The bafflingly complex history of the Sarlacc Pit in ‘Star Wars’
Any franchise that stays at the forefront of pop culture for decades remains in a constant state of expansion across multiple forms of media, which has, in turn, given almost every single creature in the Star Wars universe an elaborate and complicated backstory.
It used to be the case that action, sci-fi, fantasy, or horror movies could simply introduce a character or creature, give them a couple of scenes to get their feet wet, and let the audience decide how to treat them from that point on. In the era of over-explanation and mountainous exposition, though, those days are a thing of the past.
George Lucas created the hulking, tentacled Sarlacc for little other reason than having a cool monster show up on-screen, with the bulky beast debuting in Return of the Jedi as a means for nefarious crime boss Jabba the Hutt to dispose of his enemies with the minimum of fuss. However, as the saga has continued to evolve, more and more gaps in its history have been filled in.
Whereas James Cameron developed an exhaustive mythology for the world of Avatar that extended to the development of a Na’vi language, a painstakingly detailed history of the planet, and major moments in Pandoran history long before he started shooting any of the films, Lucas was never that type of creative mastermind. He knew what worked, without a doubt, but the expanded Star Wars saga has continued dropping new details that turn the Sarlaccs into surprisingly complicated behemoths.
It’s official Star Wars canon that they reproduce by sending spores into the furthest reaches of space, which burrow into a pit to find prey upon landing on an asteroid or planet. When they do get a tasty meal, it takes thousands of years for them to be digested, with helpless victims slowly turning them into a mushy drip-feeding of nutrients that keep them sustained for an extended period of time.
According to the Star Wars Databank, those digestive juices also contain hallucinatory neurotoxins, suggesting “the Sarlacc somehow absorbs the intelligence of all its victims, who live on in disembodied torment.” That also means they can technically communicate with the spirits of the people they’ve eaten through means that border on the telepathic, which is harrowing stuff in isolation.
It takes no less than 30,000 years for one of the mandible monstrosities to grow to full size, which gives them plenty of time to engage in heart-to-heart conversations with the people they’ve eaten and started transforming into a watery goo thanks to the mental communication that presumably stops them from getting too lonely spending millennia living in the dirt and scrambling around for their next delicious morsel before bursting to the surface in terrifying style.
Did Lucas have any of this written down ahead of time when he first put pen to paper and began crafting his Star Wars sandbox? Almost definitely not, but thanks to additional movies, TV shows, animated series, video games, comic books, novels, and much more, there’s a ludicrous amount of information detailing the ins, outs, whos, whats, whens, wheres, and whys of the Sarlacc.
