There are even closer similiarities between Dune and Starwars. When 3PO is waving to the Jawa sandcrawler in the desert, what do you see behyind him but the skeletal remains of a sandworm?
I've heard there are only 12 archetypical characters in the entire world and that all stories use mixtures and variants of them. That would tend to limit the number of stories you can tell right away...
