and an exciting part of the prequel film “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” In “Solo,” we finally get to see the origin of the “Kessel Run,” in which a young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) pilots the infamous Kessel Run in only 12 parsecs, getting onto the highly guarded planet Kessel, where spice is mined by slave labor, and back off again. Spice isn’t nearly as integral to “Star Wars” as it is to “Dune,” but it has still played a surprisingly large role in its storytelling.

Fans paying careful attention might have figured out that Herbert’s “Dune” predates “Star Wars” by about 12 years, but did Lucas draw directly from “Dune?” It’s pretty likely, though he has never commented on it publicly. There are a handful of things in “A New Hope” that correlate with things from “Dune,” from the desert planet of Tatooine with its moisture farms to the similarities between golden boys Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan/Timothée Chalamet) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), but there are little tweaks that seem to suggest they’re more of a loving homage than outright theft. Not only that, but since both men were drawing from Campbell and our own world’s history and politics, some of it is probably just a matter of a little creative confluence, when two ideas are unintentionally similar.

“Star Wars” and “Dune” both take spice in pretty different directions despite both being expensive drug-making substances, showing that even ideas that seem indistinguishable at first can really be made into something unique in the right storyteller’s hands. Let the spice flow, baby.