After Queen Amidala’s starship was damaged escaping the Naboo blockade, Obi-Wan Kenobi searched for a planet where the ship could land without running afoul of the Trade Federation. He and Qui-Gon Jinn chose Tatooine, a lawless world controlled by the Hutts. The ship landed in the desert near Mos Espa, and Qui-Gon, Queen Amidala (disguised as handmaiden Padmé Naberrie), R2-D2 and Jar Jar Binks set off in search of parts to repair the damaged hyperdrive.

Qui-Gon found the parts he needed in a junk shop run by a Toydarian named Watto, whose assistant was Anakin Skywalker, a young slave. But Watto refused to accept Republic credits, and resisted Qui-Gon’s attempt to change his mind by using the Force. Stymied, the Jedi Master departed with his companions.

With a dangerous sandstorm approaching, Anakin led Qui-Gon’s party to the house he shared with his mother, Shmi Skywalker. Anakin revealed that he’d secretly built a Podracer from salvaged components, and suggested a way to get the hyperdrive parts from Watto: Qui-Gon could enter Anakin in the next day’s Podrace. If Anakin won, the prize money would be more than enough to pay for the parts.

With a dangerous sandstorm approaching, Anakin led Qui-Gon’s party to the house he shared with his mother, Shmi Skywalker. Anakin revealed that he’d secretly built a Podracer from salvaged components, and suggested a way to get the hyperdrive parts from Watto: Qui-Gon could enter Anakin in the next day’s Podrace. If Anakin won, the prize money would be more than enough to pay for the parts.

It was a risky plan, but Qui-Gon was convinced that the Force was at work: He’d been meant to meet Anakin, and the boy was meant to help him by winning the race. In the evening, Qui-Gon tested Anakin’s blood and discovered he was strong in the Force. Determined to train Anakin as a Jedi, Qui-Gon made a side bet with Watto: If Anakin won the Podrace, Watto would free him from slavery in exchange for the Podracer.

Padmé was horrified to learn that Anakin had never even finished a Podrace, let alone won one. But Qui-Gon trusted the Force. His faith was justified when Anakin bested the Dug Podracer Sebulba, finishing first.

Anakin was free, but Watto refused to part with Shmi. Wanting a better life for her son, Shmi urged Anakin to go with Qui-Gon and not to look back. Anakin obeyed, but the pain of being parted from his mother would haunt him as he grew up in the Jedi Order.

Qui-Gon and Anakin left Mos Espa for the journey to the queen’s ship. But they were intercepted by the Sith apprentice Darth Maul, who’d tracked Amidala to Tatooine. As Anakin raced to get help, Qui-Gon and Maul crossed lightsabers in a furious duel.

A decade after leaving Tatooine, Anakin began to have nightmares that his mother was in peril. He returned to the desert planet with Padmé and visited Watto’s shop. The Toydarian junk dealer said he no longer owned Shmi – a moisture farmer named Cliegg Lars had bought her and married her.

Anakin and Padmé traveled to the Lars farm, where Anakin met Cliegg Lars, his son Owen and Owen’s girlfriend Beru Whitesun. Cliegg said Shmi had been kidnapped by Tusken Raiders a month earlier, and urged Anakin to accept that his mother was dead.

Anakin, however, knew Shmi was still alive – he could sense her in the Force. He borrowed a swoop from Owen and set off across the desert plains to search for her.

Anakin found his mother in a Tusken camp, near death from ritual torture. When she died in his arms, Anakin succumbed to his rage and pain. He ignited his lightsaber and slaughtered the Tuskens.

Blaming himself for not being able to save Shmi, Anakin promised to become so powerful with the Force that he would be able to save the ones he loved from death. This dangerous vow would leave him susceptible to the lures of Darth Sidious and the dark side.

Despite his painful memories of Tatooine, Anakin returned during the Clone Wars when he and Ahsoka Tano rescued Jabba the Hutt’s son Rotta from his Separatist captors and reunited him with his father.

During the Clone Wars, Chairman Papanoida of Pantora tracked his daughter Che Amanwe to Tatooine, where she’d been taken by a small-time bounty hunter named Greedo.

