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In George Lucas's Star Waga, 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 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope; according to Lucas he named it retrospectively after the movie's desert location, Tataouine (French spelling) 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 has been the site of repeated and failed attempts at colonization. During the prequel-era, it 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 Expanded Universe that Jawas are rodent-like, and it is vaguely hinted that the Jawas and Sand People share a common ancestor).
According to information revealed in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Tatooine once had large oceans and a world-spanning jungle. This biosphere was destroyed by an orbital bombardment by the Rakata that "glassed" (that is, fused the silica in the soil into glass, which then broke up over time into sand) the planet and boiled its oceans away.
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