Papanoida and his son Ion found Greedo in Jabba’s palace, and forced the Rodian thug to lead them to his co-conspirators in a rundown cantina in Mos Eisley. There, the Papanoidas found themselves in a wild gunfight – one that ended with the kidnappers dead and Che Amanwe free.

Tatooine also served as a place of refuge for Asajj Ventress after she escaped the destruction of her Nightsister clan on Dathomir. Ventress booked passage to Tatooine and wound up drowning her sorrows in the Mos Eisley cantina. There, she met a band of mercenaries led by a young bounty hunter named Boba Fett.

Jabba’s criminal empire attracted the attention of Darth Maul when he became the leader of the Shadow Collective. Maul, Savage Opress and Pre Vizsla launched a daring raid on the Hutt’s palace, forcing Jabba into a short-term alliance with Maul’s organization.

After Padmé Amidala’s death, Obi-Wan Kenobi took the newborn Luke Skywalker to the Lars farm on Tatooine, where Owen and Beru agreed to raise the boy. Obi-Wan then began years of exile on the desert planet, watching over Anakin’s son as he grew up.

Obi-Wan’s vigil was a largely solitary one, particularly after Owen demanded he stay away from his family. But Obi-Wan kept tabs on Luke, intervening when the Force-sensitive boy was threatened by enemies such as the relentless Darth Maul.

After the Battle of Scarif, Princess Leia Organa was captured above Tatooine while trying to recruit Obi-Wan for the struggle against the Empire. Leia transferred the stolen plans for the Death Star to R2-D2’s databanks and ordered the little droid to find Kenobi. Accompanied by C-3PO, Artoo fled Leia’s ship in an escape pod and began a perilous trek across the Tatooine wastes.

The droids quarreled about which direction to go, with Threepio scoffing at Artoo’s insistence that he was on a secret mission. They separated, and Threepio soon realized he had chosen poorly, grimly trudging up and down Tatooine’s seemingly endless sand dunes. Pausing by the bleached bones of a massive beast, C-3PO spotted a distant transport and waved frantically at it.

R2-D2, for his part, proceeded obediently towards the location where Leia had told him to find Obi-Wan. But the little droid was intercepted by a party of Jawa scavengers, who captured him and carried him to their sandcrawler. There, he was reunited with C-3PO.

After failing to find the Death Star plans aboard Leia’s ship, Darth Vader concluded that the princess had hidden them in the escape pod. A squad of stormtroopers rode dewbacks to the pod’s landing site, where they found tracks in the sand and a piece of droid plating. They began a systematic search for the missing droids.

The Jawas brought R2-D2 and C-3PO to the Lars moisture farm, which Threepio didn’t remember because of his long-ago memory erasure. Owen Lars wound up buying both droids, and ordered his stepson Luke Skywalker to clean them up in the garage.

R2-D2 showed Luke part of a message Leia had recorded for Obi-Wan, but claimed that he couldn’t play the entire message because a restraining bolt was short-circuiting his recording system. After Luke unwisely removed the bolt, Artoo rolled away from the farm, resuming his mission. At dinner, Luke asked if Obi-Wan was related to the desert hermit he knew only as Ben Kenobi. Disturbed, Owen ordered him to take the droids to Anchorhead in the morning and have their memories erased.

Luke discovered that Artoo was missing, but it was too dangerous to go after the droid at night. Hoping to avoid Owen’s wrath, he slipped away from the farm with C-3PO in the morning, searching for Artoo in his landspeeder. They found the droid – who warned them that several creatures were approaching.

Luke wondered if Artoo was trying to trick him again, but the droid was telling the truth: Luke quickly spotted Tusken Raiders and the shaggy banthas they used as mounts. A Tusken then attacked him, knocking him unconscious with a blow from his gaderfii.

Obi-Wan rescued Luke and the droids, frightening the Tuskens off with a krayt dragon call. In Obi-Wan’s hut on the edge of the Dune Sea, R2-D2 played Leia’s message and Obi-Wan urged Luke to go with him to Alderaan. He also gave Luke his father’s lightsaber and said his father was a Jedi Knight who’d been betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader.

Luke agreed to take Obi-Wan as far as Anchorhead, but while traveling they came across a burned-out sandcrawler, which Luke recognized as belonging to the Jawa clan that had sold R2-D2 and C-3PO to the Lars family. When Obi-Wan blamed the Empire, Luke realized the stormtroopers might have learned who’d bought the droids. He jumped in his speeder and raced for home.

He was too late: The stormtroopers had killed his aunt and uncle and set his home ablaze. With nothing left for him on Tatooine, Luke agreed to go with Obi-Wan to Alderaan, hoping to learn the ways of the Jedi as his father had.

Obi-Wan led Luke to the seedy spaceport town of Mos Eisley. A squad of stormtroopers stopped the speeder and questioned them about the droids, but Obi-Wan used the Force to cloud the soldiers’ minds and convince them to let the speeder pass.

Obi-Wan and Luke hunted for a pilot in the Mos Eisley cantina, frequented by smugglers of all stripes. After an altercation with two alien thugs, they hired Han Solo and Chewbacca to take them to Alderaan.

Han needed the credits – Jabba the Hutt was angry with him for dumping a smuggled shipment of spice. Han and the Hutt crimelord met outside the Millennium Falcon, with Han buying himself more time by promising to pay back Jabba what he owed him plus an extra fifteen percent.

Obi-Wan, Luke and the droids boarded the Falcon and Han prepared to take off. But an informant had led the Imperial troops to the docking bay. Han blasted away at the troopers before fleeing up the Falcon’s ramp. The freighter streaked for space above Tatooine, evaded Star Destroyers on patrol, and escaped into hyperspace.

When Han failed to pay up, Jabba put a bounty on the smuggler’s head. Boba Fett collected the bounty by delivering Han – now frozen in carbonite -- to Jabba’s palace on Tatooine. Luke devised a plan to free his friend, one that began with C-3PO and R2-D2 making the long trek to the Hutt gangster’s headquarters. Lando Calrissian was already inside the palace, disguised as a guard.

Luke gave the droids to Jabba as a gift, and the Hutt’s vassals put them to work, using C-3PO as a translator and sending R2-D2 to work on the gangster’s sail barge. The next to arrive at the palace was Princess Leia, disguised as the bounty hunter Boushh and leading a captive Chewbacca. Jabba agreed to Leia’s price for the Wookiee, and Chewie was dragged off to prison.

That night, Leia freed Han from the carbonite, but Jabba had guessed her secret and was hiding behind a curtain with his thugs. He ordered that Leia be dressed in a slave girl’s costume and banished Han to a cell in the palace dungeon.

Luke arrived to bargain with Jabba for Han’s life, but the negotiations failed. Luke used the Force to grab a guard’s blaster, but Jabba dropped the Jedi Knight into a pit beneath the throne room, where Luke had to battle a massive rancor.

After Luke killed the rancor, Jabba ordered Luke, Han and Chewie to be executed by dropping them into the maw of the dreadful Sarlacc. Jabba’s court saw the execution as an entertaining spectacle, traveling across the desert sands on the Hutt’s sail barge. Which had been Luke’s plan all along – the best chance to rescue Han was to get him out of the confines of the palace.

Luke had concealed his lightsaber in R2-D2’s dome, and the little droid fired the weapon to his master where he waited on the deck of a skiff above the Sarlacc pit. The fight was on, with Lando joining Luke in freeing Han and Chewie.

Aboard the sail barge, Leia strangled Jabba with a chain, killing him. She then fired a deck cannon into the sail barge’s top deck, starting a fire. She and Luke swung to safety aboard the skiff, with R2-D2 and C-3PO plunging off the doomed vessel into the sand.

The rebels retrieved the droids, and then proceeded to where the Falcon and Luke’s X-wing had been hidden in the Tatooine desert. The two ships streaked away from the planet and into deep space.

Following the Resistance’s victory at Exegol, Rey traveled to Tatooine and visited the Lars farm, which she found abandoned and all but reclaimed by sand. She buried the lightsabers used by Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa there in honor of her Jedi mentors, and claimed the name “Skywalker” for her own.